I just wanted to post some measurements here of the Utopia using our new GRAS 43AG-7 and KB5000 (KEMAR Anthropometric Pinna).
What I’m showing here is the raw measurement along with a few target curves, and I wanted to try getting a sense of what everyone finds most valuable for representing it.
Here’s the Utopia compared to the Harman over-ear 2018 target (notice the crazy bass shelf).
Here it is compared to the Harman 2013 over-ear target (more appropriate bass to my ear, but still ‘preference’). Between these two I find the bass on the 2013 target to be more appropriate, however I prefer the treble extension on the 2018 target. Also notice, more upper mids on the 2013 target between 2-3khz.
And here is Crin’s suggestion of an ‘enthusiast neutral’ target. Basically this takes the Harman over-ear 2018 target but ignores the bass shelf (and other features below 900hz). The idea behind this was that while all the features of the Harman target above 900hz are still present, they generally match ear-related gain factors (leaving aside the treble roll off for now). There may be some gain factors below 900hz from the head and neck but it may not be necessary to include them for headphones, and so this eliminates the ‘preference’ based features in lower frequencies like the 200hz dip and the bass shelf around 120hz.
The other nice thing about this is that if we consider a real headphone like the Focal Utopia to be reasonably ‘neutral’, this custom target reflects that fairly well. I think this can also still be improved by adjusting the target’s treble roll-off. I tend to find that the Harman targets generally do this to some degree (the 2018 less so than the 2013 target).
We can also go with the GRAS KEMAR DF target, but I’m not sure if anyone actually wants their headphones to match that, and so while it might be useful for consistency, I’m not sure it’s something we should actually shoot for.
In any case, the question of which target curves should be used is somewhat a matter of approach. There are ‘established’ curves like the ones from Harman, which are based on consumer preference (meaning there’s some room for disagreement), but you can set a custom target like the one I’ve done above that ignores the ‘preference-based’ features of the Harman target like the bass shelf, while still retaining the ones that generally follow the gain factors of the physical ear. I say generally here because they don’t follow them perfectly, but it’s pretty close.