Perceptual Science for Audiophiles

Audio Science
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Our perception of sound vs the objective reality of it has been a part of various discussions throughout this forum. It’s a big subject to dedicate only one topic to, but I thought this would be a good start. Psychoacoustics, the science of preference, the effect of your current brain state when listening to music, etc. it’s all welcome here.

I recently ran across this YT video and thought it would be a good opener:

The Audiophile Lie: Why You’ll Never Be Satisfied

Opinionated? Yes. But if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t have any issues with anything he says. IE sounds right to me.

Well one issue. I think if you buy audio equipment that is visually appealing, it is not necessarily for status. Because I honestly don’t care what others think about how my equipment looks. I just really like visually appealing objects in my everyday life, especially my hobbies. I will admit that I care what others think about how my equipment sounds, though. That might be interesting to discuss if anyone has links on how peer acceptance might unconsciously influence our preferences in audio equipment.

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Guess I’m not an audiophile! After trying hundreds of headphones and buying about 10 pairs, I’ve stopped purchasing.

Once I figured out how to manually EQ to fit my HRTF and preference, now basically any decent pair of headphones sound great to me, and some are downright amazing. After knowing how to do that, there are zero pairs of non-eqed headphones I’ve tried which surpasses what I’ve got at home, no matter the price.

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MMMMMmmmmm…….. this is just a take on consumerism in it’s entirety. While introducing the concept here.

This video applies to my entire life, I’m 44 unmarried no wife kids child support or alimony and all I have is work and my hobbies. One of them is headphone related. Did he correctly explain my cycle? Mostly yes. But he leaves out the point that this is what I enjoy doing. I spent 6 years tapping on hi-fi’s door just because I wanted to experience all the thing’s. I watched reviews and wondered…… what are they talking about? So I opened my wallet to find out. I have learned who I agree with earwise and who I agree with philosophy wise. My ear’s are unique but I can respect the philosophies I don’t even agree with. I’m not a graph or EQ guy, but I respect @Resolve ‘s grind to standardize the hobby. I don’t understand it but I thoroughly enjoy trying to get it.

Even with a perfect formula…. we are all different and this hobby isn’t just about the sound characteristics. I have dedicated to this point the ability to recommend hardware at the budget and mid-fi crowd.

I like messing with the sound. (just restarted the video). Side grade has been my way so far, and some of it overlap’s. But the nuance of repairability, fit, use case, budget, chain etc etc is literally as unique as the person looking for a solution. Not to mention some not most are looking for their one and done rather than a hobby.

“almost” and “enough” are the word’s for the industry? I look at it as a hobby. A passion.

I fully understand that some people NEED to hear this, but myself, I do not so I’m not going to finish the video. I get what he is getting at, but I ain’t got shiz else to do.

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Howdy AudioTool. The title of this topic seems a bit oxymoronic to me, because most audiophiles don’t seem that interested in science. What they are mostly interested in is their own perceptions or impressions, irrespective of, or with little or no regard to the science. So maybe that’s where this conversation needs to begin.

Perhaps some audophiles would be interested in MDAQS though. I think Sound Guys and Head Acoustics have some articles on this.

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I’m so glad to meet you here :folded_hands:

So can I send you my collection of headphones:

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This are 6 of them, could you please EQ them to following soundsignatures:

1, Meze Elite

2, Focal Utopia 2022

3, Sennheiser HD800s

4, ZMF Atrium

5, Fostex TH919

6, HiFiman Susvara OG

I would appreciate it very much.

If you finish this project, I will send you a whole Box of German Beer and some fresh Black Forrest Cake, just to say thank you :smiling_face:

:sos_button:——————————SARCASM——————————:sos_button:

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Sorry, but I couldn’t resist addressing this topic.

As someone who’s been involved in this hobby for quite some time and has relatively good contacts in the audio industry, having even worked on mixing consoles, I’ve been hearing/reading here on headphones.com YouTube Cannel and Forum for a while now that headphone EQ is the ultimate tool and that you can transform almost any reasonably priced pair of headphones into high-end sounding devices.

Well, I don’t just doubt that; due to hardware limitations, it’s simply not technically possible.

It’s true that you don’t have to spend a fortune to get appealing sound characteristics, but turning water into wine?

I highly doubt that, especially since we have all the necessary equipment in the studio.

Yet, no professional sound engineer here has managed to transform inexpensive headphones into top-of-the-line devices.

For example, based on comments in this forum, we once tried to get the sound of an HD600 at least close to that of an HD800s, but unfortunately it didn’t work because the driver simply reacts too slowly and therefore lacks the “crisp” reproduction capability.

Likewise, the soundstage of the HD800s can never be achieved, simply because the ear cup is constructed completely differently; you can EQ until your fingers are sore, it’s simply impossible.

Similar to the Focal Clear and Utopia, the Clear comes not even close to the technical detail representation of the Utopia because of the different driver materials.

There is a good reason for some different models on the Market.

:person_shrugging:t2:

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While I share the basic sentiment and have hit back repeatedly myself against their thesis on this, my angle is more “you haven’t proven it, you’re asserting it with way too much confidence given the low quality of your evidence”. But now specifically to your point about fingers going sore, I will say I think there might be a big difference between manual EQ and deriving an arbitrarily fine-grained compensation curve by non-manual methods, like what they did recently with measuring their DFHRTFs and applying the result through convolution.

IF you’re gonna be using a super-fine-grained curve, I can accept that you might get an HD800 imitation in an HD600 that fools a lot of people in a few minutes of comparing, listening to 2-3 songs, even while it’s not achievable with purely manual EQ, based on reading a response/target in the usual way, at resolutions where the whole curve fits on screen as a single image.

But I still don’t believe you can make the HD600 into an SR-L700, even with the same fine-grained EQ, such that it passes repeated A/B tests through the most critical of critical-listening sessions. I would really have to see that done experimentally, with controls, double-blind etc. (Ideally for attacking the “driver story” issue one could even consider an experiment where the two drivers to be compared are mounted in the exact same housing design, so that the experiment really drills to the core of the issue and removes all major confounders.) Meanwhile there are just too many voices in favor of “FR doesn’t come all that close to capturing everything”, both among audiophiles who have listened to everything in every price range, and from people with decades of experience building actual headphones (see the recent EP09 of the Grell Sound Lab series on YouTube).

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Well we’ve demonstrated it to ourselves (and to one another recently) by matching in-situ FRs. We just recently did this for the four of us with in-ear mics and it’s quite clear that you can in fact turn an HD 600 into an HD 800 S for example when the in-situ FR’s are identical. And yeah, it gains all the subjective ‘technicalities’ one might associate with the other headphone if done properly. What it doesn’t get is whatever the psychoacoustic contribution is from the sense of openness or the mechanical change to clamp force - and that stuff does matter fort the overall perceptual experience. But for anything sound related, it seems to be the same. But… that isn’t ‘proving it’ to the masses, because for that you’d need a lot more test subjects. We’d love to do a study like that but we’d need some outside funding for that.

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I could agree with that. Note that I too enjoy the cycle. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that as long as you understand the science of how you perceive upgrades. Be as informed on this as you would be on the upgrade itself and I think you will get a lot more out of this hobby.

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That’s great! Just remember that your brain will be biased to perceive EQ changes much like it does hardware upgrades. Or are they sidegrades?

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Excellent!

All four of you should get together, build a “universal headphone,” include the corresponding software, and thus offer every possible sonic and technical option to cover all tastes.

As a pleasant side effect, you’ll all become millionaires.

I’m looking forward to it………. really I would buy one!

I simply can’t understand why highly decorated engineers haven’t come up with this idea yet.

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But don’t forget to bring your respective sponsors and/or employers on board, because they’ll be out of a job since nobody will need this many headphones anymore.

Seriously, the experiment with the HD600, the HD800s, and the two Focal headphones was conducted by professionals here in Germany.

Both sonically and in terms of measurements, it was a failed experiment, because the drivers of the respective cheaper models were simply too sluggish in case of the HD600 and to instabile in case of the Clear, to reproduce the same clarity and speed.

That’s not fine-tuning; that’s physics.

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Did they use in-ear mics?

Also… given that you’ve brought up German engineers, that’s precisely who helped us do this.

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I’d love to read about that! I’d also love to get this topic back on subject please. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

I watched The Noise Floor episode on this and the potential is pretty exciting! Within the context of this topic though, we might want to temper our excitement a bit. Something to consider when a more formal article is written might be what methods were used to minimize expectation bias, for example.

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Yeah we’re working on some additional content on this as we speak. To briefly answer your question, you are 100% right that EQ has potential biasing effects to do with preference in particular. However when matching two headphones in situ I imagine that’d be less of a factor. If anything it would be along the lines of ideological commitments being the biasing factor - as in those of us committed to the in-situ FR concept may be more predisposed to finding them to sound identical. But beyond that, you can’t elimite the other acoustic and mechanical biasing factors like openness and sense of occlusion since they will be obvious.

I want to be clear that while for me the test was blind - in the sense that I wasn’t the one switching the profiles and I didn’t know which was which - that wasn’t the intended goal of the exercise. It was really to see if the subjective effects of the other headphone could be created, and for that we all reported the same thing, namely that for the most part they were, and what was left over was the other non-FR factors mentioned earlier.

As it relates to this topic, it’s also something DMS had brought up a while ago - one of my favorite videos he ever did:

EDIT: One other interesting thing that arose from the lab testing we just did that I’m now thinking about as it relates to this topic, technician doing the data capture for us was a PhD student working on a project that looked at how augmenting a person’s HRTF could positively impact intelligibility. The key variable there was that the person had to be trained on the new HRTF, and once done this could be used to increase intelligibility even in noisier environments. You can imagine the applications for things like hearing aids but also imagine you can create this HRTF augmentation and training in a virtual space. Kinda cool.

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I remember this one vaguely. Good to re-watch it. I think he had another where he talked about giving some of your older headphones a listen once in a while. I do try to follow this practice. It is the reason I have a moderate headphone collection instead of just 2 or 3 headphones.

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Regarding using EQ to make one headphone sound like another, there are limits, especially in the lower bass registers. Not many headphones can handle the lowest bass notes from a cathedral organ. When I tried to EQ a HD 600 when playing Saint Saans Symphony #3 (Organ Symphony), Fuggettaboutit! The driver becomes distressed.

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Hehe, of course you cannot use EQ create FR if the headphones cannot playback those frequencies without distortions. If you’re trying to have a real conversation, then perhaps start with genuine questions instead of creating strawman arguments coated in sarcasm.

Do go ahead and read some of the links Resolve posted, and learn a thing or two about how to precisely EQ on your own head and per channel. Try the method on Owliophile, learn how to decipher FR more accurately with the Harman Learn to listen app. If you don’t like the results, who cares, it cost you no money. If you’re unable to recreate the results, fine, go buy headphones and amps and be happy!

If you’re dead set on this not being possible on principal, that’s too bad. I am happy with the results and systematically took notes of every single set of headphones I’ve heard at Canjam and in Tokyo over the last few years. I could literally afford any headphone system out there, a few thousand dollars doesn’t even compare to other hobbies like gaming pc, cars, travel. This isn’t simply a case of affordability, but years long quest on sound quality.

Anyway, good luck to you and your own quest on your hobbies. In the grand scheme of things, headphone sound quality is an extremely minor improvement in life quality. I find some of the serious and derogatory tones of the discussions on audio forums quite hilarious.

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It depends on the delta between the two headphones in the bass. I actually believe the reason it doesn’t sound the same in the bass is still down to in situ FR most of the time. For example, we discovered one of the reasons Cameron and I don’t hear the HD 600 the same is because it seems we’re not getting the same bass response, and this was something we could verify with in-ear mics. So a 10dB delta between two headphones on a graph might actually be a 15dB delta in practice, depending on the person’s head/ears.

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To @Lothar_Wolf:

Thanks for pegging the irony meter. Guy who’s lecturing people to “learn a thing or two” doesn’t bother to learn what Lothar’s collection looks like. Seriously, the last thing Lothar needs is more headphones and amps. :slight_smile:

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I don’t think Luke was being serious haha. The thing is, he’s quite right in saying this, at a certain point people are just looking for novel experiences and genuinely don’t want to learn more about why the experience is the way it is. I’m not saying that’s what’s going on here but it’s a common trajectory for discourse on the subject - you inevitably end up finding that to be the underlying distance between two positions. And that’s also totally fine, it just means you end up talking cross purposes.

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So just post the 4 EQ settings that turn the HD 600 into an HD 800 S for each of you. There are only 2 (ok, 3) possibilities:
(1) The curves are substantially similar, suggesting that the difference between the phones swamps the difference between the people, or
(2) The curves are completely different, suggesting the opposite, or
(3) Somewhere in-between, suggesting maybe one or more of you is an outlier, and more samples are needed.

Personally, I’m hoping for case (1), as I’d like to start experimenting on getting HD 800 S sound on the cheap.

Thanks.

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