It never rains but it pours. We've waited with baited breath to hear headphones boasting the new target frequency responses that are beginning to appear, then two arrive at once. Last month we reviewed the first model with Room Feel, PSB's M4U 2; this month it's the turn of NAD's similarly priced Viso HP50. PSB and NAD both belong to the Lenbrook Group stable so it's no great surprise to see them sharing this feature, which arises from research conducted at Canada's National Research Council. How much further it will spread remains to be seen. The issue at stake here is the ideal frequency response, at the eardrum, for a headphone reproducing sound that's intended for replay over stereo loudspeakers. Since the 1980s it has been widely accepted that the diffuse-field response - recreating the frequency response at the eardrum in a soundfield where sound impinges on the head with equal intensity from all directions - is optimum, but recent research has suggested that a response mimicking a pair of loudspeakers operating in an acoustically well behaved room is more appropriate. Hence the Room Feel sobriquet given to the target response embodied in the HP50.
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