So then, we should be able to take a headphone with good distortion measurements and EQ it to sound the same or VERY close to the same as any other headphone regardless of driver material or technology. E.g planar vs dynamic
But is that the case?
Or is it a matter of can we actually pull that off and get two headphones to measure the same at the eardrum by EQ even if the drivers are different and the geometry of the headphone is different?
I of course don’t have the resources to do that.
Have you guys tried it?
Take headphone A and EQ it to headphone B’s FR and test to see if beyond FR if the soundstage is the same, timbre, dynamics etc?
I mean I’ve seen so many times subjective reviews on planars sounding ‘ plastics’ in the upper treble. Is this from freq response?
Or saying that trails of notes decay longer.
Is this derived from impulse response? But the FR is derived I think from the impulse response through FFT. If I’m getting this right
I know from speaker building that drivers are made from different materials , but ultimately those materials contribute to FR, but also have , distortion and compression factors included. As well as dispersion characteristics. And then of course there is the box and diffraction and the whole recipe which makes things sound different.
Does the huge soundstage of the Senn 800 lie in its FR or a combination of things?
But also , ( I think I mentioned this before) shouldn’t compression be also measured in headphones?
My experience with the Crinacle Zero Red IEM ( which I own) gives me the impression that there is some compression going on from the drivers at certain freq.
I EQ my headphones and IEMs using a similar Harman curve with a bit of META tuning below 1khz.
But I’ve noticed that during louder passages of some music certain freqencies dip in their output. Not distort. It’s very different.
Whereas on my headphones and speakers this does not happen. It’s very noticeable.
On the 4th track of this album, when the Trumpet comes in, it’s accompanied by the entire orchestra and is loud. The trumpet should be the loudest instrument in the center , but on the Zero Red the Trumpet in that part sort of collapses in volume. Which usually is a clear sign of compression in certain freq.
Don’t know if you have noticed that in IEMs or headphones. I haven’t noticed it in headphones, but in the 4 IEMs I have to varying degrees.
My friend and I are headphones and EQ fanatics, and we’ve been doing very extensive EQs lately making elaborate adjustments, first by removing all peaks and valleys from the FR by ear, then adding personalized Harman-like curve on top. We both have dynamic and planar headphones (HD600, DT1990, Hifiman, Dan Clark plus others), and after our adjustments, we both agreed that some of the headphones damn near sound the same. Of course certain aspects of the FR simply is too different to EQ to the same target, for example, bass extension of some of the headphones are simply superior than others. Also sound stage and “dynamics” wise, our thoughts so far is that EQ has a small effect, but the driver/housing/acoustic impedance seem to be more of a dominant factor. Also there’s some feeling of additional “detail” that we have trouble replicating between headphones. Maybe we just don’t have the ears sensitive enough to do so (We’re both level 8 or 9 on the Harman learn to listen program), or maybe there really is something special sauce in headphone designs that gives them more detail.
My friend also has a EARS rig. By EQing to make 2 headphones almost identically FR wise on the rig, they don’t sound quite the same, close though. By EQing with our 2 stage method, then tonally they sound damn near identical at the end, but differences such as sound stage and “punch” can still be quite substantial.
Take this with a grain of salt of course, this is just 2 guys, maybe 8 headphones, and a not super precise rig.
I too would like to hear @Resolve 's opinion about this since I hear him say it on his reviews. I’m a bit confused as to the mechanism of how this works? Some headphones can’t make low db sounds audible and some can?
Ha, well you say yes, but then bring up dynamics and soundstage.
Which is kinda the crux of my question.
So where do those other parts lie?
Anyway. I wasn’t trying to be snarky btw. We are just wondering the same things. I wish I could carry out an experiment like that as well.
Money and resources. That’s what is needed as always.
I’m sure a big company like Sennheiser would have all they need to do something like that. And maybe they already know.
I would like to see some compression measurements however. I wonder how easy or difficult that could be.
Sound stage is like… 70% not changed by our extensive EQ method. Dynamics, maybe 60-70% EQ related, still, some headphones just sounds a bit punchier, livelier.
But hey, there’s still way more to learn and try so, those are not concrete numbers by any means!
Have you tried swapping amps/outputs for your IEMs?
Yeah I swapped amps and the compression or whatever is going on is still there.
What fixes it a bit is playing the song at a lower volume.
That’s one reason why I think it’s compression.
I mean for IEMs we/I don’t know much about the drivers under the hood. So I don’t know what could be going on.
That’s interesting about the dynamics and soundstage. Super interesting
I would say it is. Between my friend and I we’ve EQed S12 pro planar IEM and Arya Stealth planar headphones, both have that kind of… metallic, plasticky slightly bright and unnatural treble. After we evened out the treble response to match our own ears, all of those traits disappeared.
So I think it is totally FR related, and planar treble is a real thing, because planar unEQed tend to have lots of small wobbles in the treble range. I’m not sure exactly which feature and which frequencies is IT, but some of the really sharp peaks and dips is definitely the cause.
Yes, if you can perfectly measure the FR at the eardrum of the individual. In reality, that’s not easy to do without probe mics.
It should sound the same provided you matched the FR at the eardrum and other factors like distortion weren’t audible. Also there’s a scenario where the experience differs because of other factors like the headphone’s openness, where you can hear the room tone around you, versus a closed back where you can’t. This can also be influential. But say you have two similarly open back headphones with different driver types, matched FR at the eardrum of the listener, they would sound the same to that person.
It is. There are trends in driver behavior, one of which is a more modal treble presentation. Or flat bass extension down from 900hz, while dynamic driver headphones are regularly more contoured.
Yes, and with headphones you have a different set of challenges, and some of those you don’t need to consider.
That and whatever psychoacoustic effects are conferred by it being extremely open.
That’s probably just a poor fit with your HRTF. IEMs are… quite challenging, because they break the natural system of human hearing. They bypass the pinna, which is a key factor that impacts incoming sound, and part of what the brain expects. IEMs in general are a total crap shoot for how they’re going to be received because of this.
It’s hard to try and identify shared meaning from someone else’s descriptions of such things, because there’s also the occlusion effect with certain IEMs, and also the way they fit can cause unique perceptions for people. But I’m almost certain what you’ve described is an FR thing.
As I try to indicate in my reviews, these are purely subjective descriptions of the experience, not of acoustic properties. I would describe this as a good balance between fundamental and harmonic tones, where there’s a clear sense of completeness to the upper harmonics of those tones for the instruments being played.
In playback equipment, that’s bound to be contained in the treble balance and level. I say balance because it’s actually a lot more important for things to not sound blunted/congested. Lower harmonics being emphasized over upper ones often leads to a compressed kind of sound that impedes that sense of clarity for the upper ends of those harmonic tones.
Yeah, pretty much. And it’s not just about roll off vs no roll off, because different tones have different resonant harmonics. But generally a good fit with HRTF and appropriate presence will be more revealing for these elements in the music, because they aren’t being masked or dominated by other frequency bands.
I don’t believe you……lol.
I wanna believe you. I mean I do……but it can’t be that simple.
Or maybe it is. Can you hear me scratching my head here?
Ha
I suppose our ears may hear more of the nuances of the FR because of the closer distance. Dunno.
For example I tried the ‘ usual mixing trick’ of making a bit of a BBC dip in the 490pro but alas the soundstage just really wasn’t there. Yeah of course it did help. But my DT1990 have a much bigger soundstage and more importantly instrument separation.
Maybe it’s the the geometry of the headphones, like you mentioned with the HD800 being very open.
As far as the IEMs I tried my best to find that trumpet while EQing. And the Zero Red is pretty easy to EQ. Unless if I’m understanding you correctly my ear anatomy makes the Zero difficult to tune or doesn’t adhere to what the graph shows.
God I hate IEMs. Lol
Doesn’t Blaine as well…?
I do understand the timbre thing for planars you explained. Well…I did for the rest as well.
Have you guys measured compression in headphones ever? Done other measurements to see trends?
I think that’s what Tyll was doing with the square waves. Trying to find correlations.
Pretty cool convo
( some of my post was of course in jest . Text takes all the inflection away)
Shouldn’t this be something that shows up on distortion graphs? I just had a quick try with my only wired IEMs (they’re USB C with built in dac/amp) and I didn’t hear what you said in that same song. It sounds the same as on headphones, no such “compression” issues.
Dynamic compression is different than distortion from what I know.
A speaker can have low distortion but when nearing and reaching maximum excursion it can reduce levels in certain freq.
Someone correct me please if I’m getting that wrong.
I do in most part actually agree with @Resolve because I always tell people….” Why do you have 10 pairs of headphones, when you can have three different types , drivers, geometry, etc and just EQ them to taste? “
Saying one headphone is good for one specific genre also baffles me. When my headphones are EQed well, everything sounds the way it should on them.
The only place I get confused on as we said is soundstage. Cause for the life of me, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the soundstage of my 1990 on the HD600 or 490pro.
What is the role of driver size? And as a practical matter can one apply EQ finely enough to really make somewhat dissimilar headphones sound close enough that it is hard to distinguish? Finally what about electrostatic drivers that are very low mass and controlled by the field? Are all of these factors captured in an individual HRTF?
I believe so. My friend and I tried it on Arya Stealth (planar) and DT1990 (dynamic). It takes a lot of tweaks but the end result was that they really sounded basically like each other.
That said, this isn’t the case when I’ve tried EQing on dissimilar driver and cup types, and a lot of the personality of the headphones remains after EQ. If the driver’s small and there’s no seal for extended sub bass, it’ll never sound quite the same. If one’s closed back and the other’s open back, there’s never quite the same resonances between the headphones. The cup volume, distance and angle of drivers to the ears still matters even after EQ.
That’s something that I was relatively certain about. Distance from the ear and eardrum in particular. The Grado RS1e with Beautiful Audio pads turns into something quite different than the over-ear original. It’s large driver is qualitatively different than smaller ones in Prestige series or the RS2e. I found that it was in many ways similar to the Sennheiser HD-6xx, with better detail (probably the upper mid characteristic of Grado) and better soundstage - which I think is related to driver distance from the ear. I could EQ
some quoted text got in her by mistake - since deleted
On the other hand, the Audeze LCDi3 and LCDi4 along with the iSINE “IEMs” sound different than ANY other IEMs as they have a 30mm driver that sits quite outside the ear. All of them are designed for EQ, of course and came (for Apple eocosystem) with a DAC/AMP in the cable and parametric EQ.
What sort of compression are you referring to? Dynamic range compression? In a recording, that’s typically perceived as an increase in loudness.
The IEMs you were using to listen (Alison Balsom is wonderful, by the way!) to this – I’m unfamiliar with them – are they a bit light from 100-1,000 Hz? That’s most of the trumpet’s normal range.