Nothing, use AutoEQ to EQ many headphones to Harman’s target curve.
I think the best option for this is a DAC with a software EQ added. Like the minidsp but a commercial DAC. Ive seen a few of these but for some reason there for portables and phones. I would love it if someone came out with something like this. theres the Monoprice amp and the ADI Dac. They have EQ built in. but you have this small little window to use and im not sure how many bands they have. i should probably just get the monoprice amp.
Yeah AutoEQ is a awesome project. would be nice if a DAC or Amp came out with support for this. That would be the ultimate! Think about it. A DAC with software for a computer with support for AutoEQ. IT would be the ultimate!
nothing wrong with EQ’ng but to me defeats the purpose of collecting headphones that sound different if im gonna make them sound theme sound the same.
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Well look at HIFImans Ananda. Its a great headphone with that big driver. its cheap at 700$ but it just has a problem with midrange and treble. So i got frequency graph and made a few adjustments and it sound a lot better. This avoids me having to send it back and buy a Arya or even a HE1000 with the same size driver but much more expensive
You could always start pad swapping and lose your mind. I’m not sure if it’s in that order.
Well, pads for the larger hfm can be hard to find lol
Especially since headphones with varying sounds signatures are basically just hardware EQ IMHO…
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You are describing the MiniDSP 2x4 (or 2x4 HD), which serves as a DAC with a DSP pipeline. AutoEQ has parametric EQ settings in addition to the graphic ones. One benefit of that solution is you can EQ your headphones and room correct your speakers at the same time. There are also 4 profiles so you can switch between up to four headphones without having to re-program the EQ settings.
I think EQ gives a slightly unnatural sound, and can make a headphone sound different than intended. Which isn’t a bad thing, but if you are looking from a purist point of view, I think it can distort things slightly.
That being said, I use EQ some when using headphones, and it especially depends on the song. If I am listening to a track on my Nighthawk Carbon that I feel is lacking a bit in bass, then I use a wide bass boost at 80hz. Most of the time I leave it off, but for certain songs I don’t care much about hearing the headphones natural sound, I want to hear a certain sound in the music more.
And with my KPH30i, some songs I find it lacking in the treble, so I will slightly dial back around 650hz and dial up around 6.9khz and 11khz. Just a touch, which gives it a little more sparkle. I do this more on Electronic tracks especially.
When it comes to speakers, I use EQ on them a lot. Especially car speakers, and it varies depending on the car.
The RB42 pair that are in my family’s living room I use the SMSL AD18 amplifiers EQ settings, usually adding a 2db boost to Bass, and a 1db boost to treble. If it is a soundtrack or orchestral piece however, I usually set it to neutral because those usually already have enough bass and treble. I also use the SDB setting, which is like an adaptive EQ that will boost certain frequencies based on the music. Usually adds bass and more punch.
I do think that while EQ can be slightly unnatural, if you enjoy using it, then feel free to do so and have no shame. Unless you are like my sister who adds a 9db bass boost to her headphones and a -10db treble boost. 
That I can’t understand.
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I think eq can sound unnatural if it’s done wrong or differently
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Right. I do think it sounds unnatural if done badly. I mean just look at the example I gave at the bottom. I pur her Momentums on one time and I felt like I was getting punched in the ears with somebody trying to sing to me through a concrete wall.
yeah this is a awesome feature and needed. foobar 2000 allows you to save settings and you can have as many as you like.
But i doubt the quality of the Minidsp DAC. I dont think it will be able to compete with the SU8 or other better DAC’s. It would be nice if something like the minidps could be made that you could hook up between the DAC and Amp. Also if room correction and all its other features are removed it could be cheaper.
The RME ADI-2 and the Monoprice equivalent have only 5 bands of PEQ. But, as I recently realized, the separate bass and treble controls of the RME amount to 2 additional bands that happen to be fixed as shelf types. That doesn’t seem like much of a limitation, since they’re at the bass and treble ends where you might well want to use a shelf in any case.
AutoEQ uses Oratory1990 data among others, and Oratory provides his own EQ settings for his large collection of measured headphones (https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/wiki/index/list_of_presets). In a few cases he specifically provides 5-band EQs for the RME. In one case he additionally uses the bass and treble bands as we see here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hb49sdoo8elfto/Focal%20Elex%20(RME%20ADI-2).pdf?dl=0. Mostly he provides 10-band PEQ settings. But I suspect these could be reduced to 7 bands with very little loss. (Seems likely Oratory owns and uses an RME himself.)
Oratory provides EQs to the Harman 2018 target, based on Harman’s research that this is the preference of a (perhaps narrow) majority of listeners. If you’re lucky that might work for you, but many of us will want to modify the provided EQ to match our own hearing. Typically, that would be a simple matter of raising or lowering the bass shelf, plus raising or lowering the 3 kHz peak.
Look at his EQ for the Ananda, as an example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1wivpf8901uflr/Hifiman%20Ananda.pdf?dl=0. Here he only uses 7 of the 10 bands in the table. One is a low bass shelf so that can be moved to the RME’s bass control. I imagine it would be little problem to adapt the treble end to the RME as well. To adjust for personal preference one would simply raise or lower the bass shelf gain of band 6 and raise or lower the peak gain for band 2. Not only do you achieve a tuning customized to your own hearing this way. You also get to claim that you aren’t a mere member of the Harman target sheep herd.
And of course you’d also likely have to tweak his settings to account for variance between your Ananda and the one he measured. So, between adjusting for your own preference and adjusting for unit-to-unit variance, I’m not sure any sort of built-in AutoEQ would be that much of an advantage. Dialing in the initial settings manually might be a mere 5 or 10 minute task.
I personally don’t care to use EQ. If all my headphones sound the same, what’s the point? I personally dont want my Atticus to sound neutral, or my HD600 to sound bassy or my LCD2C to sound like treble murder. It’s like buying a racecar engine for an Austin Allegro…you’re only fooling yourself. 
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I have actually EQed the LCD2C to see how hard you could push the bass before they distort… it’s pretty fun. They can get pretty ridiculous.
I don’t generally EQ, but I don’t try and justify it as what the recording artist intended. I’m more interested in what the hardware designer intended.
There really isn’t a specific sound signature I want, I like to understand what a designer thought was good and why.
Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of headphones I really don’t want to listen to, but I can at least appreciate what they were going for. I don’t really like most of the Beyer headphones, I can appreciate them as good headphones, but I just can’t deal with the treble emphasis.
Lol! Dr. Strangelove? 
Okay, definitely Dr. Strangelove. 
I prefer changing pads/modding instead. Otherwise you get headphones that only work on one computer/phone/DAP/DAC even, with one EQ, and you switch game/program and suddenly the EQ doesn’t work, or you switch headphones or switch to speakers and you feel like something’s different and “oh shit, the EQ” and you go out with your headphones and they sound different and “oh shit I forgot my EQ parameters” and… bleh.
I just prefer simplicity. Mod once, swap the pads once, twist the headband once, squeeze the pads on a yoga block (or DVD rack or whatever) for one night, and you got your personal pair of headphones, EQ’d forever, for everything.
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I still use my EQ even though there are pattent sound signatures already being implement on each headphones/IEMs. Sure we already know by now that every cans/IEMs have their cons in terms of sounds like KZ ZS10 Pro being too trebly murderous or the Tin T2 being not too bassy, so I use the EQ still in order to tune those to the sounds I want from those. Even my Shure SE215 that has a dark sound can be at least a bit more alive with a few adjustments on my EQ. So overall, EQs are still useful and keep on using them.