History of the Nautilus loudspeaker

I hope you’re not thinking I’m advocating a crude N-band equalizer to broadly boost the bass and reduce the treble to fix the HD800’s thin-ness and brightness. I’m talking about very precise filters that the community has optimized mathematically to fit the measured response to the ideal Harman target curve: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...

There is no reason scientifically to believe this wouldn’t work, other than the maximum driver excursion and distortion limits of the headphones. Fortunately the HD800S bass is extremely clean and undistorted, and they respond really well here. I’ve tried this with other headphones, and most cheaper headphones do struggle greatly, while the HD800S sub-bass is extremely impressive, clean, and powerful when EQ’ed in this way. And even more importantly, this works wonders to smooth out peaks in the treble that sound too harsh to be prior to EQ.

Even if it couldn’t be fixed with precise EQ though, this is still something we can measure objectively via max SPL and distortion vs frequency tests. For example, another highly regarded headphone is the Focal Clear, and it unfortunately has severe bass SPL / driver excursion limits that rules it out from being corrected in this way.

Of course it’s a fair criticism that such expensive headphones should require EQ at all! And the HD800S are indeed criticized in this way on ASR! Sadly though, it seems virtually all headphones do require EQ to sound remotely near their maximum possible sound quality potential, in terms of their physical capability. I personally love the HD800S for a number of reasons, but one of them is extreme comfort (which definitely is subjective), but I will be the first to admit their sound is painful to my ears until corrected with EQ.

The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it has a lot of competition in the entertainment space. That's why these days good speakers often part of home theater or computer setups, with a screen in between instead of standalone systems just for music listening.

>The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be achieved without spending much money;

Indeed. But people often buy for social reasons, to boast in forum threads or to belong to a circle of elitist in those communities, it's also a status game.

( ASR measurements + review of the Revel M106: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... )

There are possibly better quality speakers to pick from in this price range (e.g. Genelec 8330A, however this trades off some bass power which you probably don't want unless you have a subwoofer), but to connect these to your TV and streaming music simultaneously requires a more expensive AVR (Audio Video Receiver) that supports unamplified audio outputs, costing around $1K (e.g. Denon AVR-X3700H). It’s ironic because the Genelec 8330A have built-in amplification and digital inputs but don’t accept power-amplified signals, which is significantly more advanced in many ways, yet this advanced nature makes it harder to integrate with TVs and streaming audio simultaneously simply because most AVR products for TV-speaker integration are geared towards “passive” style speakers like the Revel’s for complex and historical reasons. (For some strange reason buying an AVR that allows you to bypass its amplifiers via preamp outputs ends up costing more than AVRs where the amplifiers are always on.)

So for best connectivity in this price range, I’d recommend the Revel M106 along with a Sonos Amp. The Sonos software experience is by far the best at seamlessly and automatically transitioning between wifi streaming music and TV use modes, works natively with Spotify and almost every other music app, as well as having a good app of its own.

However the Sonos Amp (and Sonos Port product which produces unamplified outputs, but for some strange reason omits the HDMI audio input the Amp has, unfortunately, so doesn’t integrate with a TV well) both lack the ability to calibrate bass to your room, which is very important if you plan to upgrade to speakers and/or subwoofers with deep bass, where EQ calibration to the room’s resonant frequencies is essential for best results.

If you want to be a little more future-proof and feature rich, and also be open to multichannel home theater in the future, a modern Denon AVR receiver with Audessy room calibration capability and “HEOS” Music streaming is also really good, but it gets complex as there are a lot of choices and depends on how “future proof” you want to be. And they tend to be fairly bulky.

Note that I’m assuming you want to be able to use the same pair of speakers for both TV output, and for music streaming when the TV is off. This significantly complicates the electronics, and few products get the user experience here right. If you’re willing to manually use a remote or buttons to switch modes, or dedicate the speakers to either exclusively streaming music (controllable from your phone of course), OR TV audio output (which via Spotify TV app can sometimes be sufficient for music too), then much simpler and cheaper options are available.

    The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it has a lot of competition in the entertainment space.

But, I do think that perception is one of the biggest issues.