It's an obsession with these types of people, pure and simple, and of no sonic benefit whatsoever in a playback environment.

Audio playback and the Digital Signal Processing involved in it have very light system requirements:

For example, I've stress tested my own music server by having it stream to 6 network players simultaneously. This involved running independent DSP profiles, which included convolution filters, for each of the 6, as well as transcoding the results of that processing to 24/48 flac for transmission via WiFi. The server's CPU never reached over 8% utilization while doing this and the sound was as high fidelity as anyone could ask for. I experienced no dropouts/glitching, either.

All of that was done on a Dell Optiplex 990 (i7 2600) computer that was built in 2011. It was running an "unoptimized" Windows 10 Pro install at that.

All the best... 😎

That neutral tonality is actually a Harman compliant tuning more or less. It's a well researched industry standard. KZ is starting to mature in that regard.

Regarding Harman, though, it's best thought of as a starting point from which one can personalize to their own preferences. The linked article above provides an excellent overview of it... 📱🎧🎶🎶😎🌃

"As the artist intended" and "hear the original tune" are myths propagated by those who have little knowledge of what it takes to produce a studio recording.

Unlike broadcast television and commercial cinema, there are no standards for recording music commercially. Tonality and dynamic range can vary wildly even within the same album release.

There's no way to hear exactly what the artists intended or the original tune (actually it's the mixing and mastering engineers as often the artists have little to no input into those processes) unless you've got the exact same equipment and acoustics they had.

At the mixing and mastering level, it's not about original intent, but about what will sound good on the vast majority of a wide variety of equipment that consumers own.

So, by all means use EQ to correct errors in frequency response or even for one's own personal preferences.

Oh, it's nothing special. I've got 2 pairs of bookshelf speakers from the last Infinity Reference series, aka "Baby Revel's", and inexpensive, but transparent, Class D amplifiers. One is used in an AV setup, although mostly for music, and the other for a desktop system.

People refer to the last Infinity Reference series as Baby Revel's because, both Infinity and Revel are owned by Harmon International, and they share design philosophy and technology to a certain extent.

One, the Infinity Reference 162, is comparable in performance to the Revel M16. They just can't play as loud as the latter without audibly distorting. However, they're clean up to ~85 dB and I never, ever play them that loud under normal circumstances.

The other, the Infinity Reference 152, which I use for my desktop, is comparable in performance to the Revel M105, with the same limitations as I've mentioned for the 162.

Both pairs are frequency response corrected and tuned to my listening environment via DSP.

All the best... 😎

There are a few people who tend to get obsessive about the equipment and want to try all of it that they can afford; I suspect fear of missing is a primary motivation there.

Then, we've got the confidence artist who fool the less knowledgeable into believing all sorts of lies in order to enrich themselves. And, this drives people to acquire more and more equipment that doesn't actually enhance their listening experience.

For me, the music is the obsession - Ex. I've downloaded at least 10 new albums and DJ mixes in the last week alone.

I did go through a period of auditioning every music playback and server application I could find - I'm a software engineer and, of course, that fascinates me. I wasn't chasing sound quality, though. Why would I when all of that software presented a bit perfect, if I wanted, data stream to my DAC? Rather, I was after the best user experience for my needs. I found Logitech Media Server to be the best solution for me, just in case anyone is curious.

Back to the equipment, I settled on that ~5 years ago when I was doing a refresh and my systems will remain the same for at least a decade as a result. I've four in total: 2x speaker based, and 2x IEM based.

Sure, I still regularly read about new equipment; almost daily, in fact. However, I've no desire to purchase any in the foreseeable future, as I shopped right the first time and I wouldn't gain anything in terms of fidelity by doing so.

If I wish to experience a different sonic signature, DSP is a miracle worker on that front.

Digital EQ is far cleaner in terms of distortion and phasing than analog EQ. By the way, human hearing is rather insensitive to phase unless it's really pushed to produce an effect.

In fact, EQ, as well as other DSP, is applied in all active headphone and speaker implementations to produce performance characteristics that many passive counterparts would struggle to achieve by electro-mechanical means.

We've even got a database of EQ settings, maintained by a professional acoustic engineer, for thousands of different headphones, earphones and IEMs designed to put them into compliance with a very well researched, industry standard, target frequency response curve:

AutoEQ is a project for equalizing headphone frequency responses automatically, and it achieves this by parsing frequency response measurements and producing equalization settings which correct the headphone to a neutral sound. This project currently has over 4000 headphones covered in the results folder.

Can a headphone be overdriven by EQ into audibly distorting? Of course, it can. However, if it is under the circumstances that we're concerned with, which is correcting to a target, then its got quality control issues to begin with and is a poorly designed product I'd avoid purchasing.