I have a set incoming on Monday, I am seriously looking forwards to them!
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If you can find one of those £20 Ryanair flights you can come and try mine 
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Thank you very much for the offer. But due to ill health I am unable to travel but thank you very much for your offer. Are you Spanish by any chance?
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Sorry to hear about your health!
I’m originally from the UK but have been here far longer than I was ever in the UK (I moved here when I was a child).
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Oh right. My daughter is studying Spanish and Portuguese at Manchester University. She’s about to start a years study in both countries with 6 months in each. She’s possibly going to Almería in Spain.
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Nice and warm in Almería
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Yes I believe so.
^^The arrival of this box actually makes me very happy, not just because of the content, also because I have not been having much luck with the arrival of boxes lately!
Back in February I ordered the HD6XX from Massdrop as I was planning on a trip to Miami to pick them up. The trip was cancelled and they are still in a colleagues suitcase, who has been delayed and will probably not be here for at least another couple of weeks.
So then I ordered a set of MSR7b to try them with the P20. The shipment got delayed, then delayed some more and then, when it finally arrived, they had sent me the wrong headphones (the normal MSR7 instead of the balanced ones).
So, I sent the ATH back and decided to pull the trigger on the DT 1990 as I had been resisting temptation for a while. I ordered on a Monday I believe, with a scheduled delivery of Thursday, which then became Friday, which then became Monday… on Monday I received an email saying they were out of stock and would be another 15 days.
So I cancelled that order and ordered them from Amazon yesterday, finally I have an exciting box to open…
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Enjoy! I’ve been enjoying mine. I had forgotten how good they sound just out of my LG V20. With the single-sided cable entry, they’re great for wearing while I do things around the house.
If you want EQ profile suggestions, I’m happy to share some.
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Thanks, I would of course love to hear your EQ suggestions, although I haven’t had chance to hear more than a couple of tracks through them yet, hopefully in a while after the family goes to sleep.
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I’d post today’s … but it’d be distinctly “non-audio” (well, maybe excepting the “radio”) …
I tend to incessantly tweak EQ, so my settings evolve over time, but this is an example of something that I think sounds good on most music.
Low Shelf 100 Hz 1.0 Q +2.0 dB
Peak 800 Hz 1.0 Q +1.0 dB
Peak 2500 Hz 3.0 Q +2.0 dB
Peak 4460 Hz 10.0 Q +5.0 dB
Peak 6200 Hz 5.0 Q +3.0 dB
Peak 8333 Hz 4.0 Q -8.0 dB
Peak 14000 Hz 1.5 Q -6.0 dB
Like all of my EQ, this is based on a combination of looking at measurements from my own E.A.R.S., oratory1990, DIYAudioHeaven and rtings, and most importantly just listening to a bunch of music. In listening, I’m primarily listening for vocal realism and intimacy, and timbre of percussion instruments, especially piano (yes, piano is a percussion instrument). Percussion instruments, and piano in particular, are very useful for checking timbre because they cover a large swathe of the frequency spectrum and because they produce inharmonic overtones which, if nor properly reproduced, make the instrument sound unnatural.
Reasons for these settings:
- Low shelf gives a little more rumble to get closer to Harman target, but still stays considerably below Harman because of my personal preference for less sub-bass.
- Peak at 800 Hz fills in a dip in the midrange to give guitar and voice more body
- Peak at 2500 Hz fills in a dip in the upper mids to bring more clarity and presence to voices. It’s also instrumental in achieving good piano timbre. The downside is that this makes the soundstage a bit more intimate/less open.
- Peak at 4460 Hz fills in a dip to restore some sparkle and energy.
- Peak at 6200 Hz fills in a dip to give guitars proper attack.
- Dips at 8333 Hz and 14000 Hz reduce the boosted treble in order to reduce sibilance and make cymbals sound more natural.
EDIT - I should have mentioned that this tuning is optimized for listening at around 75dB SPL(A) with my 40 year old male ears that have suffered high frequency hearing loss from too many concerts as a youth and too many babies screaming in my ear in later years. YMMV 
EDIT 2 - This is all with the (a)nalytic pads.
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Thanks, I’ll give it a try.
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As I warned you, I tend to iterate on EQ settings. I’ve stumbled upon something that I think works at lower levels (65-70 dB SPL(A)). It’s based mostly on my E.A.R.S. diffuse field measurements and I’m enjoying it tremendously.
Meaningful differences from my previously posted EQ:
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Bass is now a peaking filter instead of a low shelf. Things sound clearer to me if I retain a bit of the sub-bass rolloff. Although the DT 1990’s sub-bass clarity is very good for a small dynamic driver, I think I might have been pushing it into audibly distorting with the old low-shelf filter.
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Rather than filling in the middle mids, this instead brings down the lower mids.
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I now boost the upper mids more aggressively which seems to bring a nice clarity but still sounds quite natural. It also eliminates the need to mess with a narrow boost at 6200 Hz for guitars.
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Okay, I finally did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time - EQ one headphone to match another. I switched back and forth between the HD58X and the DT 1990 and found myself conflicted. The DT 1990 sounds smoother and more detailed, but the HD58X has tuning that I just love, finding a great balance between general openness and vocal intimacy, matched with great timbre and fun macrodynamics, but sounding just a bit grainy and unresolving.
So, I created a target curve from the HD58X’s measurements using mkhousecurve and then manually EQ’d the DT 1990 to something close to it.
There’s a couple of deviations, namely a little extra clarity at around 2.5 KHz and some extra bass. The result is eye opening - it sounds an awful lot like the HD58X, but indeed smoother and more resolving.
I didn’t expect this process to work very well because the E.A.R.S. measurement rig interacts with different headphones differently in the treble, making measurements not directly comparable. I think in this case it may have worked okay because both headphones have similarly deep pads, made of the same material and without an angle to the pads or the driver, so perhaps they’re interacting with the rig similarly.
Anyway, I like this EQ profile. It’s a lot more laid back than the others I’ve posted and change the DT 1990’s sound most dramatically. Still, I’m happy that it remains detailed without being bright.
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Great work as usual @pwjazz. It is surprising just how versatile some headphones can be.
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That is great work, maybe you could compete with headphone sales and just sell EQs for the DT1990 instead 
I haven’t had chance to try any of your EQs yet (this week has been crazy) but I am looking forwards to doing so this weekend!
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You’re too kind! Honestly, EQ is such a personal thing that this would a tough sell. For people who are happy with off-the-shelf EQ’s, oratory1990’s are a good bet (though I personally never like them that much).
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Yeah, the more I play with EQ, the more I realize that the main thing that distinguishes competent headphones from each other is really their tuning. Furthermore, from my experience with EQ, tuning between 20 - 1 KHz is much easier than at higher frequencies because there’s less interaction with the ear. Especially the range between 2-6 KHz or so gives me fits.
* - By competent I mean low distortion and good transient response.
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