Suggest audio-related topics for us to cover on our podcast, The Noise Floor!

A few more for you -

EQ Showdown
You each take the same make/model headphone and EQ it as if it were going to be your own that you’d actually use for music. What curve do you come up with and how did you get there? Next, you swap EQ curves and critique each others’ / how you, with your HRTF hear the others’ curves. Do this for several headphones.

As a challenge, and maybe after doing this several times, see if you can EQ a headphone for one of the other people. Or, for a fun bonus round, pass your desired track through all the EQs, along with oratory1990s and AutoEQs, save the WAV files and then each of you try to pick out, blindly, which track is which EQ profile. [This isn’t just a fun game to play, it’s something that will let us all understand the variation in our combined HRTF and preference and showcase ways of doing EQ. For whatever headphones you settle in on, listeners of the show will have several profiles to try out or mix and match. We’ll also learn how your desired FR lines up with or doesn’t with ours.]

EQ Challenge
A lot came up in that a recent thread that can be handled well in the group format. One idea is just how well can you make headphone/IEM A sound like B? Please don’t do the “can I make a $10 headphone/IEM sound like a $1000” flavor of this. Maybe use this as a chance to spend some time with the Fio FT1 Pro. As above, each try to do this and evaluate the others’ efforts on your head and ears. What aspects worked? What ones didn’t? Did what “B” was “known for” (soundstage, resolution, slam, je ne sais quoi, actually come across?

Time and [a word]
OK, this should be a stand-alone, but I think the discussion format of the podcast would really help as well – discussion both amongst each other and discussion with the audience. Explain the relationship between FR and time-domain analyses and give examples of going back and forth. Show that the word above is “frequency” (OK, yes, I’m a prog-rock guy). One of you can play devil’s advocate here so you can get into when they’re not synonymous (but how that’s not something we hit).

What can’t we hear?
Live, blind ABX testing of music samples with and without various issues. OK, live ABX testing sounds like watching paint dry, but one of you could mute the stream and spend a few minutes on one issue (e.g., distortion) doing a half dozen trials. The others could have done more trials of that one ahead of time and you can pool your results. Discuss what you heard and how easy it was to hear. Move beyond distortion though. Add different small-magnitude EQ shifts to left vs. right channel to simulate poor driver matching, test peaks vs dips in FR across the spectrum, look at group delay vs. FR. Sure, most things have been done in research papers, but a) those often aren’t read, b) they’re less often understood, and c) “but that’s in a lab not the real world” is a common reaction.

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