Thank you for the welcome. I pulled a muscle and am a touch intoxicated, but I hurt and this is something that I enjoy, talking about audio on forums. So sorry if I don’t make sense or I ramble.
I have been on a tech forum for years and feel like I am the douche who think’s he knows everything by recommending thing’s either first or second hand (being something I have heard vetted sources enjoy). I have spent a lot on headfi the past 5 or so years and used my usual vetting techniques. I get something very common and everyone has a review on, see who has the same-ish response to it, then follow their recommendations and see if we agree again. So I have a bit of a profile on various reviewers so I know what parts to appreciate in their video’s and what parts to respectfully disagree with.
Still, I haven’t watched much in the audio world because of it being either overwhelming or on the opposite spectrum it makes me amped up and I want to buy something. Unhealthy wallet practice.
My recent experience has left me on the R70x refine because it’s so comfortable. But I have tubes in the mail to play with it and my 6xx. Also just purchased a tube amp that will hopefully drive my Tungsten. (not going to post about it because I feel like everyone will chime in and say this or that, I just want to experience it and be the judge)
While I appreciate a forum where I am able to throw out my now comparatively uneducated thoughts, I find that a strong ethos here is to avoid people believing in snake oil and the wording I see here and in video’s makes me believe that.
Everything I do is first hand, and having the ability or rather dedication to A/B thing’s or simply be analytical in some way is freaking incredible, I can admit that sometimes I’m just over it and want to zone out to some music. But I seriously look forward to finding guidelines on how and what to experience while focusing on certain thing’s in my collection. Confirmation Bias has to be very difficult to avoid.
I can say though that my recent “high end” purchase was spurred by my funds finally coming in line with my “needs” and availability of products. But moreover it has to do with hearing my friends LCD-X and being ruined. They aren’t the headphones I would purchase because there is some weird disconnect…. um… in the staging or presentation or treble vs everything else. I spent 5 minutes on it so I don’t know what the oddness was, but I know for a fact that it has ruined me.
I absolutely love what you guy’s are doing here, tackling a subject that is objective and not at the same time and pondering certain things while throwing out others. /end ramble
Deciding on equipment or recommending it based only on measurements is a lot like reading about sex. On some of the other audio sites there seem to be a lot of people reading rather than doing.
Doing listening, of course, what did you think I meant?
Minimum phase says you can though. That’s always what this argument seems to return to. I am also skeptical though. I suppose it’s really a question of degrees of similarity.
Sorry to hear of your injury, and I hope you’re feelin better soon. Fwiw, the R70x and 6xx are both headphones I’ve seriously contemplated, and heard many good things about. I have reservations about most headphones though, including these.
At some point though, you have to bite the bullet and just dive in. I was pretty close on a couple models during the July 4th sales. Just couldn’t quite make up my mind which direction to go before the sales ended. So I’m taking a more considered look at the units that seem to fit best with my needs. What this has to do with measurement myths, I dunno. But it’s Friday night. So there ya go!
A couple other threads here that you might (or might not) find relevant to your musings about cost and EQ-ability.
I wanted to follow up on my original comment. I am here to learn and was more or less trying to point out the extreme’s where something other than EQ has to make the difference. But like someone said, this is making a point as part of an equation. You need to take everything into consideration and this video focuses on one specific idea. I am actually going to see if there are guides to EQ and such because I was never good at it. Back in the winamp days and such I would mess around with EQ and just dig myself a hole to where I ended up somewhere completely wonky with no path back and something that sounded crazy. I feel like I can finally learn something about music science instead of purely subjective and recommendation based.
The methods I use for EQ aren’t very straight forward. But they are rooted in the Harman research. Specifically, in the notion that a neutral response should be close to the in-ear response of neutral speakers in a semi-reflective room.
Since we don’t have many actual measurements of this for most in-ear measurement rigs (including the new HBK 5128), I have to make a guess at what that looks and sounds like. There is a fair amount of anecdotal info to work from though, including the frequency responses of headphones that are considered to be fairly neutral in their sound, and/or tuned close to the Harman target. I use other tools as well, like HBK’s stock 1/3-octave 5128 DF with a slope as a rough guide.
I then compute an average of the headphones that I think are closest to the neutral ballpark where I want to be. And use that as my target, and try to compute the difference between that and my headphone’s response. Add a little smoothing, so there are no unpleasant high Q peaks in the final EQ curve. And then make minor tweaks from there.
There are many different approaches to EQ. But using averages based on a number of good neutralish headphones has really worked the best for me. So that’s what I recommend. YMMV of course. And there is still quite a bit of guesswork involved even with approaches like this.
To use EQ well, you also need to be cognizant of your headphone’s technical and physical limits. If you are using an open dynamic driver headphone, like the HD6XX for example, then you need to be aware that there are practical limits on how much you can increase the sub-bass frequencies before audible distortion will result.
Open planar magnetic headphones are generally better extended in the bass, and they also tend to have lower distortion in the bass. So they can handle volume increases in the sub-bass frequencies a little better. And go a bit higher in that range than open dynamics, with less audible distortion.
Well, it’s more so the inverse. The idea that in min phases systems there would be a relevant component outside of FR is the theory. The burden of proof should be on the side of anyone claiming that there is some perceptually relevant thing that’s not being captured by FR. That’s not to say there isn’t such a thing, or to discount perceptually relevant factors like openness or differences in acoustic impedance and so on, which folks like Axel Grell are looking into, just that FR at the eardrum is far more likely to explain the subjective report being used as evidence for such a thing.
I’ll just reiterate… a claim of “I perceive X, and the FR graph doesn’t show X” doesn’t mean FR is not responsible for the perception of X. It’s just that the graph doesn’t display the in-situ FR, and its analysis is largely incomplete.
I watched the video on EQing and found it very useful, thing’s have changed a lot in the past 20 years. I’m going to start EQing at my PC and see where it goes.
One thing I’ve always wondered if a FR will show, and I never understood about dsp… What about two sounds at once that come out of the same driver? Every time I run a microphone for speaker dsp, it’s just a sweep isn’t it? Also it never follows up with changes it makes? What if the adjustment to a certain frequency isn’t linear with the change. In my uneducated mind the way a speaker produces one sound immediately into another sound or two various combinations at once has to be different from driver to driver. Maybe this is already accounted for in measurements or maybe it’s just not a thing.
This way of the hobby is completely opposite to how my brain understands these thing’s, so I’m trying to learn more and expand my hobby. I don’t think it’s a left or right thing but a combination of everything that everyone experienced has to say on the subject. That’s one thing I love about the hobby is no two people are the same and no two combinations of equipment are the same. The beauty of it is trying to communicate what my ear holes are experiencing to someone else
A common misconception of measurements is that a sweep doesn’t represent the complexity of music’s spectral content, and as far as the stimulus is concerned that is true, but this actually amounts to the same thing. You can measure a headphone with pink noise, or even music so long as it’s sufficiently full spectrum and it’ll show the same measured behavior you get with a sweep. We’re talking about SPL at the eardrum with each of these.
There are some exceptions, like with volume dependent dynamic equalization in certain active products, where the behavior changes with the crest factor of the stimulus. In these situations it actually makes more sense to measure with music or a music-like stimulus to get a better representation of its behavior when being used.
I guess the question is… why don’t we use music all the time? We certainly could, but a sweep is going to be faster/cleaner with less noise. It’s just a better and easier way to do it.
