When I say bright vs. dark I’m talking about two headphones even after they were tuned using the Oratory1990 presets. So they should have had similar (or close to the same) tuning. This is the “remaining” difference in sound… which is pretty interesting.
Similar, but probably not close enough FR at your own eardrum for the remaining difference to be inaudible.
I've been spending quite a bit of time using all sorts of devilish contraptions to assess HPs' FR in situ on my head...
...and mulling over nebulous and boring squiggly lines such as the ones below to assess the degree of confidence I can have in each measuring technique for each headphones...
... to able to present the results below, using the probe mic above, as "somewhat representative" of what is happening on my own head, comparing four headphones, unEQed, vs. EQed using Oratory's presets :
Averages of five individual seatings (headphones taken off and on) for the right channel, for one measurement session (probe didn't move between the measurements). UnEQed results on top, EQed results at the bottom.
Important note 1 : these results are invalid for you, using the same tools and methodology on your head
would yield different results. They just illustrate what happened on
my own head with
my own samples of these headphones.
Important note 2 : don't look at absolute values,
only the relative values between the four headphones. The absolute values actually aren't
that shabby but that's another subject.
Important note 3 : don't look at the relative differences too specifically. You can't say "at 1237Hz headphones A are 7.345dB higher than headphones B", but rather "at
around 1200Hz headphones A are
around 7-7.5dB higher than headphones B". How specific can I be depends on the area of the FR spectrum I'm looking at, the repeatability of the measurement method, the headphones under consideration (seatings to seatings consistency for example), etc. So it's a complex subject.
important note 4 : While the HD560S and HD650 show little seatings to seatings variation, that is less the case of the Hi-X65, and
much less the case of the K371, so take the latter's results in particular with a very strong pinch of salt.
With a lot of smoothing it's evident that Oratory's profiles were successful at bringing them closer :
But whether we're talking about small dB differences across large bandwidths, or more important dB differences across narrow bandwidths, both of which are audible, differences remained. This is nothing that should be unexpected given the vagaries of headphones measurements and variations in terms of sample variation or individual anatomical variations.
So the remaining difference in sound... might still be at least partially a question of FR (if not entirely).
