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What causes a "veil" ??

post #1 of 13
2/21/12 at 2:13am
Thread Starter 

I had a pair of AKG K430 that i quite liked, i would use them daily at work and thought they were good.

Then i bought ATH-ES55 and it was instantly obvious that the K430 had a "veil" hanging over the sound, swapping between the two was literally like removing a layer of fabric from your ear, it also covered the complete frequency range , it was not just the highs that were veiled it extended over the whole range.

It got me thinking , what was causing it? The freq response charts for the 430 show the normal peaks and troughs at treble range , slightly elevated mids but nothing unusual.

Could it be simply the material the driver is made from?

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post #2 of 13
2/21/12 at 4:01am
Quote:

Originally Posted by astroid View Post

 

It got me thinking , what was causing it?

 

The big dip around 2 kHz as well as the dips at 8 kHz, 10 kHz etc. If you look at heavily smoothed frequency response graphs it might look flat.. but that's not the case.

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post #3 of 13
2/21/12 at 5:09am

A rise in the bass and midbass and dip about 1khz - 15khz.

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post #4 of 13
2/21/12 at 8:24am
Thread Starter 

Are you saying that you could spot a headphone with a 'veil' just by looking at a graph?

 

This is the K430 graph - big dip at 6khz to 8khz but i can see similar behaviour in other cans that are not 'veiled'

 

cb776a71_AKG_K430_reponse.jpg

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post #5 of 13
2/21/12 at 8:44am

I could see the dip at 6 and 8k giving the impression of a "veil" - but you are right, there are other cans that do not exhibit one. 

 

I think it might have something to do with transient response and square wave performance - how fast (and accurately) it attacks... and how it manages sound cut off as well... 

 

Also, I notice that there is a lag when swapping headphones between two sound signatures - my brain makes the differences between them sound more apparent than they are when listening to either one on its own for just a little while longer. The brain compensates - e.g., that veil would dissappear again if you listen to the 430 for a while, and would only re-appear in contrast with the ES-55.

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post #6 of 13
2/21/12 at 9:39am
It could also be the acoustic damper over the driver that causes the veiled sound.
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post #7 of 13
2/21/12 at 9:47am
Quote:
Originally Posted by JRG1990 View Post

It could also be the acoustic damper over the driver that causes the veiled sound.


That change should show up somewhere though. What measurements would reveal it? I would still assume square wave... 

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post #8 of 13
2/21/12 at 9:54am

Quote:

Originally Posted by astroid View Post

Are you saying that you could spot a headphone with a 'veil' just by looking at a graph?

 

This is the K430 graph - big dip at 6khz to 8khz but i can see similar behaviour in other cans that are not 'veiled'

 

Yes. The ~2 kHz area is very important. There's a big dip there too which I mentioned before. The combination of those dips definitely calls for a 'veiled' sensation.


I suggest not to look into transient response or square wave measurements unless you know what you're actually looking at. Frequency response plays by far the biggest role.


Edited by xnor - 2/21/12 at 10:08am
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post #9 of 13
3/9/12 at 3:27pm

Often times headphones/speakers sound nothing like their frequency response charts.

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post #10 of 13
3/9/12 at 3:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by TMRaven View Post

Often times headphones/speakers sound nothing like their frequency response charts.


Often times frequency response charts are misread or misinterpreted.

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post #11 of 13
3/9/12 at 4:06pm

No it's not that hard to interpret them.  At times they're just plain not good at indicating things.  It doesn't help that they're usually centered around a 1khz point as well.

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post #12 of 13
3/9/12 at 4:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by TMRaven View Post

It doesn't help that they're usually centered around a 1khz point as well.
Yeah but If you take graphs of two headphones and compare them with the frequency response curves centered at 1 kHz and go from there that's what I'd call a case of misinterpretation.
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post #13 of 13
3/9/12 at 5:02pm
That frequency response chart shows a bump up at 1kHz and a dip down an octave above at 2kHz. The bumps and dips are bad enough on their own, but 1kHz is exactly the range where frequency masking can make a big impact. Bumps up around that area can cause masking an octave up... Precisely the frequencies that make sound "brighter". The bump up at 1 is probably making the dip down at 2 even worse than it shows on the graph.
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