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

The HEADPHONE Community
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I would be interested in a discussion about the sustainability of the IEM industry. Most products are made in China, what do we know about the working conditions and environmental impacts of all these companies?

I would rather pay 100 dollars for a sustainable product rather than 50 dollars for one that’s made using slave labor. I’m sure there are many who would. But I have yet to find any information about these companies that would help make better decisions.

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Can we get Lachlan on the podcast? The Aussie guy, not the cable guy. #notmylachlan :)) I want to know what things he likes nowadays.

As for topic, I want to learn more about the history and development of the personal audio industry. Perhaps you can talk about significant milestones or important products in the past, or just your favourites. They can be speakers, headphones, IEMs, amplifiers, DACs, etc. Some of my favourite things of the yesteryears are the Stax SR-Omega, Shure SE846, Hidition Viento, Benchmark DAC1 with HPA2, Sony MDR-CD900, and Sennheiser HD 580 Jubilee. It’s also quite interesting to me that some IEMs are measured better on the 5128 than 711, like the Sony IER-M7. So perhaps revisiting older products wouldn’t be a bad idea for a standalone video or article in general.

Cheers guys! Looking forward to your next one.

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Some ideas

  1. Some talk about how FR is related to musical notes. We often hear about how frequencies from a recording engineer’s perspective, ie 5k cymbal sizzle and 2k guitar presence, but if you think about it as it relates to notes instead, you run into some weird ideas. Some of the features you see on graphs look narrow enough that only one or two notes in a scale are going to be boosted or cut. When you take the idea that songs can be (or even shift) keys, you run into the idea that boosting a 5th scale degree vs a tonic might have a pretty wild effect on our perceptions of a song. Also, in the bass register, song key becomes extremely important as whether a note is in the sub bass, mid bass range, or is even audible has also affected how we feel about music.
    My question is as reviewers, how do you take these ideas into account? Do you think about song keys at all? Do you try to test devices using songs that hit notes that challenge or benefit from a particular tuning?
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That’s an interesting thought, You sound like someone professionally involved with music.

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Well sort of, I make software for musicians. I love making music but it’s purely a hobby.

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Absolutely worth talking about. And yeah we do generally consider the spectral content of how various instruments are typically recorded, and how the playback equipment impacts the relationship between fundamental and harmonic tones for those instruments.

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I first noted this a loooong time ago with Run DMC’s song “Down with the King” — the chiming background notes can fully disappear on some setups.

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One thing to keep in mind is that when using pentatonic scales or many arpeggios you have 5 or fewer notes per octave so even a third octave feature might have a dramatic effect, and a sixth of an octave could be extremely targeted.