What’s next?

I am currently listening with my new EQ for the Sennheiser HD600 together with the Qudelix 5K, which I hadn’t used for quite a while, but after I managed to reduce the filter amount to 10 thanks to Mika one of my Patrons, while still keeping the original timbre to some degree, this made the EQ very versatile and usable with external devices like the Qudelix for example or other players or apps featuring a fully parametric EQ. Of course it’s only an approximation of the optimum, with just 10 filters you need to make some compromises but I think I managed a kind of sound which sounds really natural and open but also more spacious than the HD600 stock, which is only the result of trying to make it sound like I perceive sound in real life. I am enjoying the current EQ version already so much that I was listening with the HD600 and the Qudelix during the last 2 days not only to get used to the sound which actually didn’t take long as it quickly became by far the most natural response I managed out of a headphone-like listening device and I am currently re-listening to many of my playlists again re-discovering many tracks again because the current setup became in fact my favorite headphone or lets call it listening device right now.

After all these years I started to look at sound from a completely different perspective because for me it’s actually not about the product per se but rather what kind of sound the given device is able to produce with the limit of 10 filters (more on this later). Meanwhile I see headphones as some kind of instrument which needs to be tuned properly to also sound enjoyable. You can have the most expensive Bösendorfer or Steinway at home, but if it’s not tuned properly it will sound worse than some second hand piano tuned well. The HD600 sounds pretty natural to begin with, therefore it would seem to be the perfect base for further tweaking as you don’t need to deal with any flaws just adjust the great basis to something even better.

I somehow wanted to make a kind of personal challenge out of this. Now that I finally “discovered” how neutral sounds for me, I also can create a target out of my findings and use it for individual adjustment of other headphones. I cannot say for certain how my personal target which definitely is influenced and shaped by my own personal HRTFs to some degree may suit someone else’s ears. I already tried to smoothen my personal peaks out of the final response and make a more generalised and abstracted approximation which still has the character of the original tuning I had achieved. I can imagine that most of you who liked my “work” so far will love it if your ears are not too far off from mine. Others may prefer the more common targets, which may be even more generalised to suit the average ear better, but these targets won’t sound really good to most as there is simply way too much smoothing and averaging involved to suit one’s particular ear perfectly, while my tuning is perfectly tuned forwards one particular ear namely mine, of course still with room for improvement, which may take further work to achieve. Achieving a good sound is not a matter of looking at some graphs only, which can be a useful tool and start for the more exhausting part with lots of listening and comparing to the real references involved. As the human hearing is not absolute but always relative to something and can also vary from one day to the other, I simply want my efforts to get as perfect as possible at the given moment of course. I already claimed this to be best or that etc and there maybe no real limit to achieve this “best” with maybe perfect frequency response matching between reference spectrum, the binaurally recorded spectrum and the final specrum reproduced by the headphone. In theory if those all match perfectly = perfect sound. But of course it’s not that easy actually because I rather noticed the opposite as strict response matching can result in a way too static and resonant sound, it needs some averaging and smoothing some kind of fuzziness in the response to really achieve convincing results but finally it takes again listening by ear to get there.

I started experimenting with limiting the angle of the incoming sound for the later reference spectrum matching, how much amount of sound you hear to the sides or even back is represented in the captured spectrum will contribute to the final result and I wanted to fool around with this more just to know how much influence this would ultimately have on the sound or tuning.

I just hope that all my findings can also put things into another perspective and ultimately give also an improvement to others and would need to hear some feedback from you of course. I think that finally now that I reached some state where I am really confident to have some “real” or “correct” kind of headphone sound, which I personally regard as natural and transparent sounding to my ears, which also appears not only sonically valid to me but also regarding measurements I wanted to particularly thank all of you for your kind support which helped me with this crazy journey and I really hope this could also give you another way of listening or maybe even some benefit.

Therefore (I had already announced this before) my plan or challenge would actually be to try optimising other headphones in the same way like I just did with the HD600. I want to try this for some other headphones I own, and make them simply sound “correct” to me and hopefully also to you like I managed right now for the HD600. I wanted to choose the HD560S maybe first and I am really curious about the possible outcome, because of its angled drivers the HD560S may offer further qualities to the sound when interacting somehow differently with the individual ear. I also own the HD6XX, the HD660S which all should be “doable” to make them sound comparable towards the same target because they do not differ from each other that much. Then it will be really interesting to notice if some will manage to offer advantages over the others when sounding nearly the same. With only 10 filters it will be hard to make them all sound exactly equal, but I think this is the real challenge here. With enough effort you could make them all sound more or less equal but 10 filters is the natural limit I would say to make the EQ usable in most cases, otherwise you need to use your PC all the time if the core thin requires 100 filters to work.

The chosen headphones should not be selected by specs or their “technicalities” but rather because of little sample variation and not too position dependent sound. It will be hard to create a valid EQ for the HD800S for example because you can make it to sound completely different depending on how you wear it, also other headphones come to my mind like the DT770, which can also change the sound a lot depending on how you put it on. But the DT880 is quite popular among audiophiles as well although for me not bearable without any EQ. But these are some models that come into my mind which I still own. I haven’t used them all for a long time also because meanwhile I perceive headphones or shall I simply say “sound” differently than I did 1 year ago. Headphones I liked a while back (e.g. Focal Elex) as only laying around now collecting dust. Dealing with sound nearly the whole day makes you hear things differently, like hearing shifting virtual peaks in the upper mids by adjusting some treble filter. Psychoacoustics is a very complex topic which I don’t fully understand but it’s simply fascinating that something can in fact improve just by adjusting the frequency response in another way. It’s like getting a new headphone without really having to buy one every time. For me personally this is way more satisfying than wasting money on some products that simply cannot sound good regardless how much they cost. Hearing expensive headphones sounding completely off against something way cheaper made me question the whole audiophile industry (of course not all of it). In the end it only comes down to clever marketing and making people believe they are getting something outstanding. Exactly this was the reason why I started doing audio reviews in the first place as I couldn’t stand those false claims and lies with companies trying to sell you speaker cables for some grands.

I assume many came here for reviews or getting advice which speaker or headphone is “best”. Honestly I lost interest in most these products especially headphones and IEMs despite your support I cannot even afford getting them all for a review or some video and wouldn’t have the time to prepare full reviews for them let alone I wouldn’t want to listen with them for longer to begin with. The hard truth is that if you want to make it sound right, you need to do it on your own just like I did. If you are seriously serious about sound and making your headphone sound on another level, this is my honest advice: spend some money and let your own HRTFs measured (which I simply wanted to avoid to save me some money) and then use them with some FIR filter for correcting the final response if you know how to (which I don’t). The result will be based purely on some measured data and you will be still missing the effects of your ear canal which contributes to the final sound, because usually only the effects of the pinna are measured for the HRTF data.

Or you get a binaural microphone exactly like mine, because only this really works precisely enough as it is situated deep enough at the ear entrance but is also able to capture your ear canal thus you should manage to capture your entire HRTF with it. In fact I am going to visit my Otologist in 2 weeks again to let my ears clean and want to perform some before/after headphone measurements to have some better insight on how much the response will really change, this will also heavily depend on how clogged my ears are right now, compared to a completely cleaned state. Then try matching the response your ears would capture compared to the same spectrum measured or captured at the same position with a normal dynamic microphone and finally try doing it again but with the spectrum your binaural microphones will capture from the headphone playing back the original spectrum, and you basically have a rough base for further adjustment and never ending tweaking. Although when I achieved this, it was a big step up for me in sound in all aspects. As mentioned I want to explore this more choosing other spectrums for frequency matching which shouldn’t matter much unlike the distribution of the spectrum you were hearing, because for a dynamic omnidirectional microphone the direction of the incoming sound doesn’t matter, while for your ears it does and will shape the final response accordingly. Limiting the incoming sound more to the front and sides should give quite a bit different results than getting sound only from front or even all around you. This will also change the balance of the final spectrum the headphone is going to reproduce. With all the scientific research that has been done for years on this topic, I am wondering why I have to pay those companies money but still have to do it on my own. It’s like buying a new car but you actually need to build it on your own without even knowing how it should look like.

With this being said I just hope for continuing support from you to be able to work on this topic more which I simply find more fascinating than doing videos about some crappy audio products which I would never buy anyhow. Of course my dream would be to get involved in the design or tuning of some products, I would love to tune an IEM or headphone and also offer variants for tunings like already described above using different spectrum angles etc. But no company really treats me seriously thus I can only offer you my personal optimisations towards some existing products. Ultimately I would also like to recreate the currently achieved response for the Free Pro 2 with a new updated tuning but as I cannot measure IEMs with my own ears while the couplers cannot capture diffuse spectrums, I would need to mostly rely solely on my ear which is hard to approach precisely and can take again some time to achieve comparable results.

Most maybe don’t care anyhow as long as the bass is pumping, therefore I somehow wanted to make a little survey and ask you what topic you would be most interested in to be covered on my Patreon. Creating some kind of “tuning” or optimisation towards different products will be quite an exhausting undertaking that would make lots of fun but which I can only afford with enough support from you. I want these headphones to become as enjoyable to me as I managed for the HD600. I don’t try to sell you some particular product and won’t tell you this or that is best. I would rather try optimising existing ones, maybe even those that you already own. I can also offer individual optimisations which will still be based on my own ear though and I cannot predict how you will perceive the result, that’s the sad truth. For those in the market for a “decent” headphone or who want to upgrade from something cheap or crappy, get the HD600 also because it’s still a must-have today despite its edge and it doesn’t sound off in any way.

Please let me know in the comments your expectations, wishes or ideas. I am not a business man and don’t want to make profit out of you, but to do what I am doing right now I will need continuous support to be able to survive, otherwise I need to stop this madness and start earning money with some normal job again.