You misunderstood me, but it’s okay. I am not talking about the earless rig. An earless rig would be used to tune a headphone for mass-produciton. If you wanted a custom made headphone it would be tuned with a mold that exactly replicates your ears and also several other factors (data of your ears) would be used.
The headphone would be tuned according to your HRTF, and then you would be hearing the “perfectly flat” response that was present on the earless rig, but you would HAVE to calibrate it and tune so it sounds like it sounds to the microphones on the earless rig. We have ears, just watch the video from my thread, you will understand why ears play a big role.
It will sound different to everybody. It’s a complete match to some, complete miss to others. This is due to both HRTF and preference.
But if you had a headphone be tuned to a flat frequency response, people will get different variations of this flat freq response, but it would be the closest to “uncolored” sound signature.
Yup. But the microphone is not important at that point - because it is a custom made headphone just for your ears, the masses should never hear it. But I do get your point, it would indeed be a different freq resp on the mic rig.
You need to do this individually, this is the main reason why there are so many opinions and experiences regarding headphones (and other audio equipment too), we hear it completely differently. You ideally want the product to be custom tuned to your ears. Otherwise you have vastly different experiences from people - some love it, some hate it, for some it’s just okay.
A very complicated subject, at least business-wise.
And that’s the hobby. If it was possible to have one tuning that was objectively perfect then there would actually be a “best” headphone just like there is a “best” graphics card. But since ears are fucky, we have an entire community set up around trying and collecting things that make noise.
And headphones don’t obey Mores Law, if you went back to the days of 3DFX Voodoo 1 there was a very clear best graphics card. but it’s no longer about color depth, or filtering implementations.
Already answered everything you’re asking but you keep repeating the same questions. I think you’re simply refusing the notion that “flat” for headphones is not objective or universal and it’s not a graph that looks anything like a straight line. When people add EQ to mass-produced headphones to make them sound more like open-space sound from a flat-tuned speaker, they get various curves that you can see in a Griesinger lecture that MaynardGK quoted in your other thread: How to approach to review and judge a studio/reference headphone? How to tell if something really is "reference-grade"? - #15 by MaynardGK
I don’t know how many more ways I can say this. The point of “neutral” is to not sound different from reality. To achieve that, headphones have to have a response with hills and valleys, not a straight line. The hills and valleys will be different for each headphone because their drivers and cups are also doing different things to the sound, and also different for each user because their ears will be doing different things to the sound until it reaches the eardrum. What will natural FR look like on a headphone? A curve with hills and valleys, not a straight line. I don’t know how else to answer this.
That’s an equal-loudness tuning, it’s not natural sound, not even close. If you’re going to put in the work to do equal-loudness tuning, do it with the chosen headphones, do it again for good speakers in a good room, then derive the final EQ curve by subtracting the speaker equal-loudness EQ values from the headphone equal-loudness values, and you will get the tuning you have to apply to those headphones to make them sound more natural to you, more like listening to speakers. This is Griesinger’s method.
Alright, so this changed my opinion. Neutrality is a different concept than I thought so, and it is probably impossible to incorporate a universal “neutral” for headphones - it sounds too complex and subjective to be able to apply a certain formula that “truly” is objective.
However, coloration is something that should be referencing the frequency response graph. This being said, would a headphone that was tuned to your ear (with the help of ear data, molds, and your HRTF - instead of tuning it on a measurement rig (e.g. G.R.A.S stuff)) and had a flat frequency response, would this mean that it is the most uncolored headphone?
While neutral is referring to life-like, which usually refers to a particular setting with loudspeakers, coloration should mean boosting certain frequencies. So if a headphone was calibrated and tuned just to your ears and it had a flat frequency response, could it be the fine definition of an uncolored headphone?
Without personal calibration/tuning of headphones, this would be impossible to achieve because of the HRTF - you cannot know how your headphone’s frequency response will sound to the human listener because you tuned the headphones on a measurement setup… which is not the human ear. But with the tuning/calibration, you should be able to achieve a flat freq resp and uncolored freq resp, correct?
lol.