My 2021 pair of LCD-X's arrived about a week ago. I really enjoy them, however it took me a while to get used to the sound. There is a noticeable lack of sub bass and vocals and treble seem somewhat laid back, although I actually like this since I'm treble sensitive. In my opinion they are satisfactory without EQ, but the EQ completely changed them for the better. I gave a shot at the Roon EQ using amirm's settings, and I can definitely say that the sub bass extension does wonders for this headphone. I also don't mind the elevated treble as it adds clarity and resolution, but I toned it down a notch.
However, I came across some issues while I was EQing. I also wanted to mention that I am a total noob when it comes to EQ (and I've never used Roon before), so please accept my sincerest apologies regarding my inexperience and the questions I'm about to ask.
Anyways, I was somewhat surprised when I noticed the headphones began to clip and distort. While I'm by no means a basshead, I tested various songs that I knew had lots of sub bass and observed that they did in fact distort (Roon was showing the red clipping icon). The average song was absolutely fine, but for those 1% of tracks I tested (mostly hip-hop, which despite me not being a fan of tends to have a lot of low frequencies) there was noticeable distortion. An example of this was "Middle Child" by J. Cole, where the bass completely muddled the rest of the frequency range.
I managed to remedy this somewhat by enabling volume leveling along with headroom management at -8 db, which caused the clipping icon to disappear. -4 db was fine for the overwhelming majority of tracks, but for those aforementioned sub bass monsters it was not sufficient. And the default -3 db wasn't really sufficient for the majority of bassy songs because it also clipped.
I was wondering if setting the headroom so high somehow impacts the dynamic range or fidelity of the music. I'm currently enjoying the heck out of these headphones, but as someone who's new to EQ I have a lot to learn and would really appreciate if someone could let me know what I'm doing wrong. My setup is a Jotunheim 2 with a Modius running balanced connections.
Thank you very much!