The AutoEQ site has over 2000 headphones measured on the high end gear. With maybe a 1000 data points for each plot. Of course each unit of a given model of headphone is not going to be identical to the unit(s) that were measured. But one can listen for any variance using sine sweeps.
I totally get wanting to go mano y mano with a measurement system. But for someone non-electro-technical like me, and after reading about the struggles of the guys on SBAF with mini-DSP calibration, I feel really good that I can make do with the alternate approach.
Can also be a useful troubleshooting or research feature. Don’t think yours sounds similar to a friends? Want to see how pad wear can effect response? Measuring might tell you something that you couldn’t find elsewhere (but still take your results with a grain of salt)
Absolutely. I certainly feel the allure myself, but I know I don’t have the right technical background. So I have that sour grapes rationale in my previous post ready to trot out to keep myself talked out of it.
Yet part of me is nevertheless hoping Marcgli or someone presents an irresistible counter-argument, so I too can talk myself into buying a new toy.
I mean if you want to do it there’s nothing wrong with getting something like that. Its mainly time it takes more then technical background. You can easily teach yourself how to measure accurately and have fun with it. Just don’t expect high level pro results because of the lack of higher end equipment and treatment and other stuff you need.
Sadly, I probably couldn’t live with that reduction in accuracy you mention. But on the up-side I discovered a new toy, yet one that was under my nose all along. I’ve been using the rather Mickey Mouse spreadsheet that comes bundled with my MacBook for a while now to handle my EQ number crunching needs. Then a few days ago a light bulb turned on – I realized I could graph those same numbers to look like real frequency response charts, replete with pretty colours.
When Marzipan and you were discussing the Sundara vs the Ananda’s bass interactions with various amps, I wanted to see how close they were natively. So I quickly cooked up this graph:
When I was shopping for a new headphone last winter and wanted a rough idea what the various headphones sounded like, I used a headphone I owned to simulate their frequency responses with an EQ like this:
It’s all good! Nice looking graphs. I might be weary of such few samples though, as I’m sure the frequency response changes by multiple dB much faster than the space b/w those data points in some places.
Separately, if you’re into manual EQ’ing, (maybe some people already use this), I like to use this online tone generator with a slider. Super handy if you think you can here a bump or a dip over a particular part of the spectrum, but you have to be careful about aliasing from your browser - https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/
Whoa! Super cool! I may well be using this instead of sine sweeps and Audacity tones from now on.
Amen to that. What system-wide tool do you use that has finer control? On a Mac, the only options I have are either 10-band or 31-band GEQ. That said, working my way across the frequency spectrum with that slider app you suggested, I’m hearing buttery smooth and gradual rises and falls just where I want them.
I recently started playing with EqualizerAPO+Peace on my Win box. There must be some trick to PEQ I haven’t hit on yet, but so far I’m not seeing getting as much control.
Quick check shows it to be a DAW plug-in. Don’t have any DAWs on my MacBook. Then there’s Sonarworks/True-Fi. 'Fraid to install anything like that. The EQ software I’m using is flaky; I’d be afraid to render it unusable.
Do you mean the 2x4 that people use for loudspeaker stuff? Looks awfully technical. Glad you’re volunteering to provide the hand-holding I would need if that’s the case. (What a long thread that would be.)
Yep. That’s what made me aware (and envious) of EQ APO in de first place! Them thar techniques am what I ‘parently isn’t a-doin’ correct like.
IAC, while I look forward to exploring EQ APO, fact is it doesn’t run on my MacBook. And another fact is that there are many reasons why I want to continue to do my listening from the laptop.
No underestimation here either of EQ APO or the depths of my ignorance on what to do with it.
But really the upshot is that despite a mere 31 fixed frequencies to work with (1/3 octave points) I haven’t run into any examples yet of where I would benefit from more. For example, even the dreaded 10 dB 7-9 kHz peak of the DT 1990 seems to be purring like a kitten. Smooth transition from 6.3 to 8 to 10 kHz. So presumably under the hood, the GEQ is calculating the optimal Q to connect any two points smoothly.
Thanks! had previously seen both those vids. It’s very comforting to know there actually is an n-channel PEQ option available for Macs. One project I already have slated for the end of shirt-sleeve-outdoors weather is to get the hang of PEQ a la EQ APO. After that, Mini-DSP may well look like a necessity.
But right now I’m still in shock thanks to that online tone generator you posted. I have some hearing damage in one ear. After playing with various EQ work-arounds I decided that ignoring my own variance in that area of the spectrum and EQ’ing to flat based on measurement data was the best approach. But playing with that app, I decided to try EQ’ing that region to subjective smoothness like every other part of the sound spectrum already was. Mind-blowing improvement.
Of course I could have done the same thing with a sine sweep, but the sheer ease of use of that app encourages experimentation Thanks so much for bringing to our attention!
… Although – on the downside – that totally eliminates any chance I’ll ever be able to stand using a headphone for music listening without EQ. Had in back of mind picking up a used HD 600, which of course comes admirably close to being flat, but now I’d have to EQ it to add my broken ear correction.
You can also use brown noise and pink noise to help judge if a frequency is missing or misadjusted. You just have to learn what the noise should sound like, and then you can go off of that point of reference if you want to make it as neutral as possible to you.
Looking at the 770 it seems to do a pretty bad job at picking up higher frequencies since beyerdynamic has a telltale peak in the higher frequencies. Picked up the random droops on the 770, so at least it has that going for it. Otherwise it seems like better-than-nothing way of measuring it, which is still respectable.
No problem! I was debating whether I should make me own sweep with a slider or not, then realized I should just google for it, so I found this after some poking around, lol.
Yeah I immediately was looking for the 8-9 kHz peak after I took that data… I’m planning on fooling around with the setup a bit more so I can get more consistent/accurate high frequency results. For now it seems to do well enough through the mid range.
The volume was a bit high, probably ~95 dB, but I didn’t check.
Unfortunately my phantoms didn’t come this weekend, so I won’t be able to play around with measuring those, but I’ll likely play with the 6XX’s and the 770’s a bit more…
(What a long thread that would be.)