My rather tawdry (mis)adventures with EQ’ing a now departed LCD2C are documented pretty well here and here.
Lately I’ve been taking a more minimalist approach to EQ, preferring to first find a headphone (possibly modded or pad swapped) that comes close to my desired sound, and then making only minor tweaks. If I’m able to consistently run the same EQ settings without feeling the need to tweak, then that’s a good sign that the headphone is pretty good to begin with and that I’ve managed to dial it in just right.
Although @metal571 has talked about this for a long time, I’ve personally only recently come to appreciate the benefits of simple sine sweeps rather than getting lost in measurements. Measurements can still be a useful starting point, but a sine sweep takes better account of my own hearing and also keeps me from over-correcting and instead I just scan for major peaks or dips. For sine sweeps to be useful, I like a tone generator that allows me to seamlessly adjust the frequency while continuing to play the tone, like this one.
As for specific headphones and EQs, I’ve got an HE4XX that I’ve been running with these EQ settings for a month, so I feel pretty good about it:
n.b. there’s no pre-gain here because I’m applying that earlier in the effects chain.
I’m currently playing around with a Verum One, but I’m still in the pad swapping phase and not ready to commit to anything yet.
On the IEM front, I decided a while ago that all IEMs require at least some EQ because they respond so differently to everyone’s ears, so rather than focusing as much on tonality I focused more on technicality, and specifically treble extension and to a lesser extent sub-bass extension. From what I can tell, if an IEM is down 10dB or more above 10KHz, there’s just no EQ’ing that back in. So, I ended up with a KZ ZS10 Pro + Spinfit CP100 tips, which I find comfortable and which has the benefit of having precise measurements available courtesy of Crinacle. I’ve been running something like the below EQ settings for months, and if it weren’t for the fact that my ears don’t love having IEMs stuck in them, I might just use the ZS 10 Pro and be done with the whole headphone hobby. Literally everything in my music catalog sounds great with these thanks to nicely balanced mids, strong and well extended bass when called for, enough detail, and thanks to their treble extension and some BS2B crossfeed, a surprisingly spacious and deep soundstage. I love listening to these things in bed before I go to sleep.
