GoldenSound

There's not much difference between a speaker/headphone transducer and a microphone at a basic level. For a speaker/headphone an electric current applied to the coil causes a corresponding movement, pushing air and creating sound. For a microphone, the air moves the transducer, and that causes the motion of the coil to induce a current that can be recorded. The only type of transducer that can't be used as a microphone is an AMT (air motion transformer). Besides that, normal dynamic driver, planar magnetic driver, and electrostatic transducers can all technically be used in either scenario.

The main issues are that Android typically resamples all audio to 48khz and cannot play lossless files bitperfect (ie: without resampling/changing the audio data). TIDAL has gotten around this using a custom USB driver that allows you to give the app exclusive control of the DAC and bypass this issue. You can do the same with Tidal, Qobuz, and local files (plus add a bunch of extra features like EQ) using USB Audio Player Pro I've actually made a couple videos on the topic which might help:

Worth noting with Bathys ANC that whilst I agree it's not as good as Bose/Sony, a lot of people think it's weaker than it is because by default the ANC is set to 'mild' and you need to go into the app to set it to full

PLEASE don't get Dyson Zone, that is far from neutral if that's the goal, and generally speaking given the peaky and massively boosted treble it's going to be horrendously bright for most people. Raw FR: Deviation from diffuse field neutral:

Very few wireless headphones offer a signature close to either harman neutral or diffuse field neutral. The main ones that come to mind being Focal Bathys and Audeze Maxwell

It would help if you provide the specific model name of your amp and speakers. It's not clear if you have active or passive speakers

Shenzhen ships worldwide: https://shenzhenaudio.com/products/truthear-x-crinacle-zero-red-dual-dynamic-drivers-in-ear-headphone

I would strongly recommend looking at the TruthEar Zero RED. At the $50 price point these are far and away the best of anything I've tested

This is a situation with a lot of issues at play, and a heavy mix of major/minor issues, ones with clear causes and others that are likely one-off problems and maybe don't need to be as big of a problem as they are, but for me, the biggest issue has been the response to the concern of accurate testing. Saying that spending $500 of time to retest a product because it wouldn't change the conclusion is simply not ok. It just isn't. You either test something properly or don't publish the testing at all. You are not hobbyists, you are a professional media organization who has a duty to fairly assess a manufacturers products and to provide fair and accurate information to viewers. To be clear, I actually AGREE that the conclusion about value almost certainly wouldn't have changed, but that's besides the point. LMG is a big company, and viewers rely on LMG to provide accurate information. If you do not do that, it brings into question ALL the information you provide. And if it happens consistently, the problem is exacerbated. Even more so if you then say you don't think that's a problem! I myself produce reviews of audio products which consist of both subjective evaluation AND extensive objective testing, and there have been times where I've been testing stuff and then realized that I'd made a mistake, something was configured wrong, or there was some other issue and it can be REALLY frustrating to spend an entire day or longer testing something only to realize you made an error and need to redo that work. It doesn't matter if I don't think the conclusion would change, if my mission is to provide accurate and useful data, that's what I'm going to do. If I make a mistake in testing, that sucks, but its my mistake and isn't fair on the viewers or manufacturer if I just publish it KNOWING there is a problem. Even if you feel strongly enough that the faulty data doesn't matter, in that situation you just make a video on that basis. Explaining your view with no data and explaining that no data-driven results could change your opinion is MUCH better than providing bad/incorrect data. It's one thing to catch a mistake after a video goes out, but a video should never ever be published if you KNOW that there is a mistake in the information/data being provided. Media outlets and reviewers rely on trust. That is built up over time, but can be lost quickly. If you make a mistake, that's fine, it happens, just fix it. If you consistently make errors, you will lose trust. If you then say that you don't think those errors are worthy of your time to fix, you will lose trust 10 times faster because whether you intended it to or not, a significant portion of your audience will read that as "I don't care". If your current workflow does not allow you to catch and correct mistakes, your workflow has a problem and you need to fix it, it's as simple as that.

The wattage is not the issue here, the impedance is. You'd need to check what the minimum rated load impedance for your amp is. Some amplifiers will happily drive speakers down to 1 Ohm. Others are only rated for 8 Ohm. Two 6 ohm speakers in parallel will provide an apparent impedance of 3 ohm to the amplifier which is quite low and you need to check your amp can drive this safely.

Drivers are the actual part of the headphone that moves, converting electrical energy into acoustic energy. The most common type is a 'dynamic' driver. This is what you see in most speakers and headphones. A coil of wire around a magnetic core. With the coil being attached to a diaphragm. The voice coil then moves when current is applied. (This is what your headphone cable is connected to). Moving the diaphragm, and creating sound. There are other types of driver however, such as Planar magnetic, electrostatic, ribbon, and balanced armature. But the vast majority of headphones and speakers use dynamic drivers. It's typically only once you start looking at the higher end of the market you'll get more into the other types.

The problem is that the FR of a particular headphone model isn't much more useful as a baseline compared to any other given as the majority of the audience won't have heard it anyway. And even amongst those that have, they won't necessarily all agree on whether they liked it or not and why. Generally, the accepted rule of thumb for comparing headphone FR is to treat the Harman curve as neutral, as there is significant research and reasoning behind it. Though it's not a silver bullet and it'd be good if LTT/Labs did a bit of an explanation video as to where those limitations are. Realistically though, it's not possible to simplify headphone measurements down to a point that anyone can just look at one and know how they feel about a product. Both because prior understanding is unfortunately a requirement, and because our knowledge about how to interpret the minutiae within an FR measurement and how they directly correlate to the subjective experience, is unfortunately still quite lacking. Tbh, a good Susvara chain is better than HE1 imo.

Headphone impedance is very often misunderstood, and there's a bit of history to it. From an electrical standpoint, there is no 'max impedance' an output will support. In fact, higher impedance loads are EASIER to drive due to requiring less current for the same voltage. So you don't need to worry about your headphone impedance causing any issues there. The headphones that are actually genuinely hard to drive are the low impedance, low sensitivity planars as these draw significant amounts of current. (Some extreme examples like the Hifiman Susvara people often run on speaker amplifiers).

Both are just software trickery to try to emulate a surround sound result (usually poorly). The actual hardware is no different at all.

Yeah I was pretty disappointed too The MQA stuff was annoying but at least you could turn it off/opt out. Now you can't and so it's not really a lossless service for a huge number of tracks. A real shame