Hi,
 
A have a FiiO E10K Olympus 2 DAC/Amp and a pair of AKG K612 PRO headphones. I mostly listen to acoustic sessions and I noticed a sharpness for example when an artist uses the "s" letter.
As an example on the track Kiesza - Take Me To Church (Hozier Cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIFk3tZSI from 0.30 to 1.04  all the "s"-es are sharp and stand out. Apart from the sharpness the instruments and voice sound unbelievably nice. My goal would be to reduce the sharpness of the "s"-es without losing quality. If anyone could help me understand the root of the problem and provide any solutions (software or hardware) I would be very interested. Thanks.

The K612 are very revealing. Could be the recordings you are listening to.

You could always use EQ to reduce the frequencies that you find a problem.

mihai303 said:

  Hi,
 
A have a FiiO E10K Olympus 2 DAC/Amp and a pair of AKG K612 PRO headphones. I mostly listen to acoustic sessions and I noticed a sharpness for example when an artist uses the "s" letter.
As an example on the track Kiesza - Take Me To Church (Hozier Cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIFk3tZSI from 0.30 to 1.04  all the "s"-es are sharp and stand out. Apart from the sharpness the instruments and voice sound unbelievably nice. My goal would be to reduce the sharpness of the "s"-es without losing quality. If anyone could help me understand the root of the problem and provide any solutions (software or hardware) I would be very interested. Thanks.

Click to expand...

 
What program(s) do you use to play your audio?
Hopefully something like Foobar2000?
 
Maybe a tube amplifier ($100-$120) might offer a positive change in the sound?

Thank you for the replies. I tried to listen to the same recording on an Aune T1 MK2 DAC/AMP paired with the Beyerdynamic 990 pro headphones. Unfortunately the sound is improved but the high frequencies are still too sharp. I guess the quality of the recording is not good enough. 
 
I mostly listed to youtube directly from the browser and unfortunately the sharpness is present in all videos at the high frequency level.  So I must dig in the EQ settings. I tried out the Equalizer APO project that can apply system level wide EQ for an audio device.
 
Do you have any recommendations of software / documentation I can use to determine the EQ setting while listening to a song ? 

Someone once said on a forum discussing this that I was reading that if you start listening for sibilance, you'll hear it everywhere. I recommend learning to tune it out and ignore it (psychologically).

I hate sibilance - it drives me crazy. It's one of the primary reasons I prefer warmer headphones like Sennheiser, Westone, Mr. Speakers and Audeze.

mihai303 said:

   I tried to listen to the same recording on an Aune T1 MK2 DAC/AMP paired with the Beyerdynamic 990 pro headphones. Unfortunately the sound is improved but the high frequencies are still too sharp. I guess the quality of the recording is not good enough. 
 
I mostly listed to youtube directly from the browser and unfortunately the sharpness is present in all videos at the high frequency level. 

Click to expand...

 
not sure how you determine the sound quality improvement with a low quality youtube video ? 

Random, but I am curious, does anyone know what kind of headphones she is wearing?

jwpraxis said:

Random, but I am curious, does anyone know what kind of headphones she is wearing?

Click to expand...

Those appear to be Beyerdynamic DT100 or DT150:
http://north-america.beyerdynamic.com/shop/hah/headphones-and-headsets/studio-and-stage/studio-headphones/dt-100.html
http://www.amazon.com/Beyerdynamic-DT-150-250-GREY-Monitoring-Headphone-Environments/dp/B000LDPP1K

brilliant. thank you

I also have a E10K + AKG K612 PRO and I can't find myself satisfied with it, but I suspect it's an issue on my end, I may be not doing something correctly.
I use Foobar2K and I have tested the combo with different FLAC tracks, but I find the sound kind of closed, compressed, low mids sound muddy and undefined, some peaks in higher frequencies, mids aren't as warm as described.
Percussions and medium sized strings often get drowned and choked by low mids.
Listening to Mountains -Interstellar OST, track 8, gives off tremendous low-frequency flickering  during the "chanting" part towards the end.
I suspect that I haven't tuned foobar very well or that the FLAC I'm playing are actually ****, but how likely can that be.

I'm hoping one of you can help me, maybe suggest me some good synergy or detect issues in my setup, else I'll have to ship the headphones back

It might depend on where you got the FLAC file. Did you rip it yourself?

What other headphones have you heard?

There are also some known issues that can occur when windows is trying to stream media out the USB port. On one of my laptops, that's an intermittent stuttering sound. It goes away if I disable my wireless and wired network cards. On another laptop, I have no issues with the same E10 and FLAC file.

I got them from specialized OST torrent trackers, then again the original mastering may be ****, but honestly I highly doubt that Hans Zimmer would release ****.
Assuming the issue is in the files, let's cut the chase: would you point me to your personal "setup test" flacs, so that I can rule out that hypothesis?

I tested the setup with every piece of equipment I could get my hands on: Soundmagic E10, Xiaomi Pistons, some old Numark on-ear, Sennheiser MX880, even some flashy Bose IE2.
The least improvement I've noticed is with the much pricier K612 pro. Well except for soundstage and overall accuracy.

Flac -> Foobar -> WASAPI -> Fiio E10k -> K612

Maybe I picked up the wrong combo? I've read the E10k doesn't have very good synergy and it's picky with headphones

And what happens when you take the E10K out of the chain and just go directly from the PC headphone jack to all of those headphones? I'm a little confused - does the E10K help or hurt? I'm trying to figure out whether you really have an issue with the set-up or if it is just that you expected a bigger impact than what you got.

For each headphone, putting the e10k in the line makes for a noticeable all around improvement compared to the laptop headphone jack. I don't have the control I had with various software equalizing and improvements I used to make up for the low quality playback you can expect from a normal laptop, but the e10k obviously improved each headphone pair as I expected.
Now, regarding the k612's: putting the e10k in the line does indeed improve the sound compared to direct laptop jack (which makes for awful performance with these akg), but it still has the issues I described in the first post.

I'm not an experienced audiophile, but I'm not deaf either, and I can surely say what I'm hearing is not the "natural, analytical, balanced" sound they talk about. While the soundstage is much better than any other combo I tested, and the imaging is overall accurate like no other headphone in my possession, I can still say I often hear better defined and forward instruments or whole sections with the other gear.
Say, a synth line in some Japanese soundtrack sounds much better with the Soundmagic rather than with the AKG which barely makes it sound, a clean or acoustic guitar in this or that track is warmer with the Bose, the drums are ofter more detailed and present with the sennheiser rather than with my K612 which actually choke them.