[chargedcapacitor]

That new level would be...for matching personal preference and not much else. The end result is distortion pure and simple. Because the source file is not bit perfect anymore. Hardware EQ is another matter, but people who are that confident that they can EQ a headphone to sound more "real" than the people who make it chains really should do it professionally.

Modern software EQ is bit perfect, so audible distortion is nothing to worry about.

 

[jlbrach]

It is one thing to listen to a reviewers view on the technical qualities and abilities of a HP…it is another to adopt his listening preferences as your own…IMHO that is what you are doing if you slavishly use the same settings he does

 

[Tachyon88]

Price is irrelevant to EQ'ing a headphone. Headphones with low distortion have tons of headroom for equalization. Also, I'm pretty sure digital PEQ do not degrade the sound at all and that is an old notion from old school analogue EQ. In a few years EQ will start to become the new norm. Its really not hard to learn and considering how much time some of you guys are on a form, you got the time.

 

[pippen99]

It is a starting point since I am not satisfied with what I am hearing now.

 

[adrianm]

It is a starting point since I am not satisfied with what I am hearing now.

Did you get a chance to listen to the Stealth? your comments about LCD-5 being shouty immediately made me think of this post from Mr Speakers :

Thanks for the kind words!

Of course my answer on being a user is hopelessly biased as I'm the one responsible for voicing so you'd kind of expect me to gush, but there really is nothing on my radar I'd do differently. I really enjoy this as an all around headphone, I use it for pretty much everything right now and to me it's the most comfortable headphone in the line.

I've been using a DX220 with Amp 8 to wander about the house for chores, cooking, etc and the TT2/m-scaler for my main home system, a 2Go/Hugo 2 for the bedside, and a SMSL m500 at the home office. At work I'm running an Yggy driving a Liquid Glass with some Tungsol "Mickey Mouse" 12SN7GTs which throw a stunning soundstage, and an Asgard 3 on the workbench, which keeps surprising with it's smoothness and resolution (what a fantastic piece of budget kit). Everything runs off a Roon server. My home unit is a custom Linux server by Mojo audio with linear power supplies and a stripped down OS and everything running RAM Root, at the office we run a Roon NUC install on a LAN with Aloo Signature Pro endpoints.

I keep blissing out with the smoothness of the tone, rendering for vocals, soundstage, resolution, and the bottom end for electronica. I also really enjoy percussion and strings with the smoother top end the AMTS delivers, it just sounds more real/live to me, much more so than my speakers for that matter. A key thing I like about the vocals is the resolution without added breath/grain. I haven't heard others discuss this but I think a key issue many headphones have is rendering the upper mids relative to the mids. When I listen to vocals what I hear is that the tone and balance of voice just sounds right. When I listen to live acoustic singing or even just spoken word voices don't sound anywhere near as breathy as many headphones seem to make them. To me, Stealth's vocal rendering is really honest; it conveys chest without boxiness or boom, breath without excess breathless, lip sounds, and sibilance as close as I've heard to "real people" without amplification.

Right now I'm listening to Diamond Mine by King Creosote and John Hopkins and it's like it was made for the album. Hopkins' low electronica notes come through with pressure and clarity and no fuzz, the opening recording of a little shop really highlights the ambience of the room, vocals are detailed and really present, and the layering of the harmonies is really articulate with great lateral and front/rear layering. Before that I was listening to King Hannah's track Meal Deal and enjoying the thunderous bass and the layered distortion of the guitars at the end, as well as the explosive dynamics of the track. Really cool little Indy album by Hannah... Last night I listened to some of the stunning Engegardkvartetten string quartets, they are among the best classical recordings I've heard and I really love hearing the finger work and bowing, try the Red/Yellow/Blue albums...

It's his headphone so take it with a grain of salt ofc.

 

[KMann]

EQ can be a sledgehammer, or a scalpel. Going in blind is a sure fire way to drive yourself mad on most headphones

Well said. There are different goals here, EQing to personal preference, vs EQing to a reference and, there can be more than one reference

It is one thing to know how you prefer your headphone to sound and it is totally a different beast when it comes to knowing which knob and how much you turn it to get what you want. Then there is also the 'circle of confusion', i.e, not all music is mastered by the same person using the same mic and mixed and processed using the same equipment in the studio. A cymbal or a violin recorded and mixed by one audio/mastering engineer may not sound the same if done by another person. It is nearly impossible to EQ a headphone in a way that all instruments in all the tracks you listen sound the same. Add to that the character of the instrument and the nature of the venue.

We have recordings we made using a Grammy award winning engineer, we were in the venue when they were recorded, we were monitoring the recording as it was being performed, we used multiple Mic configurations including but not limited to stereo mic and ambisonic recordings we work with the recording engineer to get close to what we heard at the live recording by EQing reference monitors (this was one way to close the circle of confusion) at least for the limited set of recordings we did. Our philosophy behind tuning and EQing has always remained the same, get close to the tonal balance of well recorded music played via a pair of reference monitors EQd to sound subjectively flat. We also receive feedback from customers in pro audio on how their mixes translate when using our headphones and any EQ they apply.

We generally wait for a significant period to receive feedback from a broad range of customers but we weigh feedback from mixing and mastering engineers more as that tends to align with our design philosophy. We also try not to change the character of the headphones much and make sure the end result is still close to how we wanted the headphone to sound.

Those who know to EQ can personalize all of their headphones and speakers (I do all of mine, Audeze or not) and I do not see this as a flaw in the headphone or speakers, it just lets me squeeze the last bit of performance. Depending on how resolving the chain is, the quality of filters used to do the EQ is also very important. So, often times even if some prefer the tonal change, the reduced transparency or clarity is a big enough factor to avoid EQ.

Adding something like a bass shelf is relatively easy and safe thing to do, making some broad changes is also OK if you know where to make the changes (hopefully this is not based on a graph but based on listening). Many headphones I have seen have lesser presence between 1-3khz and compared to these LCD-5 may sound more forward, but the question to ask is what is your reference? sometimes, it is just a matter of getting used to the tuning (call it burn-in) and during this phase, it does not make sense to keep switching headphones. After an extended listening if one still feels the mids are bit forward or you are sensitive to that range, then to cut the 3-5k region by 1.5dB -2dB is a good choice. When it comes to treble (5khz and up), things get really tricky because going by the measurements is a sure fire way to get the wrong results and what works for one person may not always work for you because the ear geometry has a bigger impact here, while all of use hear similarly (we have evolved this way), when it comes to surgical EQ making precise changes in treble, there could be significant divergence. So I strongly recommend to just not touch the treble and get used to the sound as (to my ears), it is just where it needs to be. Of course if you know what knobs to turn, go ahead.

A side note:
When we initially introduced our iSine series with Cipher cable, (against my better judgment) we went for the Harman target, because there is only one way to find if this is truly what our customers want. But majority of our customers including mastering engineers, found the midrange to be too forward and were using our app to cut the midrange (Tyll Hertsen did the same when he reviewed iSine 20), what did not surprise us is the Cipher cable with the Harman target scored pretty high on a site that values the conformance to the target. After the backlash from our customers, we went back to our normal mode of reference tuning, it upset fewer customers and as expected the same site reduced the rating because we do not conform to the Harman Target. This is just one example of what happens when trying to EQ to a measured target and our goal is not to game the system to match some numbers but to tune headphones where we can stand behind our tuning.

 

[sennfan83261]

Modern software EQ is bit perfect, so audible distortion is nothing to worry about.

It really depends. I tried Resolve's EQ settings in PeaceAPO for the Elegia and it amplified some weird, grating cup resonances in the upper mids to my ears. Regardless, I never liked the Elegia w/ or w/o EQ. I rarely EQ my cans, but if I do it is to add a +2dB bass shelf somewhere at most for more slam. Then again, I don't think I've touched PeaceAPO in over a year.

 

[pippen99]

I was once told by a respected manufacturer of headphones that unless you have a specific necessary reason for owning a closed-back headphone that an open-back was preferred.

 

[adrianm]

Modern software EQ is bit perfect, so audible distortion is nothing to worry about.

Any link to this modern software?

Price is irrelevant to EQ'ing a headphone. Headphones with low distortion have tons of headroom for equalization. Also, I'm pretty sure digital PEQ do not degrade the sound at all and that is an old notion from old school analogue EQ. In a few years EQ will start to become the new norm. Its really not hard to learn and considering how much time some of you guys are on a form, you got the time.

This is just not even worth replying to

 

[KMann]

Modern software EQ is bit perfect, so audible distortion is nothing to worry about.

Sorry in advance for more EQ and DSP talk, please feel free to ignore

Bit perfect and EQ cannot be used in the same sentence, or in needs more qualification.

Bit perfect implies the source material was not altered in any way, but EQ by very definition alters the source material and so is not bit perfect.

But if the 'bits' are altered in the right way then it is still OK, here the quality of filters become important and depending on your playback chain attention to detail is where better EQ engines excel.

1. When you EQ CD tracks (44.1khz/16bit), the computation (EQ filtering) is generally done at either 32bit float or 64bit float format, and then it is converted back to either 16 bit, 24 bit or 32 bit format. This process can be lossy because conversion from floating point to fixed point is an additional quantization step that adds more noise. Good engines do the processing at 64bits and then dither.
2. There is a difference in perceived sound quality between minimum phase and linear phase filters, I personally prefer linear phase FIR filters for headphones.

ps: Some objectivists may roll their eyes at the above statements, everything I described above is measurable. However, audibility of the differences is debatable, which is why I prefaced saying 'the chain is resolving enough'.

 

[EMINENT]

That new level would be...for matching personal preference and not much else. The end result is distortion pure and simple. Because the source file is not bit perfect anymore. Hardware EQ is another matter, but people who are that confident that they can EQ a headphone to sound more "real" than the people who make it chains really should do it professionally.

I don't know but to me bit perfect will never sound as the artist intended unless you are hearing with the exact same gear and equipment as it was mastered with down to the cables.

 

[Tachyon88]

Any link to this modern software?


This is just not even worth replying to

??Probably don't know how...

 

[jaboki]

Interesting shift towards EQ. I never EQ'd before and I guess time to try it out.

What EQ software are y'all using?

 

[chargedcapacitor]

Sorry in advance for more EQ and DSP talk, please feel free to ignore

Bit perfect and EQ cannot be used in the same sentence, or in needs more qualification.

Bit perfect implies the source material was not altered in any way, but EQ by very definition alters the source material and so is not bit perfect.

But if the 'bits' are altered in the right way then it is still OK, here the quality of filters become important and depending on your playback chain attention to detail is where better EQ engines excel.

1. When you EQ CD tracks (44.1khz/16bit), the computation (EQ filtering) is generally done at either 32bit float or 64bit float format, and then it is converted back to either 16 bit, 24 bit or 32 bit format. this process can be lossy because conversion from floating point to fixed point is an additional quantization step that adds more noise. Good engines do the processing at 64bits and then dither.
2. There is a difference in perceived sound quality between minimum phase and linear phase filters, I personally prefer linear phase FIR filters for headphones.

Yes, sorry for adding confusion. When I incorrectly said bit perfect, I meant more along the lines of 'as long as the software EQ maintains non-lossy conversion'.

 

[chargedcapacitor]

Interesting shift towards EQ. I never EQ'd before and I guess time to try it out.

What EQ software are y'all using?

I primarily use the software EQ on the RME Adi, but I will occasional use the software equalizer APO.