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$9 Headphone Review: Sony MDR-ZX110

Wombat

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Same would apply to speakers wouldn't it? EQ, Room treatment/correction, placement etc etc

No. Good speakers are somewhat even in their FR. It seems to me that this is not the case with headphones.
 

DSJR

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So far, the UK price is £12 plus postage to £20 or so depending on colour...
 

restorer-john

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Headphones. Why aren't they plug-and-play, no significant EQ required, yet considered OK with this shortcoming?

It appears all speakers and headphones these days, are from the Bose 901 (let's fix it in the EQ) school of thought. :facepalm:
 

Jimbob54

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HaHa so you are the bad guy, thats the couse that we have to pay 13€ at amazon.de ??!! ;)

I havent thought this through.
 

bobbooo

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Agreed. Would love to see more dac/amps with EQ options and easily switchable presets. That database will come from these reviews - EQ'ing without supremely legible graphs like these is really hard.

Roon EQ rules and I use it and I know there are other software options, but Amir's reviews and his rightfully strong statements about how important EQ is for headphones make it seem like there should be more hardware options.

Check out the Qudelix 5K
 

Jimbob54

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Headphones. Why aren't they plug-and-play, no significant EQ required, yet considered OK with this shortcoming?

Its a good question. 2 schools of thought I suppose.

1. In the designer's/ manuf opinion they have hit the sonic brief - but that isnt aligned to accepted targets - so some of the excess treble designs a la Beyer and co might be designed to highlight/ artificially boost detail- job done.

2. They either dont care or cant hit targets with price constraints and design brief.

Im wondering if the not too distant future isnt a stage where the latter is sidestepped totally and all half serious HP are active with built in EQ. For the first scenario, maybe 2 or more built in EQ- one for the manuf selected signature and one for the "neutral" setting- whether that be Harmanish or other .
 

tomtoo

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12€ at mediamarkt.de :) just ordered one and im so hyped to compare it to my focal clear, using armirm eq or autoeq on both

I ordert too. Iam very curious whats @amirs taste. So it gives me a much better impression of other listening tests. Some kind of a orientation line. And btw i have a new headphone. :)
 

wwenze

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SGD$25 for sold by amazon.sg
SGD$35 from Sony

Think I'll have to let it hitch a ride when I proxy ship some other stuff from slickdeals

Interestingly, I think I have seen more expensive headphones on airplanes, and they sound horrible.
 

Francis Vaughan

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Headphones. Why aren't they plug-and-play, no significant EQ required, yet considered OK with this shortcoming?

It is worth considering that it isn't the same issue as hitting a flat frequency response with a loudspeaker. A headphone is being asked to hit a physically unnatural response curve. It is being asked to emulate the HRTF of the wearer. Human head. So there is a complicated response required, one that is open to debate as to the best choice. The tools available to the designer are somewhat blunt. I would still argue that the best tool is DSP, but we are not seeing that yet. Nor for the most part even passive LCR is seen. Just electromechanical systems with odd bits of damping and resonant tuning. The designer isn't just asked to make a flat response, they are being asked to purturb the response in odd ways to meet an arbitrarily weird response (well targeted to an arbitrary species.) As they say, one should not be complaining about how well it works, but be amazed it works at all.
 

Jimbob54

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I ordert too. Iam very curious whats @amirs taste. So it gives me a much better impression of other listening tests. Some kind of a orientation line. And btw i have a new headphone. :)
I'd join in the fun but can't get on with on-ear designs. Which is a pity as I agree, a cheap way of comparing personal experience to the boss man's.
 

DuncanTodd

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What's that? You don't use EQ? Well, I don't want to hear. Actually, I don't even want to know you! You are wasting away your audiophile life without it. For zero cost you can transform a $9 headphone to a reference quality reproduction engine and you still don't want to go there? If so, I have nothing for you!
I'd be all over EQ if my sporadic headphones use if I wasn't connecting them to my old stereo integrated to listen to CDs and Vinyls :(
 
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Robin L

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A ten dollar headphone that sounds good with eq is interesting. But a hundred dollar headphone that doesn't require eq seems like a much more interesting proposition to me. While the sort of folks who hang out at ASR know about eq, most don't and most won't do anything about it. Plug and play is where it's at, unless you're an audiophile tweaker.
 
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