respice finem
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I'm new here and I'm neither an audio professional, nor a native English speaker, so apologies in advance for possible mistakes.
Coming from a medical profession and being a daily headphone listener, I've tried out quite a few headphones from cheap to ridiculously expensive, and would like to share a few thoughts and observations, which are important to me. Those refer to cable-based "conventional" over-ear headphones, I don't use IEMs, somehow I get tired of them in a matter of minutes.
1. Above the "dirt cheap" level, price doesn't seem to be a sound quality guarantee, as it usually is in other categories of audio equipment. I've come across 150€ headphones sounding better (= closer to the live performance) than others costing ten times as much.
2. The best headphones are useless if they're not comfortable for the user's individual head and ears. Having to correct the fit etc. is distracting or even annoying, and sooner rather than later, the headphones are collecting dust...
3. As we all know, "headphones stereo" differs considerably from "loudspeaker stereo", and even crossfeed only helps so much. The absence of "room sound" may lead to hearing much too loud with headphones with some listeners, while it doesn't seem to bother others. There seem to be two "predefined" (by early "programming" of their hearing?) groups of listeners. For one group, headphones will always be a "necessary evil", for the other they'll beat (subjectively of course) every pair of loudspeakers out there. The latter group tends to "overdamping" of their listening rooms, until the acoustics is somewhat similar to that of headphones - their rooms are never "dead enough".
OK - why am I writing all this? With my current listening room (ca 26 m2 L-shape) I've shifted from loudspeaker listening to headphone listening, as far as stereo goes. The speakers (5.1.2 nearfield setup) are predominantly for surround (film and concerts) and casual TV sound. I cannot convert the (living) room to a studio, for many reasons, and despite many m2 of absorbers and such, an L-shaped room will remain what it is... I've been listening via headphones since my childhood, which may also play an important role in this current "shift". Another subjective observation I've made: The headphone EQ corrections proposed by the respective websites do not fit my hearing at all, which is understandable (I'm 53 and a long-time sports shooter, so I'm already pretty much deaf above 10 kHz), the form and angle of the ears will also have their effects...
Considering the above, I'm wondering, whether the general approach to headphone measurements and EQ might be too, well, generalistic. One might say, OK, every pair of ears is different, but we are listening to loudspeaker-based systems (and natural sound) with those same ears, aren't we? Certainly, but... with headphones, the whole "listening room" is only the size and shape of the earlobes plus the headphones themselves - the earlobes suddenly make for perhaps 30-50% of it. I'm inclined to think that it may be only possible to get the "real" frequency response of any given pair of headphones for the specific user, if she/he gets a chance to bring his individual ears anatomy, as well as the (again individual) "hearing age" into play. Not that I have any idea how to achieve this technically, but I think such an approach might make more practical sense, than just applying "general" EQ, which is almost guaranteed to fail individually without correcting for individual anatomical features (as well as aging hearing for many of us). Then again, there are variations in manufacturing batches etc. - the "circle of confusion" strikes again, it seems... That annoys me a bit, because, not being an engineer but coming from an engineers' family, I'm left with choosing my headphones by listening comparisons alone, not a "technically oriented approach" by any means. Having an individualized, but still objective headphones EQ would be nice - but how? In-ear measurement mic?
I must try to keep my future postings shorter than this one
Coming from a medical profession and being a daily headphone listener, I've tried out quite a few headphones from cheap to ridiculously expensive, and would like to share a few thoughts and observations, which are important to me. Those refer to cable-based "conventional" over-ear headphones, I don't use IEMs, somehow I get tired of them in a matter of minutes.
1. Above the "dirt cheap" level, price doesn't seem to be a sound quality guarantee, as it usually is in other categories of audio equipment. I've come across 150€ headphones sounding better (= closer to the live performance) than others costing ten times as much.
2. The best headphones are useless if they're not comfortable for the user's individual head and ears. Having to correct the fit etc. is distracting or even annoying, and sooner rather than later, the headphones are collecting dust...
3. As we all know, "headphones stereo" differs considerably from "loudspeaker stereo", and even crossfeed only helps so much. The absence of "room sound" may lead to hearing much too loud with headphones with some listeners, while it doesn't seem to bother others. There seem to be two "predefined" (by early "programming" of their hearing?) groups of listeners. For one group, headphones will always be a "necessary evil", for the other they'll beat (subjectively of course) every pair of loudspeakers out there. The latter group tends to "overdamping" of their listening rooms, until the acoustics is somewhat similar to that of headphones - their rooms are never "dead enough".
OK - why am I writing all this? With my current listening room (ca 26 m2 L-shape) I've shifted from loudspeaker listening to headphone listening, as far as stereo goes. The speakers (5.1.2 nearfield setup) are predominantly for surround (film and concerts) and casual TV sound. I cannot convert the (living) room to a studio, for many reasons, and despite many m2 of absorbers and such, an L-shaped room will remain what it is... I've been listening via headphones since my childhood, which may also play an important role in this current "shift". Another subjective observation I've made: The headphone EQ corrections proposed by the respective websites do not fit my hearing at all, which is understandable (I'm 53 and a long-time sports shooter, so I'm already pretty much deaf above 10 kHz), the form and angle of the ears will also have their effects...
Considering the above, I'm wondering, whether the general approach to headphone measurements and EQ might be too, well, generalistic. One might say, OK, every pair of ears is different, but we are listening to loudspeaker-based systems (and natural sound) with those same ears, aren't we? Certainly, but... with headphones, the whole "listening room" is only the size and shape of the earlobes plus the headphones themselves - the earlobes suddenly make for perhaps 30-50% of it. I'm inclined to think that it may be only possible to get the "real" frequency response of any given pair of headphones for the specific user, if she/he gets a chance to bring his individual ears anatomy, as well as the (again individual) "hearing age" into play. Not that I have any idea how to achieve this technically, but I think such an approach might make more practical sense, than just applying "general" EQ, which is almost guaranteed to fail individually without correcting for individual anatomical features (as well as aging hearing for many of us). Then again, there are variations in manufacturing batches etc. - the "circle of confusion" strikes again, it seems... That annoys me a bit, because, not being an engineer but coming from an engineers' family, I'm left with choosing my headphones by listening comparisons alone, not a "technically oriented approach" by any means. Having an individualized, but still objective headphones EQ would be nice - but how? In-ear measurement mic?
I must try to keep my future postings shorter than this one
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