Again this is where we have to reference how headphones are minimum phase, and playback in minimum phases systems is not the same as walking into a specific room. You may experience the world like that, but headphone playback systems don’t function in a way where that’s a relevant factor.
Non-FR related factors to the experience of using headphones includes things like openness, occlusion, clamp pressure and so on… those are perceptually relevant factors, but that’s not impacting what’s heard in the recording, FR is.
This is something I’m having a hard time understanding. Your earlier post in response to @SSN757 makes perfect sense to me.
And what I think I hear when a headphone is fully capable of high precision in movement of the driver as in an electrostatic and some top quality planars and dynamics is a reasonably accurate reproduction of the sound I hear in real life. Yes it is done within the context of a minimum phase system.
But the degenerate case is the less agile driver. This has obscured the precise original relationship. And I further grant that the inability to reproduce the parts of the sound that represent the echo reflections must occur at the frequencies of the echos. And I’m excluding time-sensistive information that one might measure if one (superconducting!) left pair to the headphone was 1 meter and the other right pair was 10k meters long (which would of course change the timing of echo relative to the recording, or if not superconducting would absolutely change impedence and FR).
What I’m not getting here is that it would not be possible to EQ the less agile driver to compensate and restore the proper sound. It’s lost information. How does that equate to FR?
Does not the compliance of a driver or the Vas (I assume the pressure of the diaphram coupled through air to the ear and head would be similar to Vas) mean anything apart from FR?
Perhaps part of the confusion is that some seem to have an impressoin that FR can always be corrected with EQ.
‘Less Agile Driver’ is not really a thing we need to consider for anything outside of frequency response. There may be some situations where a transducer cannot play back certain frequencies without distorting. That would be measurable and immediately audible. But in the vast majority of competent devices, ranging from approximately 20-20khz, any conventional driver can do the job sufficiently without this deficiency. You don’t need an electrostatic driver to do that. Yes, the membrane is lighter and thinner, yes it could potentially ‘move faster’, and you’d see that behavior in the measured response with excess amplitude above 10 and even 20hz (if indeed it’s moving faster). But any contribution we’d have a reason to care about would still be in that same 20-20khz range - the same range a ‘lesser’ conventional driver can reproduce adequately.
No, the reason you perceive these transducers as ‘more agile’ or ‘faster’ or all of those sorts of subjective interpretations has to do with frequency response relationships that those headphones typically exhibit. And again, we know this precisely because we can EQ in these same characteristics from one headphone to another, once in-situ FR is identified. Ever notice how most electrostatic headphones don’t have conventional headphone tunings? If they did, they’d sound like conventional headphones!
Could you EQ a conventional headphone to sound like it has a more ‘agile driver’? 100%
Once again though, the experience would still be different, since electrostatics typically have a very very open and low acoustic impedance desiigns, which will impact the psychoacoustics. It sounds like the images in your music are coming from thin air, because there’s basically zero sense of occlusion to those designs.
I recall graphs showing more accurate square wave reproduction from electrostatic drivers. I know we don’t listen much to square waves so it may not prove much. So is the entire concept of compliance or stiffness of a driver only relevant for loudspeakers and enclosures?
I still have great skepticism about making silk purses from a sows ear.
Ok, this is really weird. Tonight my audiophile buddy came over to hear my Atrium that I got on Sunday. He’s the reason that I ordered Tungsten and Atrium, I was previously only midfi and his LCD-x made everything I own sound bland. So I had to fix that. That’s not the odd part, rather he listened to my Atrium tonight on two different chains and was shaking his head. His revelation was he had never heard anything go from the best he’s ever heard to unusable sometimes on the same track. I was baffled and tried to play it cool but he said it was something to do with the treble. He claimed that when a guitar and a symbol played at the same time he would hear “distortion”. We talked about it for a little and I tried to explain what I know about audio psychology and maybe he’s sensitive to certain frequencies but we were stumped. Maybe his hearing is better than mine, we covered everything. He isn’t into audio as a thought experiment as much as I am, rather he just knows what he likes. He prefers studio level stuff I guess.
Now the odd part; After he left I put them back on and the treble was excruciating and standing out more than anything else. So I changed to my Elex…. still there. Now I’m on my 6xx and ALL I can hear is hat’s and symbols, EVERYTHING else is in the background. Fleetwood mac, Xenia, Bliss it doesn’t matter what it is EVERYTHING is a treble factory. Hold on I’m going to change headphones again. Yep, Audio Technica refine….. treble nothing but treble. WTF is going on?
*edit: ok F this, just yanked my X3 out, darkest headphone I own and I only hear treble.
**I’m leaning into it full time and listening to Eprom
So… my understanding is that stuff was just worse ways of looking at FR, but that’s something Goldensound may be able to comment on further. If you’re still skeptical, start using tools like Owliophile to see where various features exist for you on your head with a given pair of headphones. Then triangulate that with what you see on the graph. Some features will trend similarly, but others won’t. This is the first step to realizing what sound can be with EQ.
No idea. But I’d probably start by setting any EQ adjustments or tone controls back to a flat response. Maybe you were turning the bass down or boosting the treble up for one of your other headphones, and left it that way by mistake.
Another thing you can do is try listening to the headphones on a different setup. If it sounds normal on a different player or amp, then maybe you can sleuth out where the problem might be in your other setup, through a process of elimination. I have done this many times with my gear over the years.
Without knowing more of the details on your setup, that’s about all I can suggest. I don’t have much experience with higher end audiophile gear though.
Well, I’m not an EQer. I’m a skeptic but understand that it has value. I browsed some earlier drama about it but didn’t pay attention to it, will read it tomorrow when I haven’t been drinking. So I know it’s nothing to do with EQ unless some extraneous source is messing with BOTH of my computers……… it’s purely pshyco-acoustic, if that’s a term.
Main system is PC → Centaraus → A70pro → several headphones. Second system is a different PC → SU-9 → Dragon Inspire IHA-1 → Atrium and 6xx. I didn’t try the second system, but somehow I only hear treble with a several dB reduction in everything else.
If both you and your buddy heard it, then it’s probably not psycho-acoustic.
When yer sober… I’d suggest trying the other system. Or try swapping out some components in your main system, if you can do that without damaging things! And see if it makes any difference. I think I’d probably start with the tube amp, because that is one of the more complicated pieces of gear in your setup, where some potential nonlinearities could exist.
Chinese components have been known to fail though, and you have at least 3 in your setups, the Centaurus, A70pro, and SU-9.
I am not that well-versed in higher end gear though. So take anything I say on this with a grain of salt.
No problem man, I’m not well versed in high end equipment either. I just have equipment and an Atrium. I maintain that it’s psycho-acoustic though because all of this is the same as it was the last couple of days.
I did change thing’s up on occasion but it has been the same for at least a day or two. I really wonder what it is. In fact I’m going to go back and forth with the other system now.
*I just spent 30 seconds on the other setup, wasn’t as pronounced but treble was far greater than I’m used to. I’m to tired to A/B test but I know it’s a mental thing, not an equipment thing
Seriously I listen to music, and notice sound. My setup is good enough that it doesn’t get in the way of music. Recordings are much more variable than my headphones and when needed I EQ to correct that.
While I have interest in the science I have little need or incentive to play with tweaking instead of enjoying a performance.
Sure, but if you’re genuinely interested in why some of us are saying the things we are about FR, that’s how you’d start to test it. Overwhelmingly I find that when people say things like “you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse!”, they’ve never actually bothered to try and understand why there are those of us who say that actually… you can. This puts a limitation on the discussion, as it becomes the people who erroneously claim it to be impossible against those of us who have actually done it. How are you supposed to show someone that it is in fact possible if they’re unwilling to try.
Funny you mention that because the Bravura don’t sound like that, but I think that’s specifically because they have a higher acoustic impedance than most estats. In my review I point out that the seal is so strong taking them off feels like taking off a racing helmet. There seems to be a goldilocks zone for how open you want your open back to be.
The ability to reproduce a square wave is just a way of showing the ability to reproduce high frequency sine waves. So an electrostatic having sharp corners playing a square wave just means it can reproduce very high frequencies, possibly beyond our hearing range.
And when you think about it, having a lighter/more responsive/faster driver just means, given the same energy input, it can reproduce higher frequencies.
You should. While it is possible in theory, in practice it is very difficult. The Headphones.com crew needed to get their HRTF measured in a lab and use custom designed in-ear microphones to really do it right.
Your ears were tired. You probably just needed to give them a rest while reassuring yourself (your brain) that they are the same headphones that gave you pleasure just a few hours before.
This is actually a common phenomenon and a great example of the types of things I’d like to cover in this topic. Critical listening is taxing for your brain. Like a muscle, it gets tired. Switching between headphones is especially so. I got this way at CanJam. Everything sounded like shit by the end of the second day, specifically in the treble. Specifically with everything sounding sibilant.
Also the Atrium are what you might call a colored tuning. As a side effect of this they can bring out certain issues with certain recordings. They might purposefully emphasize a FR region that the recording also emphasizes and then it’s too much. For me, the Atrium really shined with flat, typically older recordings.
Agreed. I just don’t buy that a cheaply made headphone with sub optimal QA can be EQ’ed to sound like a flagship headphone.
I keep noticing that more often than not, applying EQ seems to have an adverse impact on the sound. It’s difficult to explain, but time domain and attack/decay seem to get altered. Most of the time, would rather listen to the headphone’s deviation than listening to the results of trying to correct the “measured results”. The only exception to this for me so far has been EQ settings I found for the MDR-Z1R.
