Yeah same here, I modded the headband a bit but the pads aren’t that comfortable for me.
I also feel that way except for vocal tracks with a distinct voice in the center. For classical or instrumental it doesn’t have much of an edge (other than having good bass)
Hehe, he definitely went for something…
Do you prefer this sound over the stock tuning?
Oh and can you post your EQ settings to make it sound Harman like? quite curious what you ended up with (with and/or without the damping pads)
Over the stock tuning (dampers on but no EQ), absolutely. But that’s not a fair comparison. If you want to EQ to something close to Harman, you definitely should remove the dampers though. Boosting the treble region with the dampers installed sounds pretty grainy.
With damping pads, I can’t get anything acceptable that’s Harman-like. Here are the EQ settings I use with the dampers:
Preamp: -3.94 dB
Filter 1: ON LS Fc 30 Hz Gain 2 dB Q 0.7
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 70 Hz Gain 1 dB Q 3
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 180 Hz Gain -2 dB Q 0.6
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 620 Hz Gain 2.4 dB Q 1.71
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 3800 Hz Gain -2 dB Q 2
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 5900 Hz Gain 4 dB Q 3.2
Filter 7: ON HS Fc 9900 Hz Gain -4 dB Q 2
Here is what I developed for when the dampers are removed, but it is not what I would consider complete:
Preamp: -4.4 dB
Filter 1: ON LS Fc 30 Hz Gain 2 dB Q 0.7
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 70 Hz Gain 1 dB Q 3
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 180 Hz Gain -2 dB Q 0.6
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 7400 Hz Gain 8 dB Q 3
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 8500 Hz Gain -6 dB Q 6
Filter 6: ON HS Fc 10000 Hz Gain -8 dB Q 0.7
You’ll note that the filters below 500hz are the same and that’s because I was working with the treble region and hadn’t gotten that far yet.
Yesterday I got a YouTube link with an Headphones.com interview with Axel Grell and his OAE-1. I had never heard of this headphone before and have to admit that I am very interested in anyone taking a “fresh look” at technology. I own bass modded AKG701s and am generally happy with them, although I am more of a “speaker guy”. So after watching the interview, I googled for reviews and was very disappointed in most of them - especially the one by “Listener”. The argumentation reminded me of many things that I dislike about the audio press. Ralph Nader went on a crusade (Unsafe at any Speed) against the VW Beetle and Corvair back in the '60s and I see the same tactics here. I believe that we DO have a lot to learn and have no need to promote status quo. In the case of Naders crusade against rear engined vehicles, he lost the test of time. The highest performance architecture has been rear wheel and 4 Wheel drive is getting more attractive with electric.
I wish that those with nothing good to say, would just not say anything. My take on the marketing and Axel Grells interview is that this design incorporates more of the actual individual head transfer function (actual shape of my ear) than the usual bypassing of most of the acoustic effect with a “standard” curve. At no time did the article even address this. Instead we get a lecture why our expectations are wrong (something not even scientifically proven).
Now, am I supposed to believe someone that has learned to “accept” the bass deficiencies and other gremlins in many headphones (including the Sennheiser 6xx series)? Anyone involved in the science of perception knows that we have an acclimation period for EVERYTHING. (depending on many factors, this period can be months). Every time I put a headphone on, I need to adjust. It turns off much of reality and the expectation seems to be that we have no choice. I would embrace technology to get me closer.
I live in Germany and have not yet heard this headphone yet but am anxiously waiting for the opportunity. I will not compare them to anything else. I will bring my reference recordings and judge if they in fact give me a more truthful “timbre” for live acoustic instruments in various natural settings (not close miked). I will listen to how much I need to adjust to bass level. That is responsible for a sense of space in good recordings. I will bring my Zoom H6 and compare headphone to live speech in the room that I am in.
My expectations for any new purchase is not necessarily a turbo version of what I already own, it is more like what does my perception do every time I use it. I am 68 years old and headphones regardless of price (and many times their reviews) have always been an issue. I really liked my Jecklin Floats years ago but they simply were not dependable long term and the AKGs at least have been perfect in that respect.
In closing, teaching an old dog new tricks is not easy, but many times beneficial. I will be fascinated what critical observation of my reactions will result in. I expect something quite new.
Disagree with that, reviewers can and should offer their views especially since they’ve had access to many various products and can give useful impressions of them.
This I agree with. It is pretty apparent to me after trying many different headphones and modding some of my own that driver angle affects pinna activation and fr curve changes based on that. One overlooked test for this is rtings’s pinna db test as part of their soundstage rating. While a lot of their other ratings for soundstage seem unscientific and wrong to me, the pinna db test seem to correlate well with my own perceptions and tests.(with 4-5db on their test score sounding the most spacious and natural)
If you go in not expecting to hear a near field sound reproduction, then the oae1 might sound really good. But it’s very difficult to get out of that mindset and expectation when you put headphones on.
Oh man. PRTF is actually one of the least well-substantiated things they use, and one we’ve regularly taken them to task on. Listener gives a good explanation as to the problems with their theory on this, and I highly recommend reading that for an overview of it. Not only is there no good evidence to suggest that this is a ‘soundstage predictor’ in the form of listening experiments, it’s also conceptually flawed.
With headphones, the use condition of the device doesn’t match the localization priming of any front-biased sound field, like you’d get with speakers or just sound localization cues in the world. When we wear headphones, we’re effectively put into a ‘sound helmet’ of sorts - the sound source is directionless and there are no external sound source localization cues, because it’s literally being worn on the head. This means any induced angle of incidence for the sound source within the headphone, regardless of the method, is bound to be interpreted as timbre, not localization.
I suggest reading the incredible paper by Gunther Thiele that relates to psychoacoustics. This is one of the most influential and foundational pieces I can think of on this topic.
But as it relates to Grell’s idea and this headphone, I think we’re all generally in agreement that we’re glad he tried it, and I know people who thought it sounded great. You don’t know how something is going to turn out or how it’ll be received by people until you give it a shot. So I recommend people to listen to it if they can, even if this idea didn’t work out for any of us on our team.
Thanks I’ll give that a read when I have some time.
So far I’m not convinced that 100% of the sound changes based on driver direction/distance/cup size etc are converted to fr and that the ear’s interactions is completely and utterly ignored by the brain and turns into tonality changes only. I’m not sure what metric or measurements could be used to quantify the effects but to my ears it’s probably close to 90% and yet definitely not 100%.
Maybe your definition is fr at the ear drums which is great as a concept for argument and less so as an actual measurement routinely used to clarify topics such as the one we’re discussing. If you give headphones you have some modifications and push the drivers further away from your ears while using the same pads, do you honestly perceive no differences in spaciousness and imaging? You only hear tonality changes?
They’re are obvious spaciousness and depth differences to me between headphones, even though none of them sound more than a few inches from my head at most for most stereo recordings.
I’ve already read this a couple of times.
"Which one of these sets of features is even most similar to the average listener?
Well, we don’t know. And that’s the problem. "
I don’t agree with dismissing prtf as a concept because your ears or my ears aren’t average. That doesn’t mean the effects therefore doesn’t exist at all or aren’t relevant in any way to how we perceive sound stage. While I don’t agree with their methodology completely, I still find some correlation between their results and my own perceptions, instead of none simply because my ears aren’t the same as a rig’s.
While prtf results aren’t going to be accurate, it suffers similar limitations as FR measurements, they might not be exactly how you hear things personally, but yet there are strong correlations between the two.
Going into a review wanting this means you’re bound to be disappointed sometimes. No reviewer is going to like every headphone, and very few of the reviewers I am familiar with liked the OAE-1. I don’t think silencing negative opinions or experiences with a product does consumers any benefit, as products do sometimes have issues that people would rather know about before buying them.
My take on the marketing and Axel Grells interview is that this design incorporates more of the actual individual head transfer function (actual shape of my ear) than the usual bypassing of most of the acoustic effect with a “standard” curve.
It must be said: We have no evidence at all that the design of the OAE-1 leads to it incorporating more of the listener’s Head-related Transfer Function (HRTF) or adapts better to an individual’s HRTF than a typical headphone. Like a typical headphone, the sound emanating from the driver of the OAE-1 still passes through the same components of the hearing system on the way to the eardrum, so I’m not sure what it’s “bypassing.”
Additionally, the OAE-1 is fairly positionally variant (due in part to the placement of the drivers), which means it could be argued that there are more possible positions where it won’t be matching the listener’s HRTF compared to a more traditional design like an HD 600 or a Hifiman Edition XS.
Furthermore, and more importantly, the HRTF baseline the OAE-1 for with this headphone is based on a directional cue (the measured response of a speaker at ±30º angle relative to the listener), but headphones are devices of diffuse (directionless) localization.
This means the FR effects of the directional cue baked into the tonal color of the headphone are heard as tonal color / deviations, and not as indicative of sound source location. This has disastrous effects on the naturalness of OAE-1’s timbre for me, and I think does the same for a good few people.
The burden of proof is not on me when it comes to making the claim about how well the headphone conforms/adapts to the listener’s HRTF. If there’s data on this, I’ve not seen it (in fact I’ve only seen data to demonstrate the contrary). If such data exists I’d really love to see it though, as to my mind the error of headphone adaptation to listener HRTF is like… the biggest problem with the sound quality passive headphones.
If the OAE-1’s sound quality itself was supposed to be the proof, it did not deliver for me.
It is in fact the opposite: I’m arguing that our expectations are right, and it’s the OAE-1 that is not in line with our expectation of headphone sound, which is why some people found it noticeably colored/off sounding. Square peg, round hole, etc.
I can’t address everything here, so I’ll just say this:
My stance with regards to the framing of the article was twofold
For what it’s worth, the former is likely the part I should have focused more on, because clearly the latter “soundstage” thing was much more of a “marketing push + audiophile hype” problem than something Axel was ever actually interested in with this design. He was more interested in challenging the ideal frequency response baseline and acoustic condition for headphone timbre, but because this is the case, the problem was a predictable one:
The experiment was not a success, almost certainly because of the frequency response. Statically baking localization cue(s) with large swings in frequency response (relative to the expectation of the listener) into a headphone without modelling the rest of the aural localization process results in people saying the timbre of the headphone is off. At least, that has been my experience talking to most people that’ve heard OAE-1.
Indeed, the OAE-1 is one of the worst-sounding headphones I have heard in stock formation, and I stand by that. But if Grell wants to push forward and continue challenging established ideas, I vociferously support him doing so, even if it leads to another release that doesn’t sound very good to me.
Science is not meant to go without challenges, and his iconoclastic spirit is a breath of fresh air in a market that frankly needs more novel experimentation. He is genuinely my favorite headphone designer in the world.
But one of the most important parts of my job is presenting educated counterarguments to hyperbolic marketing copy and hype trains in order to help people align their expectations with the reality of the headphone they’re thinking of buying. That’s what I aimed to do with this piece, and I still feel I accomplished what I set out to. Thanks for reading.
OK, I have to hit back against this because you guys keep repeating it despite evidence to the contrary. 
Numero uno, headphones are devices of whatever localization you want depending on what material you put through them. The Smyth Realizer has conclusively proven this by making headphone sound indistinguishable from the sound of the speakers in the test room. Headphones may be diffuse-field by their construction, but that only remains determinant to the listener’s experience if you don’t compensate for it with EQ/DSP. It’s not an Iron Law of Headphonedom, but the way you keep emphasizing it sounds to me like you think it is.
The reason diffuse-field tuning has been an industry standard for so long is because of its cost efficiency in getting most consumers an acceptable result (because personalized tuning is hard/expensive), not because it’s the perfect solution, nor because it’s made impossible to avoid by headphones being headphones. It’s avoidable with DSP. Headphones can sound (and localize) like anything, or at least AFAIK they can sound exactly like good speakers in a treated room.
Numero dos, and I know this anecdotal: I’ve heard the effects of a close HRTF matching EQ profile in headphones, and they absolutely can be heard as localization. Even if the experience didn’t match Griesinger’s promises with most commercial stereo recordings, even if it didn’t apply to all the instruments in the mix in cases where it worked, it still did present to me sometimes as localization, not, coloration. So I know from experience that this is possible, there’s no way to change that by endlessly repeating that it isn’t.
I think it requires very close HRTF matching and maybe that recorded content also be captured (or DSP’d) in certain ways and not others, but it’s technically possible. Mr. Grell’s mistake has been seemingly to underestimate how important personalization is, and how complicated the whole process of turning this into a mass marketable product could become, especially if recording contents also need tweaking for it to work.
Even Griesinger’s tuning sounds better by far with binaural recordings made with his dummy head, albeit that is his exact ear canal shape in there and not mine. The best I could come up with so far for how it could be improved is if we repeated his process 4 times, to create a separate EQ profile for each pair of ear+speaker, and then apply those via a 4-channel EQ with crossfeed, like what you find in the HA-DSP or some miniDSP models, or in some version of ViPER4Android or JamesDSP, don’t remember which one had it rn. Never tried it myself, as that would require significant amounts of effort, listening to one speaker with one ear at a time, using some near-perfect earplug in the other(?) etc.
Feel free to append “when reproducing 2ch stereo mixed content, which makes up the bulk of all music content being listened to by consumers”
Like, I assume it’s obvious I know how our perception of timbre is tied to the content being reproduced… I literally give an example of why this doesn’t work (but other implementations of non-diffuse field tunings may work) in that message:
In other words: Diffuse Field-baseline is ideal for reproducing stereo recordings, Free Field HRTFs can (arguably must) be implemented when reproducing object-based audio to great effect, but if you’re doing that, you need more than just a single HRTF if you want it to be consistently convincing.
I mean there are moments in ordinary stereo recordings where even a non-HRTF compliant headphone gives me the impression of localized sound, but this isn’t due to the FR but due to the characteristic of the sound source in the recording. Eg. if a sound is recorded in a room similar to the one you’re in, with a “realistic” balance between direct and indirect sound, its totally reasonable that you’d think the sound is in the room with you even if the localization feature in the headphone’s FR is wrong relative to the panning of the sound.
In other words, anything can sound like a localized feature, but if we want this to consistently arise across all music when listening to 2ch stereo recordings, we need more than just tuning directly to a single location-based FR cue.
I’m not sure I actually know his thoughts on this; if anything I assume he knows how important it is but just disagrees on how to best achieve the result in a passive headphone. In general, I wouldn’t expect him to be able to compensate for the recording content or implement complex DSP, but hey I could be wrong.
Have you tried the “anchor sound” method Grell talked about?
The issue is more so the conclusions they draw than the measurements themselves existing. Measuring the difference between PRTF and HRTF is a-ok, but telling listeners there’s a likelihood they’ll perceive x PRTF character as more spacious when there’s no evidence to support this is not good for consumers.
Sure, I’m with you on that. Although I think they are onto something useful with that test and maybe you guys should improve on it and try a revised version of it yourself. It would be helpful to quantify effects that might have some universal tendencies amongst the population average. I went out of my way to test a few headphones based on their respective Prtf measurements, and found that while no headphones sound out of the head for me ever, it seem to be a rather good indication of narrow soundstage vs an increasingly wide and 3 blob soundstage.
What I wish is for you guys to continue to innovate and explore ways to help potential customers find headphones that fit them best. Not everyone can try all the headphones like you (and to a lesser extent, me), and I support you guy’s pov that measurements are a great unbiased way for people to understand a product. There just needs to be more of it in terms of what else matters outside of fr.
Just speaking to the measurements themselves, I know you know this but the FR effects we measure on a given rig/head will likely be rendered moot by the error inherent to a person trying to compare this measurement to their experience. Like, I don’t think its controversial to say we should actually be focusing even less on treble measurements than we are now, instead of focusing on them more.
If I were to entertain your idea and “fix” the way this is typically done, IMO the better approach must involve actually figuring out what kind of signature is consistently most likely to elicit a response of spaciousness. Its entirely possible that meeting the HRTF actually contributes negatively to this impression. We don’t know.
But even that seems like a bit of a waste of time, or at least it’s just not interesting to me personally. Like it’s probably obvious, but if I had it my way timbre would be the primary, secondary, and tertiary focus when evaluating a headphone’s sound hahah.
Oh I agree.
See that’s what I find curious, if I were you guys with access with measurement rigs, endless headphones, and willing participants in various trade shows and meets, I’d try to figure out a few more useful measurements so I could sell more headphones on this Internet based business.
Most people literally cannot try on headphones before they buy, so if you could entice them with more relevant information to help them find products and make them interested in doing more shopping with lower return rates, why wouldn’t you? But what I hear here on the forum and on the podcasts are usually pretty negative views about the current interpretation of measurements and the lack of interest in furthering the discoveries of more relevant ones.
And that’s totally fine. I find it rather trivial to spend a couple of hours EQing headphones to have enjoyable timbre and fr for my own ears, so to me it’s the sound quality related physical attributes which I can’t EQ that interests me most.
Always open to suggestions, if you have things we should be looking at to improve the predictive power of our measurements!
I will say, the above kind of assumes that it’s more likely that new measurements/data will reveal new good things about the headphones that are available/are coming to market, instead of further confirming how mediocre current products are 
For what it’s worth, the next thing we have coming down the pipe—reworking our preference bounds—is looking like it will be meaningfully more predictive with regard to how it actually selects good/bad products via placement in the bounded area. Can’t say much past that, but as far as “improving the usefulness of measurements,” I think it will likely be the next big improvement, and honestly a much bigger one than when we first went from tilted DF targets to the bounds.
Absolutely. That’s why I was so interested in OAE-1 on release and why Grell’s approach is among the more interesting forces in headphones to me right now.
I’m just going to leave this here and back away slowly
Yes, we’ve said for a long time the existing analysis of headphone measurements currently leaves a lot to be desired, and I think what you’ve outlined is a good business case for doing the research to help with that (certainly we’d love the opportunity to do this, but getting funding for it isn’t easy).
But there are other things to consider there. While we are indeed working to improve the status quo with respect to predicting headphone performance for people, a big part of the problem is that it’s not intuitive to interpret. Add to that the inertia of the existing paradigm of looking at a single line vs a target… it becomes sort of a feedback loop of confusion. The audience has to be willing to learn, and it’s not going to happen overnight.
The other thing is that there’s an unfortunate reality to all of this, which is that what listeners actually prefer is really not straightforward at all. Something that recently broke my brain a bit was learning that there isn’t actually any evidence to support the idea that the closer a headphone is to the ‘known good’ target, the more likely it’ll be preferred. Yet we intuitively bake that assumption into any typical read of the data.
So yeah, it’s being worked on, but it’s not at all straightforward. I’d personally like to use probe-mics, control for the in-situ response across listeners and then do listening experiments to isolate preference from non-HRTF related HpTF variation, or other factors. But that would take a lot more resources.
If I’m getting you right, this is about reproducing the right FR for each sound source that’s emitting at you from a different angle, so basically having a bunch of object-and-head related tansfer functions (OHRTFs?). This raises an interesting question, because I don’t really know if Griesinger tested his method on a wide variety of materials, specifically including classical concerts that didn’t have some lead singer or instrument in stage-central position stealing all the attention. It could be that his results seem startlingly realistic only as long as you’re focusing on that central singer - who in reality has been made to sound convincingly as if they were singing to you from the position of the small central speaker that is used in his original method. But focus on anything lateral and the magic should disappear.
I need to go back to my first tuning that I did with my Denon Envaya Mini, and listen specifically for lateral sounds at the edges of the stage. 
How could it not be? You yourselves are always going around teaching the gospel that most of the desirable qualities people look for in the sound of headphones are from specific FR shapes more than they are from anything else, IOW getting the FR right gets you most of the way there. I don’t understand why I’m having so much trouble convincing you it’s the same with spaciousness and localization: getting the FR right is what should get you most of the way there. I’m not saying anything revolutionary.
Mind you, I have these “lucky moments of localization” too, but they’re usually with some percussive sound appearing to be far to my left or right, maybe a little behind me. This has nothing to do with my Griesinger example, where the Griesinger tuning made some sounds in some commercial recordings appear more convincing as coming from a central source right in front of me, which never happens by getting lucky with a recording and had never happened before with those recordings. And all I changed was the FR. It has that big of a contribution, it just does.
If it’s what I heard in the interview video on the Headphones channel it just seems like the headphones half of Griesinger’s procedure, where you find the HpTF as referenced to whatever your personal equal-loudness curve is. Then you would repeat that with speakers in a room and find their HRTF as referenced to your equal-loudness curve, and subtracting one from the other gives you the final transformation you need to make those specific headphones sound like speakers in a room to you.
Except he’s doing it in a worse way because pure tone loudness is harder to compare as the frequencies get farther apart, than noise band loudness for bandpassed pink noise around each of the comparison frequencies. Even with noise bands it gets really tricky to compare frequencies very far apart, it doesn’t even seem worth trying with pure tones.
I mean I provided an example that I think makes some level of sense. A sound with a “convincing” FR relative to what your brain expects is probably somewhat more likely to be convincingly externalized, sure… but my point is that in stereo recordings there are plenty of instances where the impression is convincing, but largely thanks to other factors like time-based processing or effects baked into the recording (reverb, echo, envelope/dynamics manipulation etc).
Here’s what I think is a pretty good example: Caroline Polachek - Hopedrunk Everasking
The above linked song has what sounds like a fire alarm making a “battery low” noise that was almost certainly recorded at a distance in a typical room. The “chirp” from the fire alarm itself consists of literally only two tones (~3750 Hz and ~7500Hz) such that would be very hard to judge the “relative tone color” of this sound across headphones, and indeed across all headphones I’ve heard this song on, the chirp always sounds essentially the same.
But it’s also one of the more “externalized-feeling” sounds I’ve heard in a stereo recording, regardless of the headphone I’m listening on, and this is (IMO) almost certainly due to how prevalent the reverb tail is relative to the initial sound, and not how the FR of the headphone is coloring the sound or how exactly the FR balance of that chirp matches how a chirp’s direct component IRL would sound at my eardrum. I would argue that even in the real world, it may even be too harmonically-simple of a formant to even localize without the influence of reflections and other sympathetic noises.
To be clear, we agree heavily on FR of the headphone being among the largest influences (likely the largest) on spatialization of stereo recordings of headphones. I’m just mindful of the fact that the recordings themselves can utilize a lot of tricks to sound spacious that have nothing to do with the headphone’s FR.
I actually had the impression he said to use band-limited noise as you say. Was just curious about your experience, really. I tried it with pure tones and found the results not-exactly-revolutionary, though.
Do you know what his entire procedure is? I didn’t understand what he was trying to do with it