Hello all! I’ve been hanging around the site more often and I’ve realized that a TON of people need help with EQing their headphones and IEMs.
I thought it’d be great if we had some sort of centralized repository of EQ profiles either from @Resolve or myself, as well as a place for people to request EQ profiles of their IEMs/headphones for me to help with.
First, there are some things readers should know about how I’m going to approach making EQs for other people, as it will be rather different than the pre-made EQs done by people like Oratory1990 or Jaakko Pasanen’s AutoEQ databases:
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I won’t be EQing headphones or IEMs directly to any of Harman’s targets unless explicitly requested. Using Harman means I can only use results from one type of measurement fixture—specifically legitimate 711 couplers for IEMs, and GRAS 45CA/43AG rigs for headphones—and IMO better results can be had when incorporating data from other measurement fixtures.
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I will, as mentioned, be incorporating measurements from as many “heads” (measurement fixtures) as possible. For this to work, Diffuse Field calibration for all measurements is necessary. This means the measurements might look different than the raw measurements many are used to in our hobby. If you’d like an explanation for why this is necessary and better, check out my article about Diffuse Field.
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The default “target” I will be aiming for will be something akin to Harman’s OE 2018 target. In this case, the filter values alone that were applied to Harman’s In-Room Flat that led to Harman OE 2018 will be the “target” all of the Diffuse Field calibrated measurements are steered towards. However, I won’t be crazy about matching exactly to the target from top to bottom.
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I will be utilizing the Preference Bounds we use for our measurements at Headphones.com to help make sure I’m steering towards a likely improvement, and I will also be generally using very wide Q values, especially above 4000 Hz. Above this frequency is a high-uncertainty area wherein humans are bound to vary extremely in terms of on-head frequency response, so a gentle touch in this region is necessary.
As a quick example of what I mean, let me show you what the process and output would be like with the Sennheiser HD 800S.
First, I’d begin by gathering as many measurements as I can for each head and averaging them for each head. In this case, Oratory1990 has measured a bunch of units on the GRAS system he uses (with KB50xx pinnae) so that one’s easy, but for the rest I’d be making a single “average” per head, to consolidate unit variation. Example shown below.
After that, I will Diffuse Field calibrate all of the measurements and average them, leading to a result that looks something like the below measurement in red.
Finally, I’ll go ahead and begin EQing, using the Harman filters as a rough guideline and mostly shooting to get the totality of the response more “within the bounds”. These are the results I’m going to show in every post, with all of the prior information left out in the interest of brevity. Results shown below in green.
I will state my confidence in the provided EQ preset, which indicates how much I think you should trust the measurement:
Confidence: MEDIUM-HIGH
And then I will post the EQ filters that I used to get the above result, as well as prescribing where the listener should adjust to tilt the response to their preference:
Preamp: -8.2 dB
Filter 1: ON PK Fc 20 Hz Gain 1.8 dB Q 1.400
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 71 Hz Gain 1.0 dB Q 1.400
Filter 3: ON LSC Fc 82 Hz Gain 6.6 dB Q 0.600
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 190 Hz Gain -2.1 dB Q 0.700
Filter 5: ON HSC Fc 1075 Hz Gain 3.2 dB Q 0.600
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 1550 Hz Gain 0.6 dB Q 2.700
Filter 7: ON PK Fc 3950 Hz Gain -2.0 dB Q 4.000
Filter 8: ON PK Fc 4900 Hz Gain 2.7 dB Q 2.000
Filter 9: ON HSC Fc 6000 Hz Gain -4.8 dB Q 0.700
Filter 10: ON PK Fc 6250 Hz Gain -6.0 dB Q 2.000
Adjust band 3 for overall bass level
Adjust band 9 for overall treble level
And that’s it! So if any of you have any requests for EQ of any headphone or IEM out there that has a measurement, feel free to drop a request in here. Otherwise, I’ll be making a point to post in here at least once a day until I’ve run out of headphones and IEMs to generate profiles for.
Happy tweaking!
