You are likely just hearing the created sample which will have inherent characteristics as it was a purpose built sound sample and most likely developed at average gaming volume so the developer would control the final product. If you are hearing distortion you can pretty much bet that it is in the sample itself and has nothing or very, very, little to do with the gear you are using. I listen to a great deal of electronic music for instance with pretty nice headphones and you can really hear the very wide variety of differences in all of the samples used. There is plenty of intentional distortion simulated or other such effects. My point with saying that is that it is perfectly reasonable to consider the sample in the game as the likely culprit, not the playback gear.
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HD6XX bass
- Thread starter TankTop
- Start date
Do you have any speakers you can compare to? It does sound like it could be the headphones though as you said it happens whenever any demanding bass is present, when watching movies as well as gaming.
solderdude
Grand Contributor
It is not redundant and can show resonances that do not result in amplitude peaks or the resonance length is not directly related to the amplitude
If the measurement would be redundant it would not be used so widely.
It's widely used by reviewers, but not by industry professionals it seems, likely because correlation with audibility is low, and they can be misleading due to nuisance variables as Oratory explained. Anyway, I said they're redundant for minimum phase headphones, and for non-minimum phase headphones the plot would be more useful if normalized to flat frequency response at t=0 to discount amplitude differences.
- Thread Starter
- #66
Kick bass is fine and I played several 20hz-20khz test tones so I’m going to call it the gain in the movie or video game. With test tones there a significant amount bass loss below 50 hz with none below 34hz and a null between 650hz-720hz, it varies a little depending on the source of the test tone.
They do roll off a good bit in bass response below 50hz. If you want better subbass, you might like the Focal Elex.
Sine tones / sweeps and even isolated drum kicks are not great tests of sound quality when actually playing complex audio like music or movie/game soundtracks. A better test would just be to play a range of high-quality, well-recorded lossless music tracks with a good amount of bass / sub-bass energy in them.
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- Thread Starter
- #69
Not the end of the world, I expected a little more though. Soundstage and clarity is incredible, I hope nobody thought I was bashing them. In COD there are a few audio modes with reduced bass, I’ll play around with it a little. I also found out my hearing is done around 13khz.
solderdude
Grand Contributor
The nuisance variables are very small. The nuisance is caused by the HATS. I don't have the same nuisance (small differences). Of course the time differences at that scale are inconsequential and too short to matter. It is no reason to say the method is pointless as in the case of the HD800(S) the amplitude error is the culprit of all the sharpness in the sound, not the membrane speed/damping. The method is valid when it comes to much longer ringing. It is hard to hear it at certain frequencies for the reasons I already mentioned.
Just because some professionals do not use it doesn't mean the data is not relevant nor important.
The CSD is not as easy to explain and draw audible consequences on as it is specific to >500Hz and requires sharp decay analyzer filters.
I have seen many, many completely pointless and poor executed CSD from many people, even those that should know better. So in that light I would say CSD can be useful if done properly and one knows what one is looking at.
Exactly, so its utility is limited to poorly designed headphones with much too low damping. The vast majority of headphones however will be able to have their audible behaviour characterized almost entirely by their frequency response (e.g. the large FR peak at 6-7kHz for the HD800S).
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KaiserSoze
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There is a not-terribly-difficult way to increase the bass from your new headphones. I've never done it, because I'm happy with the response curve of the pair of HD-580 that I've owned since the very early 1990s. It is interesting to me how fads that come and go influence the general perception of a product that has true staying power. It was maybe about ten years ago when the HD580 and HD600 and HD650 headphones were often criticized for having the "Sennheiser veil". These criticisms were mostly from people who preferred more emphasis in treble. To my perspective the "veil" was just the very smooth, natural sound from these headphones. But in the present era lots of people, mostly younger people, just can't get enough bass, so now the criticism is that the bass is weak. Well, to be honest the measurements support this perspective, that the bass is weak, but when I listen to them I don't notice this. The reason could be that my hearing is more sensitive to bass. Also worth noting is that the amount of perceived bass depends on the overall volume level, according to the Fletcher-Munson curves. This is why the idea of an ideal or perfectly flat frequency response is a little questionable to start with, because even if the playback speaker or headphone has a perfectly flat frequency response, the listener won't hear the same frequency response that a listener at the live event or in the studio heard, at the time of recording, unless it happens that the listener is listening at volume level matching the volume level at the live event or in the studio. This is the reason that better preamplifiers and receivers used to have variable loudness controls, back in the day, but this also fell out of favor at some point because some know-nothing with a loud voice went around claiming that loudness controls were corrupting the music fidelity. (The person who did this is a well-known influential person within the audio industry, or used to be, and anyone curious as to who it was will not likely have much difficulty learning who it was, by doing some web searches. Whatever.)
Anyway, in the design of the headphones you bought, the sound power radiated from the front of the driver (toward your ear) is only partially acoustically isolated from the sound power radiated to the back of the driver. There is a fairly large area within the headphones, permitting cancellation between the front and rear wavefronts. As with dipole radiators, the effective attenuation naturally follows a curve that, in dipole speakers and according to Linkwitz, is 6 dB per octave. (The cancellation/attenuation increases as frequency decreases, owing to the way that directivity varies according to frequency.) I expect that the bass attenuation curve is much different in these headphones, even without factoring in the acoustic impedance (the membrane) that is applied to this area to limit and control the amount of bass cancellation. The more acoustically transparent the membrane is, the greater the bass attenuation. Sennheiser has fine-tuned the acoustic transparency of the membrane over the years in order to achieve the bass level that they deem optimal for this headphone. The measurements suggests that the engineers who own the design are not fond of bass, but perhaps there is something not quite right with the measurements, or perhaps it has to do with anticipated listening level, or something esoteric that they do not share publicly.
In any case, it is apparent that if the membrane is made less acoustically transparent, the bass will increase. I will caution you to proceed at your own risk. If you ruin your headphones, don't even think about blaming me, because all that will do is make me laugh. You can find videos on YouTube that show how to disassemble the headphones. Be especially careful not to damage the driver or the fine wires that connect the coil to the little springs that provide the contact to the cables. Those wires are extremely fine, and if you break one of them, you will likely have to replace the driver. Here is a link to one of these videos:
The obvious questions: (1.) What kind of material should you add to the barrier? (2.) How should you attach it? (3.) How much of the existing barrier should you cover?
The obvious answer: You are on your own.
If I were doing this, I would maybe start with a thin sheet of open cell foam, partly because thin sheets of open cell foam are easy to come by. I would probably start by covering all of the barrier, and I would attach it using the least intrusive means that I could think up. If I used glue, I would use small dabs in carefully chosen locations. Obviously, the locations for applying glue are the same locations where the existing barrier is bonded to the supporting framework. You obviously want for it to be fairly taut so that it doesn't flop around. Note that you could fill the space between the barrier and the outer grill, but the effect of doing this would not be the same as the effect of making the barrier less acoustically transparent. I.e., you want to use a thin sheet of foam or a cloth, placed directly against the barrier. Another approach might be to use a thin, stiff piece of cardboard with holes strategically cut through it. The total area of the holes would matter, but the size of the holes likely would not. I would try to avoid covering the area directly to the rear of the driver. I would also work entirely on one side and not do anything at all to the other side until I had something I liked.
Finally, I will say again that if you ruin your new headphones I don't even want to hear about it. I'm only pointing out something that is obvious to me and that has been obvious since the day I bought the HD-580, nearly three decades ago. Proceed at your own risk.
KaiserSoze
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Although it depends on the purpose. From the perspective of scientific methodology, repeatability of findings is essential, so that it will be possible for different reviewers to either corroborate or refute one another's findings. This is only really possible when objective measurements are performed using test tones. Or else the whole of audio recording and reproduction technology can remains shrouded in mysticism.
- Thread Starter
- #74
On a side note, I have an old NAD 705 and someone suggested it may have a nice dedicated headphone amplifier. Here are the schematics if anyone who know how to read them wouldn’t mind doing me the favor.
https://www.schematicsunlimited.com...ed-amplifier-service-manual/download/MTkzNjQ=
https://www.schematicsunlimited.com...ed-amplifier-service-manual/download/MTkzNjQ=
The veil isn't really due to a lack of treble - it's mostly down to the slightly raised upper bass / lower midrange a lot of Sennheiser headphones have, which perceptually masks higher frequencies, making them harder to distinguish, leading to a slightly veiled subjective impression (simultaneously providing a 'warmer' sound signature). (The HD650 does also have rolled off treble however, which exacerbates this problem further.) And yes, both the HD600 and HD650 have poor bass extension. So both deficiencies exist, and are clearly shown in their measured frequency responses.
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solderdude
Grand Contributor
The headphone out is simply the speaker out via a 330 Ohm resistor so for today's standard a VERY high output resistance.
For those days quite normal.
Works well for high efficiency planar headphones and 600 Ohm headphones.
Not really suited for a lot of low impedance headphones. The HD6xx will sound noticeably 'darker' on this amp.
So there is no nice dedicated headphone section inside
- Thread Starter
- #77
Thanks, I was contemplating having it refreshed but I think I’ll pass. Appreciate you looking at it for me!
solderdude
Grand Contributor
Funny how much half truths, partially truths and complete incorrect info is seeping into this thread here and there.
The HD650 is about the most documented and measured headphone that has been scrutinized for decades.
The HD650 is about the most documented and measured headphone that has been scrutinized for decades.
I generally agree, but here I was saying it would be better (not ideal) to listen to real music rather than test tones, if all you're doing is casual, uncontrolled, sighted listening tests, which is all most people are willing to take the time to do. The problem with using test tones, for both listening and objective measurements, is there is no real hard evidence that the audio degradation of a device (electrical or electroacoustic) when playing sine tones is representative of its degradation when playing the complex waveforms of actual music. There is in fact evidence this correlation is a poor one in DACs / DAPs, from null difference measurements done by Serge at SoundExpert, which show the difference signal between the original and recorded output from a DAC (a measure of its degradation of the signal) when playing sine tones is poorly correlated with the same measure when playing real music, or the industry standardized 30-second 'Program Simulation Noise' (BS EN 50332-1), which was devised to be representative of the spectral content of music and speech, and so could be the best of both worlds (a test signal that is closer to real music, yet standardized and repeatable by others). See the original thread by Serge and the recent discussion of the idea here if you're interested. In theory, this may even be able to be extended to measuring transducer audio degradation, possibly relative to the recorded acoustic output of a 'reference' headphone playing the Program Simulation Noise (this would be much easier than for speakers due to not having to take account of dispersion characteristics).
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solderdude
Grand Contributor
No it can't. Not in theory and certainly not in practice.
