Software to design headphone EQ curve

[randomusername]

Sorry if I post in wrong forum, it is basically general EQ question, but specific to headphones in my case.
First try i attempted to EQ headphones was by looking at their measurements curve and writing peaks and dips corrections filters manually, trying to align resulting curve to expected target with bass shelf (just like amrim does now in his headphone reviews). After few iterations, the result i got was pretty good, sound become more balanced, less muddled and "full" comared to stock headphone sound, you know what i am talking about.
Next try i decided to use REW for this purporse. I dont have any speakers and only heard about REW before in this forum, so it take me some time to figure out how to use this software. I loaded 2018 harman target as home curve (got it from autoeq github repository), set speaker type to full-range whitout slopes, loaded crinacle GRAS measurements for my headphone (he seems to do many of them and calculated average curves already), selected range 20-16500 (i dont hear beyond 16500 anyway) and let REW to calculate filters. Also i have added low-pass filter at 18.5k to cut off exceeded freqencies (last auto-generated peak resulted to high rise at this point, and REW seems to not care about this).
The results was astonishing, after loading 20 generated filters in equalizerapo all muddiness and harshness i have seems to be used to and i have not noticied is gone, and sound become extremelly clear and natural. So, after few days i have spent to listening to music in this beautiful quality, i want to know, if there is any more convient way / software to design EQ curve rather than REW calculations to predefined target? I want to change target curve manually just by dragging it by mouse (and listen to results) and I dont even need this autogenerated 20 PEQ filters in text form, my equalizer supports convolution filters in .wav files, and results should be more precise in this way.
Thank you in advance

 

[sweetchaos]

As far as I know, there's 2 ways of auto EQ'ing headphones based on the target preference curve:
1. AutoEQ
I believe it's python based, and it fits various measurements to various preference curves.
I haven't tried running the tool myself, since I'm lazy and just used his auto-generated PEQ profiles.
Here's a how-to-guide on how to do this.

2. Matlab tool created for speakers by @ Maiky76 , but I know he's using it for headphone PEQ filter generation as well.
I believe his target is the Harman curve, as explained in this post.

Not sure if that answers your question.

 

[witwald]

The approach that you have taken seems to be quite reasonable. You have a target curve and a measured headphone curve to work with. Letting REW do the filter calculation appears to have worked well for you.

Which headphones do you have? Can we see the measured headphone response curve and the target curve that you are aiming for?

As a general comment, it seems to me that 20 PEQ filters is quite a lot! I'd have anticipated that 6 or so filters might suffice, and be capable of achieving quite good results. Aiming for a very close fit to the target curve might not be entirely necessary. I would have expected that simply getting the main features equalised would produce a good listening experience.

Maybe REW allows you to switch off some of filters while the optimizer is tuning them? I'd start with a few filters centred on the main response aberrations that you wish to control. Once they are designed, adding one or two extra PEQ filters at a time may serve to get a better match with the target, while minimising the use of so many PEQ filtering functions.

 

[markanini]

I like REW best because it's easy control bands manually which helps with tweaking after subjective evaluation. You can for instance limit adjustments to <2kHz where individual HRTFs have less effect. Another thing that's made easier is creating an octave band EQ for devices that lack parametric EQ.