If you were at the World of Headphones Heidelberg show, then it was probably me.
I want to agree, but I also have to stay open-minded. There are different ways of sounding neutral. You can have neutral-measuring speakers, but you will never listen to them in a neutral space. So even if you use very direct-sounding near-fields (which most professionals do), there will be variations and some room for error/preference. The variation gets immensely bigger in home/personal/consumer audio.
If you want to get rid of every influence of the room in a headphone, you would be ending up with a very bright sound that nobody would agree with as natural-sounding, as that‘s not how we experience it at home, in a studio or on a concert.
Now assuming you have perfectly recorded tracks, mix them just right, and then pass the final mix on to two different mastering engineers, for sure both masters will sound different. Would it be possible to say one master sounds more neutral over the other? Even when using speakers? The variables are too many. It‘s not always possible to say which is more „neutral“ or how exactly it was intended to sound like. We have to use our experience to make estimations to narrow it down. (Or, in our case, we have close contact to producers, mixing and mastering engineers and can take their feedback.)
Having that said, the HEDDphone TWO tries to remove every form of coloration and thus also sounds more direct than the previous version. It is even closer to the experience of working on near-field monitors. This does help to pick up more details and I think the HP2 is one of the highest-resolution headphones yet, which makes it extremely easy to hear doubled vocals, reverb, auto-tune and every „mess“ that is happening during production, mixing and mastering. More so than the HEDDphone ONE. On a good master, you can hear even better details, small cues and artistic choices. Yet I can also understand if people say the tuning of the first version is closer to their preference.
