This weekend I had my first experience with eq'ing headphones. More or less prompted by the discussions on ASR.
The soft- and hardware I use are an rPi 4 with HifiBerry digi2 pro and DSP add-on running HifiBerryOS, connected via coax to a Topping DX7Pro. Headphones I started with were the Meze 99 Classics.
I used the Oratory profile for these headphones and manually entered the peq settings.
While I could definitely hear a change in sound, it wasn't really satisfactory all over the board. Compared to the non-eq'd sound, it was definitely less dark. However, the mids were a bit too much upfront to my liking. Sometimes giving me the impression they were coming through a phone line (I'm exaggerating of course, but you'll get my point hopefully). Bringing down the gain of one or 2 of the filters mostly fixed this.
More serious though was that I had the impression that the sound was somewhat distorted. Keep in mind that I mostly listen to electronic music, so it's not always easy to judge what the original sound is supposed to be. Still, the feeling that something was 'wrong' remained.
As far as I know, there is no option in HifiBerryOS to lower the overall gain. A setting I see in a lot of these eq profiles. However, in a thread on HifiBerry's forum they say there's no need for this, as there should be more than enough headroom.
Since I'm new to this kind of tweaking the sound, it could be I missed something here and there.
Any tips, suggestions, advice would be helpful. So far I'm thinking I'm just adding a source of distortion in an otherwise clean system.
The soft- and hardware I use are an rPi 4 with HifiBerry digi2 pro and DSP add-on running HifiBerryOS, connected via coax to a Topping DX7Pro. Headphones I started with were the Meze 99 Classics.
I used the Oratory profile for these headphones and manually entered the peq settings.
While I could definitely hear a change in sound, it wasn't really satisfactory all over the board. Compared to the non-eq'd sound, it was definitely less dark. However, the mids were a bit too much upfront to my liking. Sometimes giving me the impression they were coming through a phone line (I'm exaggerating of course, but you'll get my point hopefully). Bringing down the gain of one or 2 of the filters mostly fixed this.
More serious though was that I had the impression that the sound was somewhat distorted. Keep in mind that I mostly listen to electronic music, so it's not always easy to judge what the original sound is supposed to be. Still, the feeling that something was 'wrong' remained.
As far as I know, there is no option in HifiBerryOS to lower the overall gain. A setting I see in a lot of these eq profiles. However, in a thread on HifiBerry's forum they say there's no need for this, as there should be more than enough headroom.
Since I'm new to this kind of tweaking the sound, it could be I missed something here and there.
Any tips, suggestions, advice would be helpful. So far I'm thinking I'm just adding a source of distortion in an otherwise clean system.