[bigshot]

And worrying about response curves on speakers is a waste of time. You can buy a speaker with the most perfect response possible on paper and drop it in your living room and it will be a mile away. THE ROOM is as important to the sound of the speakers as the speakers themselves. When I buy speakers I never bother with response curves. I just want to know the frequency extension and how loud they can get without distorting. The rest is up to the arrangement of the room and equalization.

Balanced response with speakers is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than with headphones. The relationship of the response of speakers to a balanced playback bears no relation to the way the Harman Curve relates to headphones. Speakers have completely different variables, and completely different ways of dealing with them.

 

[ADUHF]

Listen. Don't talk for a minute. I'm getting exhausted with this. I'll repeat myself one more time.

I did not say that it was not a discernible difference. I said it is perceptible but IT DOESN'T MATTER because when listening to music your ears would easily accommodate to it in a very short space of time. Ears can adjust to response deviations. Small imbalances, especially long gradual ones just don't matter. The differences between one headphone copy and another of the exact same make and model are probably as great or greater than this.

You're arguing some sort of absolutist straw man theory that I'm not claiming. You can go ahead and say a tiny molehill is a mountain to you. That is fine. I will understand your obsession and leave you alone. But at least understand what I am saying.

THERE IS NO PERFECT RESPONSE CURVE. THE HARMAN CURVE IS AVERAGED FROM A RANGE OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE'S PERFECT RESPONSE CURVES. THERE'S NO NEED TO DEMAND ACCURACY TO A FRACTION OF A PERCENT BECAUSE THE CURVE ITSELF ISN'T ABSOLUTE FOR EVERYONE'S EARS.

I am listening, bigshot. And would agree that our ears have the wondrous ability to adapt to all kinds of different sound signatures. So you will get no arguments from me on this.

I can't agree that such small deviations of 2 dB or so across a wide range are of no importance though. Because I know from my own personal experience that they can make a noticeable difference to my enjoyment of a headphone's (or speaker's) sound. Your and others mileage may vary on this though.

 

[ADUHF]

And worrying about response curves on speakers is a waste of time. You can buy a speaker with the most perfect response possible on paper and drop it in your living room and it will be a mile away. THE ROOM is as important to the sound of the speakers as the speakers themselves. When I buy speakers I never bother with response curves. I just want to know the frequency extension and how loud they can get without distorting. The rest is up to the arrangement of the room and equalization.

Balanced response with speakers is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than with headphones. The relationship of the response of speakers to a balanced playback bears no relation to the way the Harman Curve relates to headphones. Speakers have completely different variables, and completely different ways of dealing with them.

This has not been my experience. In fact, I'm finding an extremely high correlation between the predicted (and measured) sound power and room responses of the better loudspeakers, and what sounds best and most accurate on a pair headphones.

So there is clearly a strong relationship between the two in my view. And this becomes even more clear as a delve more deeply into the details of the two types of transducers. So I'm afraid I can't agree with you on the above, either in theory, or in actual practice.

 

[bigshot]

You won't be satisfied with any transducers I'm afraid. The vast majority of human beings wouldn't have a problem adjusting to a small broad deviation like that.

As for the speakers. I am giving up. You didn't read what I wrote again.

 

[ADUHF]

Balanced response with speakers is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than with headphones. The relationship of the response of speakers to a balanced playback bears no relation to the way the Harman Curve relates to headphones. Speakers have completely different variables, and completely different ways of dealing with them.

I'm sorry, but the vast weight of the evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, seems to be against you on these points, bigshot. Imho.

 

[bigshot]

No I'm done. I can't get my points across to you. There is some communication problem. You don't hear what I am saying. That's OK.

 

[VNandor]

The difference would need to be more than 3dB to be at all audible, and anything under 5 would be pretty small. I don’t see any difference between the responses you’re citing there in the last chart.

^So this is your first post on that graph. This claim is demonstrably false which you hopefully recognized because your next take was this:

Differences under 3dB in commercially recorded music are too small to matter. 3dB with test tones is different than 3dB in a narrow band of frequencies with recorded music. Numbers are meaningless without context. It’s a good idea to research thresholds of human perception and experiment with sound editing programs so you know what the numbers actually sound like.

Some people took your advice and experimented with sound editing programs to see what the numbers actually sounded like and reached a different conclusion than you. I don't think we have different conclusions because you couldn't get your point across. Maybe what you couldn't get across is that these changes do not matter to you but you are perfectly fine if it matters to people other than you? I'm just grasping at straws here.

 

[sander99]

Balanced response with speakers is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than with headphones. The relationship of the response of speakers to a balanced playback bears no relation to the way the Harman Curve relates to headphones. Speakers have completely different variables, and completely different ways of dealing with them.

I'm sorry, but the vast weight of the evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, is against you on these points. Imo.

@ADUHF: Headphones skip a part of your HRTF, loudspeakers don't, and sounds in the real world coming from a distance don't. That's why there exists no objective neutral for headphones, but objective neutral for loudspeakers does exist (although the latter depends on the room as well as the loudspeaker).
Don't confuse Harman's reasearch on loudspeakers with the Harman curve for headphones. Of course there is a relationships between the two.
I just now read this sentence that seems to describe that relationship: "The Harman headphone curve is the response of a flat loudspeaker (Salon2 IIRC) in a moderately reflective room (intended to be a representation of domestic listening), measured by a calibrated head-and-torso simulator that acts as a surrogate for a human listener."
The headphone has to "compensate" for the skipped part of the HRTF to achive the same tonal balance as the loudspeakers, and because everyone has a different HRTF there can never be one headphone that does this exactly correct for everyone. Everyone would need a different headphone (or different EQ for the headphone).
If however you have a loudspeaker in a room that measures flat at the listening position then it will be objectively flat for everyone (sitting in that position).

Now still for you yourself that 2 dB here or there or whatever may matter because of your personal HRTF, but for everyone else it is a random change that could be better or worse or equally bad in the other direction. Maybe that is what's really bothering @bigshot, that such details of your "personal optimal headphone curve" are meaningless for everyone else.

And worrying about response curves on speakers is a waste of time. You can buy a speaker with the most perfect response possible on paper and drop it in your living room and it will be a mile away. THE ROOM is as important to the sound of the speakers as the speakers themselves. When I buy speakers I never bother with response curves. I just want to know the frequency extension and how loud they can get without distorting. The rest is up to the arrangement of the room and equalization.

This I can not fully agree with. I gather you didn't look at the Floyd Toole video that ADUHF posted earliet in this thread?
They did subjective listening tests with many people and many loudspeakers, and did so called spinorama measurements of the loudspeakers (measuring the frequency response on many different axis). They found that loudspeakers that had a similar frequency response off axis in various directions compared to on axis are preferred. If such a loudspeaker is not flat it is not necessarily a problem: that can be EQd. If however the off axis response is very different from on axis you can not fix that with EQ.
He says a lot more of course, but from the above it seems it could be worth while to look at a loudspeaker's spinorama before buying.

 

[bigshot]

That is dispersion, not frequency response. Two different things. There are purposes for wide dispersion speakers, focused horn loaded ones, and dipoles. Dispersion affects the response at different points in a room, but that is a separate issue from the general frequency response of a speaker printed on the charts he was posting. And again dispersion has as much to do with the room as the speaker.

It's difficult to talk about one topic at a time. Side issues keep getting added to the already massive group of kittens being herded. I'm tired of it.

 

[ADUHF]

Science is hard. And I frequently have to rest my brain when thinking and talking about this stuff.

As I said before, I've probably watched that video by Mr. Toole maybe a dozen times. And there are still things in it that I don't fully grasp. Because he covers so much terrain and so many different concepts in such a relatively short space of time. I wish he had also explained a little more about how to treat rooms for the lower frequencies as well. But I'm sure that's covered in some of his other books and articles. And maybe also some posts on AVS.

It also took me quite awhile to understand what he was sayin about the relationship between a speaker's dispersive/directional characteristics, and in-room frequency response. There is clearly an important relationship there though. Which can be seen in the sound power frequency response curves of most of the speakers that I've posted above.

The reason many speakers apparently have a dip in their sound power (and in-room) response at around 2k, for example, is because there's often a reduction in the speaker's dispersion in that range, due to the cross-over of the midrange and tweeter drivers. On speakers with a more L-shaped sound power curve, that reduction in dispersion may be even less confined in its bandwidth. And extend a little further up into the higher frequencies above 2k as well.

So yes, a speaker's directivity or dispersion is apparently pretty crucial to its tonal balance and sound quality in a room.

 

[ADUHF]

^So this is your first post on that graph. This claim is demonstrably false which you hopefully recognized because your next take was this:

Some people took your advice and experimented with sound editing programs to see what the numbers actually sounded like and reached a different conclusion than you. I don't think we have different conclusions because you couldn't get your point across. Maybe what you couldn't get across is that these changes do not matter to you but you are perfectly fine if it matters to people other than you? I'm just grasping at straws here.

I can't get inside other people's heads. But I suspect that the main thing bigshot is objecting to is the notion that the sound of loudspeakers in a room can be accurately reproduced, in all its characteristics, solely through the manipulation of a headphone's frequency response. Which is not something I believe, or have said here. And if I gave that impression to anyone, I apologize for it.

Imo though, there is a very strong relationship between the sound power and in-room response of a good set of loudspeakers, and a good-sounding set of headphones. Which can potentially go quite a long way towards the objective of achieving a more room-like sound in a pair of headphones. Because frequency response is one of the more important characteristics in both a headphone's and speaker's sound quality. And I think (or maybe hope?) bigshot would also tend to agree with me on this.

There are, of course, other factors or qualities in a loudspeaker's sound which are potentially more difficult to emulate though, such as crossfeed, and temporal effects. And DSP may be one possible avenue to more accurately approximating some of those.

 

[ADUHF]

@ADUHF: Headphones skip a part of your HRTF, loudspeakers don't, and sounds in the real world coming from a distance don't. That's why there exists no objective neutral for headphones, but objective neutral for loudspeakers does exist (although the latter depends on the room as well as the loudspeaker).
Don't confuse Harman's reasearch on loudspeakers with the Harman curve for headphones. Of course there is a relationships between the two.
I just now read this sentence that seems to describe that relationship: "The Harman headphone curve is the response of a flat loudspeaker (Salon2 IIRC) in a moderately reflective room (intended to be a representation of domestic listening), measured by a calibrated head-and-torso simulator that acts as a surrogate for a human listener."

I looked at the discussion on ASR that the above quote came from. And it unfortunately devolved into another rather insipid discussion of B. Katz's supposed ideal room curve. Audio engineers use different room curves for different purposes though. And I'm sure Mr. Katz has his reasons for what he does. If it works well for him, then so be it. I won't debate that here. Whether that also makes such a room response a good model for the sound of a pair of headphones is highly debatable though imo.

What is equally as relevant, if not more so imo, is the sound in the target listening space. Which may, or may not resemble what's going on in the production environment.

The headphone has to "compensate" for the skipped part of the HRTF to achive the same tonal balance as the loudspeakers, and because everyone has a different HRTF there can never be one headphone that does this exactly correct for everyone. Everyone would need a different headphone (or different EQ for the headphone).
If however you have a loudspeaker in a room that measures flat at the listening position then it will be objectively flat for everyone (sitting in that position).

I would agree with this.

I think the significance of this issue can sometimes be overstated though. And is probably a more important factor to take into account in the design of IEMs than over-ear type headphones. Others may disagree with this though.

 

[ADUHF]