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- Jun 4, 2014
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I just finished watching that B&K webinar. They've done some very impressive work!
I still see a couple of sticking points before this becomes widely accepted as a standard though.
1) The 4620 coupler is being considered by a standards committee, but doesn't currently represent any kind of international standard (it's not compliant with the current IEC60318-4, i.e., 711 standard even up to 10 kHz). For earbuds and shallow-insertion IEMs, this might be the only choice. But without detailed comparisons against IEC60318 (non-RA0401) measurements and lots of listening time with frequency sweeps, it's not really clear what people measuring deep-fitting IEMs would be gaining.
2) Even if this becomes a new international standard, I see another roadblock to its widespread adoption. I had an interesting chat with our SoCal B&K rep a couple of weeks ago and he'd told me about the 4620 coupler being available separately. The 4620 includes the 4-chamber coupler, a 1/4" pre-polarized mic, low noise pre-amp, ear canal and pinna. It's all one package. And there's a separate package for a left and a right ear. All this makes perfect sense and you might think that somebody who's only interested in measuring IEMs could just buy a right ear. But how many IEMs these days are completely symmetric and would allow a perfect fit of the left earbud into a right ear canal/pinna model? Most IEM shells these days are anti-symmetric, and if you wanted to measure channel balance, or just take an average of the left and right buds, you'd really have no choice but to buy both. My B&K rep gave me a quote for these, but also asked me not to disclose the price, because B&K don't publish prices, so I'll respect their wishes in that regard. I understand there's a lot of R&D gone into these products which B&K deserve to recoup, and I'm not shy of spending several thousands of dollars on measuring equipment. But I will just make a brief statement about B&K prices in the next paragraph.
Yikes.
I still see a couple of sticking points before this becomes widely accepted as a standard though.
1) The 4620 coupler is being considered by a standards committee, but doesn't currently represent any kind of international standard (it's not compliant with the current IEC60318-4, i.e., 711 standard even up to 10 kHz). For earbuds and shallow-insertion IEMs, this might be the only choice. But without detailed comparisons against IEC60318 (non-RA0401) measurements and lots of listening time with frequency sweeps, it's not really clear what people measuring deep-fitting IEMs would be gaining.
2) Even if this becomes a new international standard, I see another roadblock to its widespread adoption. I had an interesting chat with our SoCal B&K rep a couple of weeks ago and he'd told me about the 4620 coupler being available separately. The 4620 includes the 4-chamber coupler, a 1/4" pre-polarized mic, low noise pre-amp, ear canal and pinna. It's all one package. And there's a separate package for a left and a right ear. All this makes perfect sense and you might think that somebody who's only interested in measuring IEMs could just buy a right ear. But how many IEMs these days are completely symmetric and would allow a perfect fit of the left earbud into a right ear canal/pinna model? Most IEM shells these days are anti-symmetric, and if you wanted to measure channel balance, or just take an average of the left and right buds, you'd really have no choice but to buy both. My B&K rep gave me a quote for these, but also asked me not to disclose the price, because B&K don't publish prices, so I'll respect their wishes in that regard. I understand there's a lot of R&D gone into these products which B&K deserve to recoup, and I'm not shy of spending several thousands of dollars on measuring equipment. But I will just make a brief statement about B&K prices in the next paragraph.
Yikes.
