It was bound to happen, given Listener and I have such dramatically different ears and HRTFs. I believe we can also substitute Cameron’s ears in as well to see how he’d get on with these, though I’m not sure if his ear canal size is more similar to mine or Grif’s.
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There needs to be a brand that caters exclusively to long canal fellas 
the market is ripe and ready
Lengthy or girthy canals, we conjecture. We don’t actually know yet. The 5128 head and features take a dataset from both men and women, potentially making features smaller than those of the average male. But it could be my length mode resonance around 6.1khz is more typical of audiophiles, given 99.9% of them are male, and many with inflated domes, whereas Grif’s are more typical of the average population including male/female.
Obviously his upper treble preferences / tolerances are… unique, but I do imagine for IEM HpTFs, particularly length modes, he’s getting a more common behavior in situ.
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I fear my anatomy to be somewhat of an outlier in the other direction… my resonance with an ideal fit tends to be more around 9k or so, and as such I find myself having to significantly oversize my tips to get a more representative of average sound signature. I also have extreme canal bends so deep fitting is essentially impossible, but that’s neither here nor there…
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Yeah ear canals are wild. When we went and got our MRIs, one of our friends who came with us apparently had a very distinct bend to his canal - or at least so we were told, we didn’t sit around comparing ear canals haha.
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Thanks for your review.
Hmm, the Lumen should have been my end game iem. Now I am not so sure about it. Not really that the Lumen/Lux is not a good fit for your ears (soundwise and anatomically) but it made me realise again that one will not get its end game iem without doing a listening test and for the Lumen/Lux this is unfortunately quite difficult to do here in Europe.
Blind buy in kilo buck range?
A more general question, maybe more to Josh than you guys, with this ear canal variations in mind, how can a developer tune an iem anyway?
It’s one of the reasons IEMs are a problem. Headphones have variability problems too, but they are a little bit more observable. And, at the very least there’s some specific pinna interaction available in measurements, and length mode resonances aren’t a problem.
IMO you have two choices as an IEM designer:
- Err on the side of caution for potential problem areas for people even if you don’t personally have them
- Recognize that you can’t please everyone and just commit to what you like in a way you think will work for most people.
Ideally you do what @veebee did here and just have different versions built on a theme. I’d personally love for something in between, but as a design strategy, I think it’s totally reasonable.
Now, as a consumer, if you have no way of knowing how you’re going to hear something and you have to blind buy, there is actually something you can do. If you already have a set of IEMs that you use, ideally something that measures reasonably. Do manual tone gen with a tool like Owliophile to identify the dominant length mode resonance for you with that product, it’ll likely be anywhere from 6khz to 9khz.
There’s no guarantee you’ll hear it at all, and it can be in a different spot depending on how the IEM fits in the ear, but it’s at least something you can try. If you do hear that resonance closer to 8 or 9khz there’s a good chance Lumen will work for you. If you hear it at 6khz, then that may be an issue. Again this is a very crude and unpredictable test, but it’s at least a starting point to better understand your anatomy.
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Thanks for your extensive answer.
I use UM Mest MKII (quite bassy), yanyin moonlight (more harman like) and Sennheiser IE 600 (wojld say also harman like?).
I already have measured my ear canal resonance, as I have followed Oluvs patreon channel and owned the ear fun free pro 2 TWS with Oluvs tuning which had different shapes for the different resonance frequencies.
He is an early advocate for ear canal resonance and their implication on tuning an iem or choisung the right iem for your specific resonance. I loved this tuning, unfortunatley as with all my cheap chinese TWS the battery died after a year or so, as I am using these not often enough.
So my resonance is in the range of 6 to 6.5 kHz when I remember correctly, maybe I should redo these test, but with my tinitus listening to sinus waves is not really fun.
I never fully understood exactly how I should take my resonance into account of a specific frequency measurement of an iem. So Lumen seems not a match more my resonance frequency because the Lumen has not a dip in this range?
If I am willing to EQ the Lumen anyway (bass shelf and probably treble shelf) I could also reduce the 6-7kHz region right? or is it not that easy?
Ideally you want to see if you can find that resonance with a similar shell design to the one you’re considering. I also think Oluv was right to identify canal resonances to get his product to sound good for people - he understood that this will vary from person to person, and it’s a meaningful problem with IEMs.
Where he went wrong is that he indexed the sound in his products to a free field sound source - his reference speakers. This doesn’t work in a directionless sound field condition like headphones and IEMs. To be clear, it may be better than products just tuned at random, which is also a thing that happens. But we know this isn’t going to sound natural to people unless they can spoof their brains into interpreting sound localization in a locationless listening condition.
With regards to the Lumen, if you’re going to EQ anyway, you could do that for the 6-7khz band, but keep in mind the response is also shifting slightly for the rest of it too. But yeah, I’m of the opinion that everyone should be EQing their IEMs, precisely because this length mode resonance is going to be a problem for most people on many IEMs.
If you tested this with a TWS IEM, its likely that your length mode with an actual passive IEM would be higher considering they’re typically designed for deeper insert than TWS IEMs. Just a heads up. My length mode with AirPods Pro 2, for example, is closer to 6.5-7 kHz, whereas with most passive IEMs its closer to 7.5-8 kHz.
Its more about understanding what the effective canal length will do to the measurement than the IEM having to have a dip at the spot where you have a resonance. You can place an IEM specifically to have a more relaxed SPL in this range by placing it deeper, but if your canal is longer the measurement itself is going to be very wrong for you.
If you look at this measurement again, the longer canal’d listeners will have their SPL in the 5-6 kHz range at the top of the shaded area, the SPL in the 7-9 kHz range in the bottom of this area, and the SPL in the 10-12 kHz range in the top of this area. Whereas someone with shorter canals will have SPL in the 5-6 kHz range in the bottom of the area, 7-9 kHz range in the top of the area, and the 10-12 kHz range in the bottom of the area.
Highly recommend grabbing whatever passive IEMs you have around and seeing where you get the most defined/audible peaks in the 6-9 kHz region, because this will indicate if you have a shorter canal (8-9 kHz), longer canal (5-6 kHz) or a more average one (7-8 kHz).
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