There’s no great push for frequency response accuracy in the headphone community. But I happen to be in the minority that wants this. Or course, slight problem – there is no such thing. I well and truly get that. But as some sort of starting point or reference point I am still interested.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that accurate headphones should play back music to sound like a flat pair of loudspeakers (presumably 2.1) in a well-treated room. I know next to nothing about loudspeakers, so when I try to find out what a well-treated room does to a flat FR I’m quickly in over my head. The most common target seems to be 1 dB of room gain per octave over 10 octaves. Which would look like this:
Apparently, several forum members are familiar with the recording studio scene. Do you feel this is anything like a good approximation of what the room gain of a hypothetical average/typical recording studio 2-channel set-up would look like? Or at least a good approximation of the home playback environment they’re trying to target? If not, what would that be?
(I’m assuming room gain is the relevant aspect of “well-treated room” for FR. If not, please correct.)
Actually, the word monitor points to a real problem with my question. As I understand it, most recording studios work primarily off near-field, not far-field(?). So perhaps I should leave recording studio set-ups out of the question and just concentrate on what is the typical home environment room gain that is being targeted.
I would say a fair amount of higher end recording studios use midfield or far field monitors if they are pretty serious. I would say most studios built as a studio have midfield arrangements with far field depending on the speaker
Also a common thing is to have your main monitors in midfield or far field and have a pair of lesser smaller nearfields that you can switch to
I personally am still deciding if I want to implement a smaller set of monitors in nearfield besides my main midfields (the room is still in the design process right now)
At some point I would think they would want to hear what a mix sounds like in a mythical typical home 2-channel or 2.1 system. This would involve the in-home speaker sound being modified by room acoustics. So what would that total in-home speakers + room FR look like?
I have no idea, and that is why I am having someone design the studio for me lol. They are much more familiar then I lol. I don’t think there is really a typical fr graph or anything you could look at that would be helpful imo