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"You wouldn't download a car..." Turns out maybe you can? The free endgame solution for objectivists

tmtomh

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I have no doubt believing that FR EQ can explain (and erase) the majority of perceived sound differences among headphones.

I would also say, however, that headphones and speakers, being transducers, are going to be inherently lower in fidelity and therefore more variable in sound, than digital source components and amplifiers, which do all their work in the electrical domain (albeit both digital and analogue for some of those components).

And I think with headphones in particular, other sources of variability include impedance matching between the headphones and your headphone amp (as higher impedance amps can alter the response of high impedance and in some cases even moderately high impedance headphones); and the shape of your ears and the way the headphones fit on your head. The change in sound you can get from even small adjustment of the earcups or in-ear inserts of a headphone is far greater than the change in sound from swapping an amp or DAC, or in some cases even from swapping speakers.
 

dfuller

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Gradually, I'm thinking more and more about whether there's more to headphones than frequency response.
Oh, there absolutely is. Take into account harmonic distortion and time domain response (i.e. how much they ring), never mind the impedance that varies with frequency.
 

Theriverlethe

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Oh, there absolutely is. Take into account harmonic distortion and time domain response (i.e. how much they ring), never mind the impedance that varies with frequency.

Most of the CSD plots of headphones I've seen only go out to five milliseconds. Room acoustic measurements generally look at hundreds of milliseconds, so it's hard to see how a couple milliseconds would have much effect. Headphones usually have much lower distortion than loudspeakers as well. Physical dimensions of headphones and how they couple with the user's head probably account for a lot more variability in perception.
 
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ChickenChaser

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I'm clearly not very technical because that made not a lot of sense to me :)

Perhaps I'll tell you what I'd like to try and then if your offer still stands that would be great (if it's too much of a pain, that's fine too)

I used to own a pair of Audeze LCD-X (open back). Loved the sound but they were too heavy.
I now have pair of HifiMan HE Edition X.
I run a mac with Roon, so I can input parametric EQ manually or upload a convolution file.
So if I wanted to make the HifiMan sound like the Audeze how would I do this?

Honestly, it is a lot of work. There are step instructions, but they're scattered across the "measurements" page and the main page of the AutoEQ document/website. I'm not sure when I'd have time or energy to break the whole thing down from start to finish, though I'm glad to help with a few steps if you get stuck somewhere specific. Once you got it all installed properly you'd open the command prompt, use the commands to open up AutoEQ, and then enter something like this:

python autoeq.py --input_dir="measurements/oratory1990/data/onear/Sennheiser HD 800" --output_dir="my_results/Sennheiser HD 800 (LCD-4)" --compensation="compensation/harman_over-ear_2018_wo_bass.csv" --sound_signature="results/oratory1990/harman_over-ear_2018/Sennheiser HD 650/Sennheiser HD 650.csv" --equalize --parametric_eq --max_filters=5+5 --ten_band_eq --bass_boost=4 --convolution_eq --fs=44100,48000

With the names changed to represent the LCD-X and HifiMan Edition X, and the appropriate compensation curves. It's not as scary as it looks, just have to take it a step at a time.
 
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ChickenChaser

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Oh, there absolutely is. Take into account harmonic distortion and time domain response (i.e. how much they ring), never mind the impedance that varies with frequency.

Per online tests I've taken, I can hear harmonic distortion up to around -26dB. That puts me well above average, and I'm quite literally not sure I've ever seen a headphone with distortion that measured that high.
 
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