@GoldenSound Just posted this excellent video on some of the pitfalls you can encounter when starting to learn how to EQ, where the recommendations come from and what they’re actually doing to your listening experience.
And what you can actually do yourself to have a positive experience with EQ.
So I figured I’d start the one thread to rule them all. Get all your grievances out about EQ here. “EQ is the devil”. Or all the things you love about EQ. “I named my third child EQ”. Or the questions you have about EQ.
What do you think? Have any of you used AutoEQ in the past? What was your experience with it or just trying EQ in general?
Is there any content you’d like to see around EQ from The HEADPHONE Show team?
Some resources if you’re new to EQ. Also if you find these resources don’t do the job you think they should do in explaining anything, let us know! Feedback is always welcome!
And here are some videos from the team’s recent trip to London where they got their own personal HRTFs measured so they can show you exactly how headphones sound on their own heads so you can understand why you may not agree with their tastes.
What I’ve learned from this thread is that life is not about the EQs you ultimately end up with, it’s about the technicalities you shred along the way.
What I’m curious about is whether in-ear microphones can be useful to help EQ a headphone. I don’t need to measure the full FR and plot against a target. I just want something to help smooth out the treble and channel imbalances - whether from the unit or my ears. Something I could use in combination with listening to sine sweeps as the video suggests. Useful additional tool or waste of money?
Disclaimer: I have not tried all of the available EQ profiles out there for all available headphones, so I can’t really offer any broad-based commentary on them. I have tried some of Oratory1990’s EQ profiles and AutoEQ profiles for some of my headphones. And I found that some of them worked fairly well. But they usually did not produce an entirely neutral-sounding result to my ears.
I don’t believe that’s due to HpTF variation or because my ears are somehow different than other people’s ears or the measurement rigs’ ears. I reject most of the conversation that I have heard here on that topic, when it comes to over-ear headphones.
Imo, the main drawback of the profiles were the targets that were used, and how they were implemented. I will repeat again though, that I thought some of the profiles worked fairly well… But only up to a certain point.
As always, the biggest missing piece in the EQ puzzle for me is the lack of any in-ear measurements of neutral speakers in semi-reflective rooms for comparison. This is the standard that the Harman research concluded was best (not DF or FF). In lieu of that, I recommend comparing the response of your headphones to the responses of other neutral- or good-sounding headphones. And developing your own EQ profiles from that.
So I just eye balled an HD 800S EQ to -10dB slope that just took the average of all of your personal HD 800S measurements below 4khz, dropped the center of that big treble mess down to the reference line with a high shelf, and fixed my treble peaks with owliophile. It sounds really nice actually. I’m thinking this plus some basic tone controls for bass, treble, and ear gain would be a really great EQ starting point for a lot of people.
I’m wondering why you all seem to be getting quite a bit less bass below 50 Hz than 5128. Seal stuff?
Tried a tone sweep the other day for my Mirph1 headphones and it wasn’t that hard to find a couple of treble freqs that need some adjustment. A 5 minute job and better sound for free
Thank you as always for the great video! I was wondering if there are parametric EQ system wide for Mac users (other than SoundSource + EQ software of choice like Pro Q-4)?
I think some of these disagreements keep popping up because we don’t have a very rigorous naming scheme for all these xRTFs under discussion. I’ve been choking on this “non-HRTF related HpTF variation” stuff myself because I just don’t see how you can separate the biometric side of any xRTF (or eardrum-endpoint transfer function) from everything else that’s contributed by the non-biological part of the setup.
Any xRTF is always just as strongly “related to” the inanimate components as it is to the bodily geometry of the listener. So an “HpTF” is actually just another HRTF but with headphones as a source, meaning it’s always an (Hp+H)RTF, just like a speakers-in-room HRTF is an (SiR+H)RTF etc.
So then what do you really mean when you say “non-HRTF related HpTF variation”? Are you saying you’ve subtracted everything biometric from those (Hp+H)RTFs (aka. all of the +H terms) before you plotted them on the same graph? I don’t see how you could, because you don’t have any plausible mechanism to disentangle the bodily causes of each (Hp+H)RTF from the non-bodily causes. Or do you think measuring the DFHRTF for each head gives you a purely biometric HRTF that’s such a complete(!) capture of the anatomical information that it can just be subtracted from any (Hp+H)RTF whatsoever and it will always give you a “purely tech-side” (Hp)RTF?
HRTF = has to do with how the head and ears impact sound - what the brain expects sound to be based on the individual’s anatomy
HpTF = has to do with the headphone behavior in a given condition.
Any measurement is effectively an HpTF. If you measure on a GRAS, you’re seeing an HpTF. If you measure on a human, you’re seeing an HpTF. But HpTF alone isn’t very interesting, because it doesn’t tell you if the response you’re seeing agrees with the person’s HRTF - so what the brain is expecting - or not.
When we’re subtracting each person’s HRTF, we’re showing just the headphone behavior in situ. So this shows how the headphone behaves when the condition is “being worn by person X”. That behavior is then different, when it is “being worn by person Y”. But you can only identify this if you have each person’s HRTFs, because those are going to be different from person to person.
And, all of this makes perfect sense when you consider the potential variables that result in FR differences in situ, like clamp force differences, positional differences, acoustic impedance differences and the impact of the ear geometry in close proximity.
Getting your HRTF is currently not an easy thing to do, but it does give you the picture of how your head and ears impact sound (and torso), and this is extremely useful if you’re trying to isolate headphone behavior. And, as we can see from the images above, when you have multiple people go through this process, subtract their HRTF, using the same headphone, it reveals that the behavior of the headphone itself is rather variable from person to person.
So again, it’s not good enough to just measure the same headphone on different heads, because you don’t know if the result you’re seeing is down to the anatomy of the individual and how their ear is impacting the sound, or if that’s down to the headphone’s behavior in situ. This is why you need the HRTF.
DF is just the HRTF for a directionless sound field condition, which is what we want with headphones - and somewhat surprisingly, this also tracks exactly with manual tone generation.
It’s more so that regardless of the HpTF being technically emanating from a single source location that still has a relative azimuth/elevation relative to the ear, the processing our brain brings to the equation is Diffuse, so the DF HRTF is still the baseline against which the timbre of the headphone is judged.
Right. Because that wasn’t the goal of their research. Sean Olive and company wanted to know what type of response headphone listeners preferred. And whether that was consistent with the previous research they had done on speakers. What they found was most listeners prefer a response close to the in-ear response of neutral speakers in a semi-reflective room, which is consistent with their conclusions on speakers.
Imo, that should be the target that you are going for.
Understood. But if it’s not a flat DF with equal energy or intensity at all frequencies, then what is it?
The answer (imo) is what I said above, the in-ear response of neutral speakers in a semi-reflective room. Because that is what most people seem to prefer, based on the research.
This parimarily tells us that people like a similar bass to treble delta in headphones as they do in speakers. It does not tell us that they prefer semi-reflective over DF as the sound field condition in headphones.
Sure it does. They prefer the timbre of neutral speakers in semi-reflective rooms to the timbre of a flat diffuse field. Both were tested in the research. And the SR room won overwhelmingly over DF.
The only way a diffuse field works is if you correct it in some way to more closely match the timber of neutral speakers in a semi-reflective room. So why not save the trouble and just measure the speakers in an SR room?
If you want to give that a more personalized touch (which isn’t really necessary for over-ears imo), then you can do the measurements on your own ears, and EQ your headphones to match them. It’s harder to do reliable measurements at the DRP of your own ears though than to do them on a HATS measurement rig, which is why rigs are generally used for this.
They never tested a SRF vs DF in the same conditions—with preference filters applied. I assume you know that, so I’m not sure why you’d insist their testing validates something that was never tested.
They tested a flat DF in their early research, and it was one of the least preferred responses. The timbre of neutral speakers in a semi-reflective room was the most preferred response.
The conflicts on this subject are understandable. And yes, I agree that some of the terminology on this has become extremely confusing. Where I mostly disagree with the staff here is on the importance of personalization, and on the primacy of DF.
I choose to follow the Harman resarch and its conclusions by attempting to approximate the in-ear response of neutral speakers in an SR room with the tools currently at my disposal. My main tool for that right now is the (raw) measurements of neutral or neutral-ish sounding headphones.
I’ve also tried using sweeps and tone generators btw, along the lines of what’s being suggested by Resolve and others here. And did not find it an effective way of achieving the above, or of achieving reliably better sound quality from my headphones. So that’s why I don’t use that method, or generally recommend it to others.
