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aldarrin

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Update: uninstalled both Peace and Equalizer APO from my PC because it because one or both contributed to instability on my PC. Using Wavelet on my phone, which includes AutoEQ, has been very pleasant.
 

tvrgeek

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This is definitely not the first thread on this topic, and I'm really tired of getting into this discussion over and over again. Suffice to say that AutoEQ and similar measure-and-apply-filter-to-match-target-response solutions are very simplistic in their approach and ignore many other considerations of sound quality and personalization. It's worth to search deeper in the topics of AutoEQ and Oratory1990 to get a more complete picture.

Agree. I would add the brains ability to adapt to what it senses when you enter a room. Your brain will eq a lot based in it's perception of the environment. We put too much stock in equalization when it is not that important. Been down that rabbit hole and climbed back out.
 

Fluffy

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Agree. I would add the brains ability to adapt to what it senses when you enter a room. Your brain will eq a lot based in it's perception of the environment. We put too much stock in equalization when it is not that important. Been down that rabbit hole and climbed back out.
Mind you I didn't say EQ is not important – just focusing solely on it and trying to match some ideal curve, will ignore a lot of other considerations. EQ is not the be-all and end-all of sound quality, but it does always have to play some role. Intentionally ignoring the benefits of EQ is also very restrictive.
 

rxp

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Brain adaptation on environment is seriously amazing.

In using Impulcifer where I can simulate a real loudspeaker system in a room I can be completely convinced that it sounds amazing while sitting in the same chair I made the impulse responses with as I listen to speakers. I can then take the exact same impulse response (BRIR) into another room and it sounds odd. You have to train your brain to listen to different BRIR's in different rooms. Even with different situations in rooms. I have a nearfield one for when I'm sitting at my desktop or laptop.

It's legit amazing and it really gives me an explanation of audiophoolary. It's not that people are insane - it's just that they hear with their eyes.
 

fabriciom

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Hi,

Ive been playing with the AutoEQ settings for my headphones and CanOpener and this thing is amazing.

What I wanted to find out is if there is a tutorial on how to measure your headphones and come up with the exact settings for them.

I understand that even same model headphones vary and wanted to have a more exact solution.

Thank you.
 

jaakkopasanen

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Hi,

Ive been playing with the AutoEQ settings for my headphones and CanOpener and this thing is amazing.

What I wanted to find out is if there is a tutorial on how to measure your headphones and come up with the exact settings for them.

I understand that even same model headphones vary and wanted to have a more exact solution.

Thank you.
Measuring headphones is not something you can do yourself easily. Reddit user oratory1990 measures headphones when people send the their pairs so this would be your best option. Keep in mind that even if it's your own pair, the results are not gonig to be perfect because your ears are not the same as the dummy head ears and the seal and positioning of the headphone might be different. The best would be to adjust the eq setting by ear to your liking but that's not mutually exclusive with sending your pair to oratory1990.

And yes, Crinacle's GRAS measurements are now available in AutoEq: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/Au...lts/crinacle/gras_43ag-7_harman_over-ear_2018
 

fabriciom

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Measuring headphones is not something you can do yourself easily. Reddit user oratory1990 measures headphones when people send the their pairs so this would be your best option. Keep in mind that even if it's your own pair, the results are not gonig to be perfect because your ears are not the same as the dummy head ears and the seal and positioning of the headphone might be different. The best would be to adjust the eq setting by ear to your liking but that's not mutually exclusive with sending your pair to oratory1990.

And yes, Crinacle's GRAS measurements are now available in AutoEq: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/Au...lts/crinacle/gras_43ag-7_harman_over-ear_2018


Hello Jaakko,

Thanks for you work and getting this done. I'm really impressed and amazed how well this works.

I though the measuring would be simpler process.

Also, I wish I had a good set of monitors to tweak and test.

Any who, thanks and good work!

-Cheers,
Fabricio
 

tvrgeek

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I did just stick my Berhringer up to my Grados and Yamahamers. Both read pretty flat though slightly different. Between them listening is a tad different as well. I thing the Grados are flatter. Headphones are designed knowing about the average ear topology and try to reverse filter what your outer ear does in the real world. I would just play with it and see how it sounds to you. Being a almost controlled environment, I suggest "flat" is a good starting point. If you need much eq, maybe you need better headphones. :D
 

Martin

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I just found a post on /r/Oratory1990 linking @jaakkopasanen's Headphone Ranking based upon Sean Olive's preference score. The list is for non-EQed headphones. I find it interesting that the top headphone on the list is a wireless noise cancelling headphone. I also found the grouping around the score of 81 rather interesting (bolding is mine):
Focal Clear
HIFIMAN Arya
HIFIMAN Edition X​
Oppo PM3​
Warwick Audio Aperio​
Audeze LCD-2 Closed Back
Sennheiser HD 650​

Lastly, I find it odd how the Audeze LCD headphones' scores line up almost exactly inverse to their cost. :eek:

The list makes me want to try the PSB M4U 8, Dan Clark Audio Aeon 2 Closed, Audio-Technica ATH-M50x and Focal Elex.

I'd like to see the same list for EQed headphones.

Martin
 

jaakkopasanen

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I just found a post on /r/Oratory1990 linking @jaakkopasanen's Headphone Ranking based upon Sean Olive's preference score. The list is for non-EQed headphones. I find it interesting that the top headphone on the list is a wireless noise cancelling headphone. I also found the grouping around the score of 81 rather interesting (bolding is mine):
Focal Clear
HIFIMAN Arya
HIFIMAN Edition X​
Oppo PM3​
Warwick Audio Aperio​
Audeze LCD-2 Closed Back
Sennheiser HD 650​

Lastly, I find it odd how the Audeze LCD headphones' scores line up almost exactly inverse to their cost. :eek:

The list makes me want to try the PSB M4U 8, Dan Clark Audio Aeon 2 Closed, Audio-Technica ATH-M50x and Focal Elex.

I'd like to see the same list for EQed headphones.

Martin
I actually don't find it surprising at all that a wireless headphone ranks the highest. It most likely has a built in eq which tunes the headphone to Harman target.

Currently you can find two entries in the ranking list for some headphones. For example oratory1990's measurement for HD 600 ranks at 91 while Crinacle's only at 78. Crinacle's measurement has less bass probably due to problems with seal. Because of this, I would take the ranking with a big grain of salt!

EQ'd preference scores are not very meaningful, especially if you consider FIR filter based equalizers which can produce any frequency response very precisely. The scoring algorithm doesn't distinquish headphones well above 90 points.

I would use the ranking list mainly as an inspiration when trying to figure out which new headphones to buy. It shouldn't be take as a super accurate absolute truth. On top of that there are a lot of other aspects to the headphones which matter, like comfort.
 

bobbooo

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EQ'd preference scores are not very meaningful, especially if you consider FIR filter based equalizers which can produce any frequency response very precisely.

I'd say Oratory's post-EQ scores are more meaningful than most, due to him manually checking for audible issues caused by non-minimum phase parts of the frequency response determined by excess group delay (e.g. due to a cancellation from an internal earcup reflection), which cannot be EQed out effectively. A ranking by his post-EQ scores would be useful then I think, in seeing which headphones have fewer or more such issues and so would be the most/least amenable to effective EQing.
 

jaakkopasanen

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AutoEq just became a bit more magical!

Dips in a headphone frequency response are a problem for equalization because a naive approach would "fix" them the by producing a narrow (high Q) spike in the equalizer frequency response at the same frequency. These narrow spikes are not wanted though because they introduce ringing. Dips are also not very audible, so a trade between ringing and fixing the frequency response doesn't serve us well in this case. Therefore it's better to leave the dips alone. Unfortunately there are no good existing solutions to this problem, or at least any that I would know of.

Here's an equalizer frequency response for Beyerdynamic DT 770 without any smoothing or reqularization for the spikes. Those 4 kHz and 9 kHz ones do not sound good.
11416777.png

Any kind of smoothing tricks are not going to help here since they are all affected by the depth of the dip / height of the peak. It doesn't matter if the peak would naively be 10 dB or 30 dB, it needs to be avoided all the same. The width of the dip does play a role however, wider the dip the more it needs to be equalized because wider means less ringing and a more audible error in the frequency response.

I came up with a novel reqularization algorithm to address this problem. The peaks in the equalizer requency response are limited by the steepness of the slope (first derivative). This approach produces the same result regardless of the dip height but produces more correction for wider dips. Let's take a look at the same DT 770 equalizer frequency response with reqularization.
11416775.png

Here the dashed green curve is the same naive equalizer frequency response and the orange curve is the reqularized one. The naive frequency response is first smoothed to avoid problems caused by noisy artifacts and then traversed left to right and right to left. In both directions the slope is limited to 18 dB per octave. The smaller value of the two curves is the selected at each frequency and finally sharp kinks are rounded by smoothing the curve. The graph above also shows the areas where the slope has been limited. Blue areas for left to right traversal and red aread for right to left traversal. The green areas are excluded from the limited slope. This is done to avoid widening narrow dips in the equalizer frequency response. A better example of this is Adam SP-5.
11416776.png

Pay attention to the 6 kHz dip. Without the green zone, the orange curve would have a much wider dip there. Dips in the frequency response don't cause ringing so there's no need to limit them in any way.

So how does this sound then? A lot better, if you ask me. I own 80 ohm DT 770, Sennheiser HD 800 and Custom Art FIBAE 3 headphones, all of which have some kind of dips in the frequency response (HD 800 only has the 9 kHz one which should be there) and I clearly prefer the reqularized equalization to the one with only smoothing. I encourage you to test it out for yourself, assuming you have headphones which have these problems, not all do. The current state of AutoEq results has the reqularized eq settings and the Git history holds the old results.

I believe this new algorithm concludes my search for automatic headphone equalization. There are some things still to do however. The 18 dB per octave limit is somewhat arbitrarily chosen. It's the maximum slope in a parametric filter with 10 dB of gain and Q of 2.0. I did some testing to compare 18 dB/oct vs 24 dB/oct vs 12 dB/oct but the test wasn't blind so cannot really say anything conclusive. 18 dB/oct is more relaxed than 24 dB/oct and 12 dB/oct tends to produce problems because it starts to cut things which should not be cut. We eyeballed the debug plots with oratory1990 and it looks like 18 dB/oct produces somewhat similar reqularization as he has been doing manually. I still want to conduct a proper double blind listening test with a decent population to have more data for the decision.

Parametric equalizers are not completely solved with this new algorithm. AutoEq has an algorithm to produce parametric eq settings by searching for an optimal combination. While the search target is now good, the end result might still contain parametric filters with positive gain and too high Q values. The parametric eq optimizer in AutoEq is a very creative creature and might produce things we humans can't think of. This will be solved later time when I implement a Q reqularization specifically for the parametric eq filters.

I hope you enjoy the new settings and if there are any questions, leave a comment and I'll try my best to clarify. Happy listening!
 

Jimbob54

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AutoEq just became a bit more magical!

Dips in a headphone frequency response are a problem for equalization because a naive approach would "fix" them the by producing a narrow (high Q) spike in the equalizer frequency response at the same frequency. These narrow spikes are not wanted though because they introduce ringing. Dips are also not very audible, so a trade between ringing and fixing the frequency response doesn't serve us well in this case. Therefore it's better to leave the dips alone. Unfortunately there are no good existing solutions to this problem, or at least any that I would know of.

Here's an equalizer frequency response for Beyerdynamic DT 770 without any smoothing or reqularization for the spikes. Those 4 kHz and 9 kHz ones do not sound good.
11416777.png

Any kind of smoothing tricks are not going to help here since they are all affected by the depth of the dip / height of the peak. It doesn't matter if the peak would naively be 10 dB or 30 dB, it needs to be avoided all the same. The width of the dip does play a role however, wider the dip the more it needs to be equalized because wider means less ringing and a more audible error in the frequency response.

I came up with a novel reqularization algorithm to address this problem. The peaks in the equalizer requency response are limited by the steepness of the slope (first derivative). This approach produces the same result regardless of the dip height but produces more correction for wider dips. Let's take a look at the same DT 770 equalizer frequency response with reqularization.
11416775.png

Here the dashed green curve is the same naive equalizer frequency response and the orange curve is the reqularized one. The naive frequency response is first smoothed to avoid problems caused by noisy artifacts and then traversed left to right and right to left. In both directions the slope is limited to 18 dB per octave. The smaller value of the two curves is the selected at each frequency and finally sharp kinks are rounded by smoothing the curve. The graph above also shows the areas where the slope has been limited. Blue areas for left to right traversal and red aread for right to left traversal. The green areas are excluded from the limited slope. This is done to avoid widening narrow dips in the equalizer frequency response. A better example of this is Adam SP-5.
11416776.png

Pay attention to the 6 kHz dip. Without the green zone, the orange curve would have a much wider dip there. Dips in the frequency response don't cause ringing so there's no need to limit them in any way.

So how does this sound then? A lot better, if you ask me. I own 80 ohm DT 770, Sennheiser HD 800 and Custom Art FIBAE 3 headphones, all of which have some kind of dips in the frequency response (HD 800 only has the 9 kHz one which should be there) and I clearly prefer the reqularized equalization to the one with only smoothing. I encourage you to test it out for yourself, assuming you have headphones which have these problems, not all do. The current state of AutoEq results has the reqularized eq settings and the Git history holds the old results.

I believe this new algorithm concludes my search for automatic headphone equalization. There are some things still to do however. The 18 dB per octave limit is somewhat arbitrarily chosen. It's the maximum slope in a parametric filter with 10 dB of gain and Q of 2.0. I did some testing to compare 18 dB/oct vs 24 dB/oct vs 12 dB/oct but the test wasn't blind so cannot really say anything conclusive. 18 dB/oct is more relaxed than 24 dB/oct and 12 dB/oct tends to produce problems because it starts to cut things which should not be cut. We eyeballed the debug plots with oratory1990 and it looks like 18 dB/oct produces somewhat similar reqularization as he has been doing manually. I still want to conduct a proper double blind listening test with a decent population to have more data for the decision.

Parametric equalizers are not completely solved with this new algorithm. AutoEq has an algorithm to produce parametric eq settings by searching for an optimal combination. While the search target is now good, the end result might still contain parametric filters with positive gain and too high Q values. The parametric eq optimizer in AutoEq is a very creative creature and might produce things we humans can't think of. This will be solved later time when I implement a Q reqularization specifically for the parametric eq filters.

I hope you enjoy the new settings and if there are any questions, leave a comment and I'll try my best to clarify. Happy listening!

Thanks for all the good work. I look forward to trying some of the EQ with this change on some of my "quirkier" cans.
 

_thelaughingman

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@jaakkopasanen Absolutely love your work that you do with AutoEQ. I've been recommending the results and parametric EQ's provided by you to the members here, especially users of MacOS that need a good solution for their headphones.
 

sweetchaos

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Thanks @jaakkopasanen for your work.

A couple of questions:
#1. So whoever uses Wavelet, will automatically get the latest EQ profile, without any interaction? Or will they have to somehow "refresh/reload" on their phone, just to see these latest profiles?

#2. I see that the github page has 2 versions of "Hifiman He400i".
Hifiman He400i (which I'm assuming is the 2016 version as well)
https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/oratory1990/harman_over-ear_2018/HIFIMAN HE400i
Hifiman He400i 2016
https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/oratory1990/harman_over-ear_2018/HIFIMAN HE400i 2016
Here's a comparison:
results.gif
But Oratory lists only one "HE400i (2016 version)":
https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/wiki/index/list_of_presets
By looking at the raw frequency of oratory's graph, it matches your "HE400i 2016" version.
Perhaps Oratory had a second one, and removed it?
If one of your profiles is redundant, please remove the second.

#3. What's the easiest way to import Amir's parametric EQ profiles into Wavelet?
I understand that Wavelet can only use graphic EQ to work, so a "conversion" (for a lack of a better word) will need to be done.
I looked at your "Equalizing Headphones the Easy Way", so I'm guessing "WebPlotDigitizer" will need to be used.
I'm happy to do the work myself, but I will need assistance, if it's not too much trouble.
If this is off topic, I can continue this conversation via Private Message.
 

jaakkopasanen

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Thanks @jaakkopasanen for your work.

A couple of questions:
#1. So whoever uses Wavelet, will automatically get the latest EQ profile, without any interaction? Or will they have to somehow "refresh/reload" on their phone, just to see these latest profiles?

#2. I see that the github page has 2 versions of "Hifiman He400i".
Hifiman He400i (which I'm assuming is the 2016 version as well)
https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/oratory1990/harman_over-ear_2018/HIFIMAN HE400i
Hifiman He400i 2016
https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/oratory1990/harman_over-ear_2018/HIFIMAN HE400i 2016
Here's a comparison:
But Oratory lists only one "HE400i (2016 version)":
https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/wiki/index/list_of_presets
By looking at the raw frequency of oratory's graph, it matches your "HE400i 2016" version.
Perhaps Oratory had a second one, and removed it?
If one of your profiles is redundant, please remove the second.

#3. What's the easiest way to import Amir's parametric EQ profiles into Wavelet?
I understand that Wavelet can only use graphic EQ to work, so a "conversion" (for a lack of a better word) will need to be done.
I looked at your "Equalizing Headphones the Easy Way", so I'm guessing "WebPlotDigitizer" will need to be used.
I'm happy to do the work myself, but I will need assistance, if it's not too much trouble.
If this is off topic, I can continue this conversation via Private Message.
1. I'm not sure if Wavelet has been updated yet. If I remember correctly, the dev told me he packages the eq profiles into the app which would mean the user doesn't have to do anything.

2. Good catch with the HE400i. There seems to be 2016, 2020 and without year. The one without year was a preliminary measurement and has been since removed by oratory1990 from his list of measurements. I'll delete that one.

3. You could parse the equalizer frequency response with WebPlotDigitizer. Then you need to run AutoEq. Set compensation/zero.csv as the input (copy the file to a dedicated folder eg. my_data/zero/zero.csv) and set the parsed equalizer frequency response as the compensation. This should give you a GraphicEQ.txt which matches the Amir's equalizer frequency response. You can then import this to Wavelet.
 

tankas

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My feedback on a pair of headphones:
AKG K712pro - the new iteration sound better compared to the old one.
Hifiman Ananda - did the change couple weeks ago, and since then it sounds exactly as Oratory1990 recommendation, which is good.
 

jaakkopasanen

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My feedback on a pair of headphones:
AKG K712pro - the new iteration sound better compared to the old one.
Hifiman Ananda - did the change couple weeks ago, and since then it sounds exactly as Oratory1990 recommendation, which is good.
Glad to hear!
 

mike_ranger

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Also big thanks for your work!
I have a question regarding the Crinacle measurements. I downloaded the latest raw data in the proposed directory structure.
For some reason, the latest Focal Utopia (Sample 3) is not generated.
Do you need to update the script if something in the measurement change or should your script do that automatically?
Thanks, Mike
 
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