No offense, but no. And the only reason is because I’d have to start over on my EQ profile for them. Until now I thought they were pretty much 10/10 already.
It has been in the back of my mind to get around to trying them based on your recommendation, but it hasn’t gotten to the top of my list yet.
That sounds interesting but I have my doubts as to how good AI can possibly be at this.
Well it’s starting with a non-personalized FR measurement from an unspecified rig. So I can make a pretty good guess that it won’t be very good. Not to mention in the demo he asks it for a music genre specific EQ preset. See https://forum.headphones.com/t/getting-used-to-it-the-benefits-of-owning-multiple-headphones for why that’s not necessarily a good approach. 
It’s actually tempting for me to buy one just to play with since I don’t have a desktop amp right now. But I think I’ll save my money and pass.
Nope. Changed my mind and have one on the way. While I don’t have a lot of confidence in the built-in presets and the AI EQ features, the rest of the feature set checks all of the boxes for my desktop/work source. And maybe I can somehow feed the EQ AI my own measurements and/or targets. That should be fun to play with!
@AudioTool What adjustments have you made on your Empys?
You guys have me motivated to step outside of my comfort zone and I so I adjusted the 140Hz band -2.5 dB with Q:0.8 to start with.
It seems to have cleared up some of the detail on the low end. Tom Sawyer kick drum is more defined … Red Brachetta improved bass articulation … Tool’s Reflection improved bass articulation and texture. Some tracks sound a bit brighter now. I will continue to listen for a week before I make additional adjustments. Tiny steps! LOL
I feel I’m at a bit of a disadvantage because I don’t have multiple headphones to listen to A/B. It would seem to me that a great way to cut your teeth on EQing is to try and match sound signatures between headphones.
I’m still not convinced what I am hearing isn’t psychoacoustic! 
I just started with the EQ preset that @listener created and tuned/refined/personalized from there. Owliophile.com can be useful for this.
Interesting live stream today. Can’t wait for you guys to condense that to a few nice articles and expand on the new knowledge and insights gained from knowing your HRTF.
What brand/model/thing is that you’re holding?
There is no brand / model, these are mics that I made based on a design from Blaine and a revision by Oratory1990.
Just posting this video here for anyone wanting to understand why we advocate so strongly for the importance of frequency response, and how it describes ‘technicalities’ like detail, speed, soundstage and so on as well.
I’m also posting this in response to the people who said “you can’t turn a pig’s ear into a silk purse”. Many of those people are no longer here, but this is us doing exactly what they said we wouldn’t do.
Now… the HD 600 is far from bad, but we deliberately picked these headphones because the HD 600 is notorious for having no soundstage, and the HD 800 S is notorious for having a super wide and expansive soundstage. We were able to make these two sound identical with EQ, demonstrating that you can in fact EQ ‘technicalities’.
With that said…. as I noted in the video, there are other factors that are important to the experience, and we’ve always said this. The openness, the occlusion effect, the clamp pressure, the psychoacoustic system that interprets the wearing of any headphone includes all of these things - as they are necessarily connected to the experience of these devices.
So if someone gets more ‘soundstage’ as a function of a headphone’s openness, changes to the frequency response can only get you so far there.
I think one reason people are not around is that you have “sound identical” and “can only get you so far” in the same post.
Which one is it?
Techincal writing is hard in terms of phrasing things such that there is only one way to interpret the words, rather than “if you already understand it then you can find the intended meaning in the words”.
I’m a reasonably smart guy with an interest in the topic but I can’t find a way to reconcile “exact” and “only so far”.
Yeah it’s “how it sounds" vs “how it feels”. While the sound can be identical, the experience of using the headphone involves both of those things.
So it makes perfect sense for “sounds identical” and “can only get you so far” to be in the same post when you consider the fact that the experience of the headphone includes more than just the sound.
I found this from reading the RTNGS article regarding EQ:
" That said, EQs can’t fix everything. If a pair of headphones’ driver simply cannot produce deep sub-bass, boosting 20Hz by 15 dB won’t create miracles (and might just cause distortion). Similarly, EQs won’t change things like the group delay or perceived soundstage of a pair of headphones in a direct way (those also depend on driver and ear cup design), though a more balanced frequency response can subjectively make the soundstage appear better by reducing overwhelming frequencies. Think of EQ as fine-tuning the tonal aspects of sound, which is the biggest factor in the perceived sound quality of a pair of headphones. But if headphones have severe distortion or lack capability in a certain range, EQ can’t be of much use."
Whilst I think EQ can improve playback (provided it’s done right, which is not as easy as it sounds), I think there are limits. If the headphone drivers are angled, it seems pretty hard to get the driver whose mounted straight to mimic the angled driver, especially since no two ears are shaped the same.
With respect to the first part, that’s an excursion limit issue and it’s absolutely correct. We’ve noted this as well, there are limits to what you can improve when there’s an excursion limit.
The second part, to do with group delay and soundstage, RTINGS is simply wrong. And I cannot stress how unfounded their soundstage metric of PRTF is. This was based on some enormous assumptions that haven’t been shown to be true, and there’s no evidence to support it.
When it comes to angling the drivers, that impacts the FR. I highly doubt there’s any impact on the perception from angled drivers APART FROM the impact that has on FR. Like I would be genuinely surprised if there’s anything there that holds up in a blind test when in situ FR is controlled for.
When listening to music all we have is experience.
I’ll read things that seem to be related to experience but let the rest of it go.
I watched this entire video and while I do support the research, I feel that getting the HD600 to have the timbre and soundstage of the HD800S is not the same as them sounding identical. I read you saying all technicalities are contained in FR and now you may have proven it. But all I hear anyone discuss in the video is the HD600 getting the timbre and soundstage from the HD800S. Missing are things like dynamics/punch/slam and detail retrieval. Honestly, having soundstage completely described by FR is intuitive to me from what I know about HRTF. I want to know about the other technicalities.
I’d really like to see this test repeated between an HD600 and a Tungsten DS, for example. That would really put “driver story” to bed.
There is a problem here, I think. When most people read that it sounds identical but has a slightly different experience, they will interpret that as the timbre is identical but there are differences outside of timbre, IE technicalities, that are not the same.
Yeah, we deliberately picked soundstage because it was clear examples of “bad” on one headphone and “good” on the other. The difficulty with any ‘technicalities’ is that since they only ever describe the subjective experience and not real acoustic properties, it’s all down to the private language of the indivudal. Like even if people believe there’s a separate acoustic ‘technicalities’ layer, the only access anyone has ever had to that quality has to do with the character of their private experience.
So… yes, all of those other qualities to each headphone were emulated, but we didn’t focus on those other aspects because they would’ve been less obvious to all of us than the soundstage effect.
And genuinely that matters! If a person’s sense of a given technicality comes from the feeling of wearing that particular headphone, then that’s a characteristic EQ can’t change.
It’s much easier to get the experiences to be identical with two headphones that have the same openness and mechanical design for example - maybe some HiFiMAN headphones. You could turn a Kithara into an HE1000 rather easily for example.
It can be done! Though again, how much of the experience of ‘technicalities’ comes from the weight / clamp / occlusion of the wearing of each respective headphone? That may be different depending on the person too, since that depends on where attention goes when using the headphone, or how people attach meaning to it.
Hi Andrew,
Any idea when you’ll get your hands on the new Audeze LCD-5S?
it seems to have flown a bit under the radar for a major flagship release from a big manufacturer. No interview with Jude or anything on Headfi just a standard product page. Looking forward to your review whenever it comes out.
Found this explanation regarding the OAE1 Headphone from the designer:
" The OAE1 sounds unusual for headphones. Especially when the listener is trained to listen with traditional headphones. The reason is, that the phase response at the entrance to ear canal (EEC) is the one of a sound source not in a 90° (270°) angle to the head, but in an angle of 0° to 60° (300°) in front of the head. When sound waves are coming from these angles, the lower frequencies went directly to the EEC. As sound waves propagate increasingly in the form of a beam with increasing frequency, the sound waves in higher frequency ranges coming from the front do not go directly into the ear canal, but are reflected from the pinna into the ear canal. This leads to a delay, the length of which is twice the distance from tragus to antitragus and antihelix divided by the speed of sound. Depending on the size of the ear this delay is in the range between 0.06 ms to 0.12 ms. Our brain knows this delay very well as it occurs when listening to natural sound source in front of us. But we have learned that it doesn’t occur when listening with traditional headphones. So the OAE1 sounds more correct, but unfamiliar at first. I hope this helps.
Axel"
So, it appears that EQ alone cannot change the soundstage, which calls into question making the HD 600/650 sound like a HD 800S.
??? This has nothing to do with soundstage, this has to do with timbre - which is Axel’s conjecture here about front-biased sound fields, and how that may be more natural than the typical headphone listening condition.
As far as what that difference actually does…. it shows up in the frequency domain. So you can literally measure the effect of this difference, and in fact that’s how he designed it.
Having spoken to Axel at length many times on this topic, where his conjecture steps outside of the frequency domain, it has to with any perceptual qualities that are not related to sound propagation, which is exactly what I’m talking about here with the two distinct variables to the experience:
His argument is that #2 is highly relevant to the psychoacoustic experience for people, and I fully agree that it is. Where we disagree is that I’m rather confident his conjecture about front-biased sound fields is not how most people will interpret them in passive stereo headphones like the OAE-1, and most who have listened to it will also agree that it’s a bit of a struggle. And again, this is not to do with soundstage, but to do with timbre.
But we agree on the core importance of non-sound related factors to the experience that are perceptually influential, and we talked about this in the video at 8:15.
You’ll note me saying “it sounds like an HD 800 S, but it doesn’t feel like an HD 800 S”. This is what we’re talking about. With EQ, everything to do with the sound portion of it can be emulated. But you can’t make it feel identical.
