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New frequency chart for hd280 pro at headroom???

post #1 of 22
12/30/08 at 1:22am
Thread Starter 
It's totally different now.....why?
Did they do new measurements with a different method?
The old graph showed a sharp roll off around 200hz, but now it looks like this.
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post #2 of 22
12/30/08 at 11:39am
I guess old one wasn't accurate? It seems like they are updating their frequency charts. HD650 is missing alltogether. and I think Grado graphs look bit different too.


*edit*
http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCom...phID[]=573

HD595 is changed a lot from what I remember. This really is closer to something I heard when I had HD595. Its earlier graph, which I remember, was IMHO quite misleading with almost very flat frequency graph, but its treble was incredibly veiled for my ears and now the graph show that too. Something I did NOT hear in HD580, it was a brilliant headphone.
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post #3 of 22
12/30/08 at 11:58am
looks like they changed the "match" point from 600 hz to 900 hz, which is better, IMHO.

There is a balanced HD650 in there, somewhere.

It is sort of amusing how closely my chosen favorite headphones all look similar now.

Edit: check out the DT250-250 vs k271, the bass still doesn't look right at all...
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post #4 of 22
12/30/08 at 1:43pm
That looks nothing like the 280's. They have no bass at all.
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post #5 of 22
12/30/08 at 1:53pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Acrog View Post
That looks nothing like the 280's. They have no bass at all.
They have a good bit of very deep bass, but are light on midbass. The hump shown is from 20-50hz, leaving the 60-100hz region a bit light. Looks accurate to me.
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post #6 of 22
12/30/08 at 2:08pm
I have to say that their new curves look a lot like what I hear from the three cans I currently own. They got the "hot" upper-midrange of the SR80 (that's an easy one, all the Grado curves I've seen catch that), the dip around 3 - 5 kHz in the K81 DJ that gives them an ever so slight nasal coloration, and the broad recessed area in the upper mids of the D1001 that turns piano tone to mush. They also confirm what my ears tell me about the bass, that the alleged bass-bloated K81 and D1001 are certainly bassier than the SR80 but not THAT much bassier.
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post #7 of 22
12/30/08 at 3:43pm
Those can't be right, look at the graphs for the ATH-W5000. From what I read, those have really good bass, but their graphs say that the bass has a 30 decibel dip in the lower end...
http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCom...Type=0&graphID[]=283&graphID[]=123&graphID[]=263&graphID[]=173

actually, on further inspection of the Grado graphs, they seem to be pretty correct... weird

*edit* oooh, they have a cool feature right below the graphs called "impedance versus frequency". For Kicks, put the balanced HD650 in there and a Denon D5000. It becomes clear why the HD650 needs an awesome amp to sound good
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post #8 of 22
12/30/08 at 3:53pm
Very little (non-organ) music has fundamentals below 70 Hz or so. (Even the sound you hear when you strike the lowest notes of a piano is mostly harmonics; there's very little energy produced at the theoretical fundamental frequencies of those notes.) So subjective impressions of bassiness are not likely to be affected much by what goes on at 60 or lower.
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post #9 of 22
12/30/08 at 4:00pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by supersleuth View Post
Very little (non-organ) music has fundamentals below 70 Hz or so. (Even the sound you hear when you strike the lowest notes of a piano is mostly harmonics; there's very little energy produced at the theoretical fundamental frequencies of those notes.) So subjective impressions of bassiness are not likely to be affected much by what goes on at 60 or lower.

IMHO real bass starts from 70Hz and above are just upper bass. Below that has lots of very relevant information about deep frequencies. When I drop frequencies below 50Hz to 0 bass drums and guitars lose their power completely.

Still, those graphs can be misleading. While there seems to be a heavy roll off below 70Hz that doesnt mean those frequencies are not there to support the music, it just is not that powerfull and deep sounding. Strong bass does not necessarily equal to good quality bass.
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post #10 of 22
12/30/08 at 4:06pm
We're not really disagreeing; there are exceptions to the general rule I mentioned, and amplified instruments like bass guitars seem likely to be such an exception (depending on the capabilities of the speakers they're played through). But for most acoustic music including virtually all classical music that doesn't involve an organ, my statement holds true.

Another complication is that very low frequencies are more felt through the body than actually heard, and headphones just don't do that.
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post #11 of 22
12/30/08 at 4:52pm
The headroom measurements are made with a Neumann "fritz" Binaural head and are at the "ear drum" not at the entry of the ear. That explains some of the off shapes too since there are resonances that happen in the ear canal. Anyway I think there may be some problems with the measurements because the noise floor of the measurement changes between SE and balanced for the same phone. eg:



This should not happen. And points to probable differences in the volume at which the sound was measured. Especially since the difference is on the order of 6db which is the natural loss in volume when you switch between balanced to SE.
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post #12 of 22
12/30/08 at 5:15pm
I don't really like headroom's method of normalizing waveforms. That's why the measurements I did recently take a different approach. Headroom obviously matches volume at a 1 Khz, disregarding any dips or bumps a particular headphone might have in that area (relative to other frequencies). With my measurements, I normalized the recorded waveforms to a uniform average RMS (Root Mean Square) over the entire spectrum. In other words: the average volume of each recorded file is the same, not only the 1 KHz output is the same.
My conviction is that this allows for better comparability even though it still doesn't say everything about how headphones really sound compared to each other. Psychoacoustics and HRTFs are hard to show in graphs
My method has other shortcomings but at least I know that the results mostly conform to what I'm hearing.
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f4/hea...phones-388711/

I'm also wondering why so many AT in the new headroom measurements have severely rolled-off deep bass. My measurements show something totally different (my AT are pad modded, but still) and my hearing certainly confirms that they're not that bass-light.
AT comparison

The Balanced K701 measurement seems odd to me. Can balancing turn them upside down in terms of Frequency Response? I doubt it. Something must be wrong there. Oh and notice the 1 KHz volume level doesn't even match...
K701 / HD650

This is really interesting by the way:
AD300 / HD650
AD300 and HD650 sounding somewhat similar? Haven't seen that coming But I'm suspicious given the K701 measurements.
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post #13 of 22
12/30/08 at 9:01pm
^ I have to disagree about the AD series ATs. To me they do sound as bass thin as the graphs make them out to be. However I agree with you about the K701. It looks wayyyyy more bassy in the graphs than it sounds.

Looking forward to looking at your measurements after work. *goes back to being productive*
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post #14 of 22
12/30/08 at 10:06pm
The K701/702 DOESN'T look bassy in the Headroom graphs. You have to look at the bass / treble balance (which is almost a horizontal line- no falloff towards the treble end) and the relative absence of a midbass hump (which is generally what gives cans an impression of bassiness.) Compare to a can that IS bassy like the Denon D-2000.
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post #15 of 22
12/31/08 at 1:50am
Quote:
Originally Posted by supersleuth View Post
The K701/702 DOESN'T look bassy in the Headroom graphs. You have to look at the bass / treble balance (which is almost a horizontal line- no falloff towards the treble end) and the relative absence of a midbass hump (which is generally what gives cans an impression of bassiness.) Compare to a can that IS bassy like the Denon D-2000.
Not only is there plenty of mid-bass hump, but according to the graph it's about as bassy as a HD650, which is nowhere near true IME.



...and bassier than an RS1:



What I find really strange is the fact that the balanced and unbalanced D5000s have significantly different isolation:
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