Excellent Presentation on Headphone Measurements

[amirm]

If you don't believe in a decade of research backing the talk, then of course you are going to have a negative reaction to it.

 

[ADU]

If you don't believe in a decade of research backing the talk, then of course you are going to have a negative reaction to it.

I understand where you're comin from on that, Amir. But I disagree with it. It's not a fair characterization of my opinion in this case.

 

[kongwee]

For me, able to test as many headphone I want. 2 hour traveling, many boutique/shop/cafe. All these talks are just for information. Practically ATH-50 is all I need.

 

[amirm]

I understand where you're comin from on that, Amir. But I disagree with it. It's not a fair characterization of my opinion in this case.

Well, your characterization of the talk was beyond unfair.

 

[Doodski]

Practically ATH-50 is all I need.

How is the bass on those? Are they comfortable?

 

[ADU]

Well, your characterization of the talk was beyond unfair.

That is a different subject, and you are of course entitled to your opinion. Which I'll bear in mind.

 

[kongwee]

How is the bass on those? Are they comfortable?

Bass is light. For bass, my preference is in-ear phone actually. For headphone, it is enough. It cup my ear fully. After heavy use, it doesn't stress my head. The leak is so not good, especially you need to do recording. I can go for Beyerdyamic, but I am too used to Audio Techinca. It is compromise for work instead of relax listening.

 

[Doodski]

Bass is light. For bass, my preference is in-ear phone actually. For headphone, it is enough. It cup my ear fully. After heavy use, it doesn't stress my head. The leak is so not good, especially you need to do recording. I can go for Beyerdyamic, but I am too used to Audio Techinca. It is compromise for work instead of relax listening.

I use the Sennheiser HD 598SR right now and am thinking about getting something better. I like a lot of high frequency. I have my EQ very boosted in the highs. So something bright sounding is maybe the best. I use them ~2 to10+ hours per day. Have you heard the 598 when you go looking at headphones?

 

[jae]

What do you think are the other 2 headphones of the 4 he mentioned made by Harman that follow the curve? Could they be the k371 and k361?

AutoEq/results/RANKING.md at master · jaakkopasanen/AutoEq

Automatic headphone equalization from frequency responses - jaakkopasanen/AutoEq

github.com

 

[Miiksuli]

View attachment 194519

That made me order EarFun Air Pro SV. It has similar tuning (probably), atleast if we can trust to the measurement.

 

[kongwee]

I use the Sennheiser HD 598SR right now and am thinking about getting something better. I like a lot of high frequency. I have my EQ very boosted in the highs. So something bright sounding is maybe the best. I use them ~2 to10+ hours per day. Have you heard the 598 when you go looking at headphones?

Very few occasion, I tried Sennheiser. Beyer and AT are more common for me.

 

[MayaTlab]

I find this ''bass punch'' hump very smart. I always try to do this when i eq my headphones otherwise the punch can be drown out. I generally tone down the 60-80hz area. That part makes too much constant, fatiguing sound.
So little less around 60-80, little more around 90-120 compared to harman.

Even when leakage issues aren't involved, below 200Hz, it's quite common, particularly for headphones with a somewhat closed front volume, to show a number of wiggles / bumps / dips on ear simulators, that simply won't show up to the same extent on real humans.

That's quite visible in this article from Harman with the K550 : https://www.grasacoustics.com/files...mprovedMeasurementofLeakageEffects_Harman.pdf

K550 on ear simulator (with one of Harman's custom pinna, but the pinna doesn't matter in this case, it's similar across different pinnae) :

Same K550 on two real humans with a good seal (the other six couldn't get a proper seal anyway) :

Resolve's on-head measurements for the DCA Stealth seem to show a fairly similar 100Hz vs 200Hz difference to what he measured on his ear simulator, but the overall transition is smoother, so what looks like a bump on his ear simulator looks rather like a slightly elevated bass shelf with his on-head measurements (Not sure of it but I believe that he uses a compensation file to match his in-ear mic with the ear simulator at lower frequencies, just like what Rtings does, so the values should be somewhat comparable) :

Dan Clark Audio Stealth Planar Closed-Back Headphones Review

Check out Resolve's Dan Clark Audio Stealth Review. Find out how Dan Clark Audio's closed-back planar magnetic flagship headphone stacks up to the competition.

www.headphones.com

Also, given how reliant DCA headphones seem to be on getting a proper seal, that discussion seems to me a bit of a moot point until we get more on-head data at low frequencies across a wider range of individuals (which I'd be surprised to learn DCA doesn't perform on their own when developing their headphones !) .

This is one thing that I love about Rtings' data : for the over-ears, the bass response is measured on five real humans and then merged with their ear simulator results past a few hundred hertz : https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/sound-quality/frequency-response-consistency
Alas no DCA headphones in their database.

The K371 and 5909

Two perfect examples why on-head measurements effin' matter .
While someone else's experience might be different, as far as I'm concerned I can quite categorically assert that these two headphones are not shaped like Harman when put on my own head, and that this is not a question of sample variation.

Mark Levinson 5909, new ANC wireless cans that advertise use of the Harman curve

Forgot to give credit to @Sean Olive in his tweet here. I believe this is an actual production sample - it slightly differs how it measures from the production validation sample posted earlier. What @Sean Olive thinks about Brent Butterworth´s measurements at Soundstage Solo...

audiosciencereview.com

Mark Levinson 5909, new ANC wireless cans that advertise use of the Harman curve

From another thread, looks like Bose just released a firmware update to their APP for their new QC45, which adds EQ settings: Bass, Med, and Treble control. ;) Coincidentally, I ordered the QC35 yesterday as I'm curious how it compares to my ML if I apply the EQ settings from Amir's excellent...

audiosciencereview.com

 

[Jimbob54]

I'm 10 minutes in and its good so far. @Dan Clark I believe it was Frans @solderdude who did the colourful FR chart of how we perceive each area.

 

[solderdude]

Yes it was... and what Dan said was also true .. some member at ASR drew that FR chart and I am a member here .
Dan, as of today, has my permission to use it in his presentation.
I really like his talk and honesty and matches with most of my views.

The plot was made by playing around with a graphic equalizer and matching what I heard with terminology used on various audio(phile and phool) forums.
Most terminology in the plot is widely accepted in the audio consumer world.

 

[cheapmessiah]

Yes it was... and what Dan said was also true .. some member at ASR drew that FR chart and I am a member here .
Dan, as of today, has my permission to use it in his presentation.
I really like his talk and honesty and matches with most of my views.

The plot was made by playing around with a graphic equalizer and matching what I heard with terminology used on various audio(phile and phool) forums.
Most terminology in the plot is widely accepted in the audio consumer world.

You have a link for it? I found it interesting and useful.

 

[solderdude]

https://diyaudioheaven.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/descriptors2.png?w=768

a higher resolution picture is attached (my website can't do higher resolution, at least not the free account)

 

[xaviescacs]

https://diyaudioheaven.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/descriptors2.png?w=768

It's a classic already. Dan just confirmed this.

 

[odyo]

I might experiment with mimicking that 80-150Hz hump in some of my headphones that have been measured. He did intimate that the main reason for including that hump was due to the fact that the Stealth is a very low distortion headphone, so it doesn't display the harmonics in that area that would happen as a result of bass distortion happening from tones lower down the frequency range in headphones that have higher distortion - as in the theory that distortion in the low bass of some headphones reinforces overall bass level by distortion creating harmonics in the bass further up the frequency range. So the Stealth wouldn't be able to get bass reinforcement by these distortion harmonics in the bass & therefore they added in the extra bass to make up for that. It could be the Harman Curve was created on headphones whereby the bass is partially reinforced by the harmonics that come about from the distortion that might have been present in those headphones during the process of creation of that curve. (Although wouldn't the amplitude of the harmonics be captured in the overall frequency response measurements of the headphone anyway, which would go against the reasoning behind the inclusion of that hump, even though Dan did say that was why they included the hump). But anyway, I might experiment incorporating that hump into some of my EQ's to see how it sounds......perhaps I'd expect it to fair the best in headphones that have low bass distortion, as that was supposedly the driving factor behind inclusion of this hump......I'd probably try it on my HE4XX (planar, and quite low distortion in bass), and also on my HD560s (dynamic driver, but low distortion in bass too).....I might try it on my closed back NAD HP50 (also low distortion) but it's hard to get the seal right on the HP50, so a bit unreliable to test on that one.

That makes sense. I listen at quite low volumes though. I don't know if distortion is still relevant at that level. I noticed that i'm more sensitive to this 60-80 area. At 20-40hz, you feel the vibrations more than hear. At 60-80hz it turns into a intruding sound to my ears. Maybe it's the harmonics of 20-40 area or maybe hum i don't know. That's the part i find annoying below 150hz when i boost the bass. In fact, if i lower the energy in that area, i can even use extreme levels of EQ like 20+db bass and still have somewhat ok sound. Feel like that area masks the both sub bass and punchy bass as well as clarity overall.

 

[odyo]

Perhaps this deserves its own thread, but this was another interesting talk from the same conference given by the designer of the Sennheiser HE-1 and HD600/650/800, Axel Grell, who left Sennheiser awhile ago, and started his own company, Grell Audio.

It looks like one of the products he is developing is an equalization program that will allow people to more easily dial in the best sound for their own ears. The questions in the 2nd half were wide-ranging though, and covered alot of different topics, mostly related to his work at Sennheiser.

I thought he had some pretty interesting things to say on the subject of acoustic impedance as well, which is something I don't know nearly as much about as FR. He seemed to imply that measurements of this characteristic could potentially be up their with FR in terms of importance in the design and tuning of headphones though... Some very interesting stuff.

I watched this couple of days ago. I remember 2 interesting bits. The main emphasis of the talk was i think the natural equalizer tool of humans (ears) and he emphasizes driver size because it makes more use of this natural equalizer (human ear). One of the main motives of HD800 i guess. Also looks like he likes big planar drivers for this reason.

Second interesting part is their in house experiment with high frequencies. He said people preferred inaudible high frequency reproduction in a blind test even though they didn't hear them.

 

[ayane]

It was a good presentation, and the example of how distortion can color the sound was fascinating.

If anything, I think the presentation was detail-shy and not technical enough and left me with a lot of questions! How can a headphone create a 3D soundstage when the wavefront always hits the pinnae from the same angle? Also, apart from tuning the group delay, impulse response, and distortion, what are the advantages of non-DSP frequency response tuning? How does individual-specific HRTF computation fit in to statistical average approaches of finding a target preference curve like Harman 2018? How much do interpersonal anatomical variations stymie research on finding preference curves, especially considering the limited diversity in the subjects (e.g. differences between female and male subjects, or even interracial differences)? Finally, in a world of DSP and HRTF/otoacoustic emissions measurements/canal gain measurements, what can be gained from bypassing the pinnae in headphone design (i.e. IEMs)? what is lost?