[james444]

@james444 Thankssss for the clarifffffication.

 
Sssso naughty! (and hilariously funny

)
 
But seriously, I'm grateful that Jalo brought up the HD800, since it shows that a phone can have a weak spot and still be considered one of the very best out there.
 

James, what do you have if you add a W and a M together?

 
No idea... is this some kind of test to prove I'm not a spam robot?

 

[fzman]

James, what do you have if you add a W and a M together?

A public resgtroom controversy in the Southern United States?  

 

[fzman]

On a more serious note, I think that the Vega has a coherence that most multi-driver iems lack, no matter how skillyfully they are combined and crossed over.  The KSE-1500 also has that same coherence, but lacks the "punch" that the Vega's dynamic driver can provide.  That said, in the same way that not all speakers will 'work properly' in all rooms, not all iems/tips work equally well in all ears.
 
As a result of a very sharp first bend, and poor life-style choices when I was younger, I am not hearing any sibilance from the Vega, even with the LPG. The only iem that ever drove me crazy in the upper frequencies, leasding to it being sold the day after I rewceived a used pair, was the EX1000.  The fit for me was horrible, and the sound was painful to me.   The similarly shaped XBA-Z5s are neither.  My original Kaede is leaner/brighter than I generally prefer, but is still a favorite of mine.  Not sure if that makes any sense, but I am a strange one!
 
Chacun a son gout!
 
Happy times everyone!

 

[warrior1975]

I agree with the spikes in the ex1000 being a bit more harsh as well. The Vegas are definitely a bit smoother than the ex1000 from memory. Overall, the Vegas are a very impressive iem.

 

[Jalo]

No idea... is this some kind of test to prove I'm not a spam robot?

James that was a dumb joke. Sorry about that. But in terms of wave analysis, at any given point a positive value is always canceled by an equal negative value and hence a perfect M shape wave plus a perfect W shape wave will basically give you a straight line as they pretty much cancel each other out. I use this example to illustrate a point for why the frequency chart is not a very good measure to judge the sound of a phone and also seasoned audiophile knows that two phones can have similar frequencies but can sound very different. It all depends on how they are tuned. In the case of the HD800, there are two ways by which one can reduce the brightness. First one can reduce the brightness by reducing it at the source that produce the brightness, second one can reduce the brightness by increasing the warmth and hence reduce the effect of the brightness. My HD800 is never sibilant because of the second reason. We headfiers know this too well. We use copper wire, dampener, tube amps etc. to balance out the brightness of a sound to out liking.

The limitation of a frequency chart is that when a phone is measured, they shoot a sine wave or some equal amount of measure to evaluate a phone and then select two variables, amplitude and frequency, to show the characteristics of a particular phone but that is not how musical wave behaves in natural setting. Any given sound of a phone exists in the space of at least four dimensions, time, frequency, phase and amplitude, and with many other factors affecting the perception of it. It is equivalent to looking at one eye, one nose and one ear on a woman's face to determine how beautiful this woman is not to say beauty perception is in the eyes of the beholder. For instance, on your spectrograph of the Vega, you correctly pointed out that there is an increase of energy at around the 7 kHz region but if you look at the time that lasted it is about or less than one millisecond. The time required for human auditory perception is around 0.66 uSecond to 1.66 millisecond. In other words, at any given time, many of us will not even be able to hear that energy spike because it does not exist in the perceptible time domain even though it is there.

Furthermore, the 7th khz has to be the foundation sound and not the overtone of a foundation sound as that will take it out of our auditory perception range of 20 khz. But regardless of all these technicalities, we headfiers has the ultimate spectrogram that allow us to capture all of the factors and that is our listening. That is why the majority of the users of Vega do not hear sibilance even though on a two dimensional chart it shows a spike in the 7 kHz region. Sibilance is not like bass you can argue how much it is really there, sibilance is an entity that is very clear to most of us, it is either there or it isn't and I think to the majority of the Vega users at least on this thread is that it is not there and by showing the limited frequency chart is not going to make it appear in my hearing. I like to use an analogy to illustrate this point. Assuming your neighbour come running to you at your place of work and said hey James your house is on fire, and you seat him down and explain to him how it is not possible, how you spend half a million dollars and have a MIT professor install this fire prevention system in your house etc, but isn't it true that nothing you can explain can negate the fact that your house is on fire? By the same token, if I don't hear sibilance I don't think explaining will make it appear. Yes we can talk about foam tips or ear anatomy but we can also talk about Recruitment, Hypeaccusis or any other listening conditions where a person either is borned or develop a sensitively to certain frequency in which 7th kHz is a popular one. On balance, I think what I am saying is it is easier to explain a minority phenomenon than argue a against a majority phenomenon with incomplete data.

Please see an interesting link:
http://www.yamahaproaudio.com/global/en/training_support/selftraining/audio_quality/chapter4/02_audio_universe/

and James, in all sincerity I am merely exchanging ideas with you and in no way showing any disrespect.

 

[james444]

James that was a dumb joke. Sorry about that. But in terms of wave analysis, at any given point a positive value is always canceled by an equal negative value and hence a perfect M shape wave plus a perfect W shape wave will basically give you a straight line as they pretty much cancel each other out. I use this example to illustrate a point for why the frequency chart is not a very good measure to judge the sound of a phone and also seasoned audiophile knows that two phones can have similar frequencies but can sound very different. It all depends on how they are tuned. In the case of the HD800, there are two ways by which one can reduce the brightness. First one can reduce the brightness by reducing it at the source that produce the brightness, second one can reduce the brightness by increasing the warmth and hence reduce the effect of the brightness. My HD800 is never sibilant because of the second reason. We headfiers know this too well. We use copper wire, dampener, tube amps etc. to balance out the brightness of a sound to out liking.

The limitation of a frequency chart is that when a phone is measured, they shoot a sine wave or some equal amount of measure to evaluate a phone and then select two variables, amplitude and frequency, to show the characteristics of a particular phone but that is not how musical wave behaves in natural setting. Any given sound of a phone exists in the space of at least four dimensions, time, frequency, phase and amplitude, and with many other factors affecting the perception of it. It is equivalent to looking at one eye, one nose and one ear on a woman's face to determine how beautiful this woman is not to say beauty perception is in the eyes of the beholder. For instance, on your spectrograph of the Vega, you correctly pointed out that there is an increase of energy at around the 7 kHz region but if you look at the time that lasted it is about or less than one millisecond. The time required for human auditory perception is around 0.66 uSecond to 1.66 millisecond. In other words, at any given time, many of us will not even be able to hear that energy spike because it does not exist in the perceptible time domain even though it is there.

Furthermore, the 7th khz has to be the foundation sound and not the overtone of a foundation sound as that will take it out of our auditory perception range of 20 khz. But regardless of all these technicalities, we headfiers has the ultimate spectrogram that allow us to capture all of the factors and that is our listening. That is why the majority of the users of Vega do not hear sibilance even though on a two dimensional chart it shows a spike in the 7 kHz region. Sibilance is not like bass you can argue how much it is really there, sibilance is an entity that is very clear to most of us, it is either there or it isn't and I think to the majority of the Vega users at least on this thread is that it is not there and by showing the limited frequency chart is not going to make it appear in my hearing. I like to use an analogy to illustrate this point. Assuming your neighbour come running to you at your place of work and said hey James your house is on fire, and you seat him down and explain to him how it is not possible, how you spend half a million dollars and have a MIT professor install this fire prevention system in your house etc, but isn't it true that nothing you can explain can negate the fact that your house is on fire? By the same token, if I don't hear sibilance I don't think explaining will make it appear. Yes we can talk about foam tips or ear anatomy but we can also talk about Recruitment, Hypeaccusis or any other listening conditions where a person either is borned or develop a sensitively to certain frequency in which 7th kHz is a popular one. On balance, I think what I am saying is it is easier to explain a minority phenomenon than argue a against a majority phenomenon with incomplete data.

Please see an interesting link:
http://www.yamahaproaudio.com/global/en/training_support/selftraining/audio_quality/chapter4/02_audio_universe/

and James, in all sincerity I am merely exchanging ideas with you and in no way showing any disrespect.

 
@Jalo, I don't mean to be disrespectful either, but it took me quite some time and effort to phrase and structure my explanation in an easily comprehensible way, in order to (hopefully) make even newbies understand that the Vegas have (1) an objectively measurable treble peak that (2) may or may not be subjectively heard as sibilance. At no point did I suggest to anybody that they ought to hear sibilance. The fact that you're insinuating this, shows that you did not get the core argument of my post.
 
Tbh, I really don't know what to make of your wall-of-text like reply that mixes bits of wave and acoustics theory with subjective convictions in a seemingly random and elusive way. I hope you don't mind if I carry this discussion over to the sound science forum, because for one, it doesn't belong to a dedicated Campfire Audio IEM thread anyway, and for another, I'm neither an engineer nor a scientists and there are some real pros over there that can probably help to shed more light on certain arguments in your post.
 
Edit: added link to sound science forum thread.

 

[Jayce87]

Vega + Ref8 balanced cable + DP-X1 = pure eargasm 

 
http://imgur.com/zs1XTiV

 

[tangents]

  Vega + Ref8 balanced cable + DP-X1 = pure eargasm 

 

 

 

[warrior1975]

Great pic!!

Can't wait to get mine back and hear them with the Ref 8 and my Sony nw-wm1z. Should be a special treat. Just need to get me some 4.4 loving!!

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I use this example to illustrate a point for why the frequency chart is not a very good measure to judge the sound of a phone and also seasoned audiophile knows that two phones can have similar frequencies but can sound very different.

I have never seen two phones with actually similar measured frequencies. Note that 99% of the graphs you see out here are heavily smoothed. And the devil is in the smoothed out details. Also, taking graphs from disparate sources for comparison is a recipe for disaster. Finally what the coupler / dummy head measures is often quite different from what your ears can hear from the same earphones in terms of frequency peaks and troughs. At the end of the day, I've compared hundreds of different headphones and the only two pairs of headphones that can be said to have roughly the same frequency responses are... two copies of the same headphones.

 

[MRAD]

   
Sorry @Mimouille, as much as I agree we should not make a huge story out of it, your post is simply a misconception of what @shotgunshane and I were saying, so I'll try to provide a step-by-step clarification:
 
We're talking about two things:

• the Vegas driver's energy peak in the 7-8kHz range
• sibilance (an exaggeration of consonant sounds like s, sh, or z., commonly associated with too much energy in the 7-8kHz range)

 
1) is part of the driver's frequency response itself, it's not caused by some subpar source or so, and it can be measured and visualized. Following the timeline from top to bottom, you can see that the Vegas exhibit noticeably more energy at 7-8kHz than below or above that range, and that it takes about three times longer for this surplus energy to decay (white arrow):
 

 
 
So, by now we have an objectively established energy peak (1), but how does this relate to sibilance (2) and the fact that some people seem to hear it and others don't? Well, there are several things that may happen to this energy, as it travels from the driver towards your eardrum and finally arrives as sound in your brain. It may bump into the soft material of foam tips or against some bend in your ear canal and lose momentum. It may be weakened while trying to squeeze through the constricted bore of Spitfits or other narrow bore tips. Or it may even arrive at you eardrum in perfect shape, but your inner ear may not be very sensitive to frequencies in that range, so your brain won't notice anything out of the ordinary.
 
With all that said, let's not forget that when it comes to sibilance, (1) is the cause and (2) the possible effect. Which means that just because some people don't hear the effect, it doesn't invalidate the cause.
 
 
Last not least, let me refer to @Jalo's post and I'm actually glad you brought up the HD800, which has a history of being a pretty controversial headphone: the pinnacle of sound quality for some and a piercing treble monster for others.
 
So, let's have a quick look at what happens in the HD800's lower treble, because it's not that much different from what we've seen on the Vegas. Slightly different perspective, but you can see that there's a clear peak of initial energy (yellow arrow) that also takes longer to decay than frequencies below or above that range (white arrow):
 

 
And finally, let's take a look at the new HD800S and how Sennheiser addressed this issue with their re-tuned model. It's easy to see how initial energy has been reduced (yellow arrow) and decay has been shortened (white arrow):
 

 
 
Now, even if many people don't have an issue with treble on the Vegas as is, I'm sure no one would object to following the Sennheiser example and making the Vegas even better in some future revision?

Very useful explanation.  Thank you very much.  

 

[MacedonianHero]

  Heard silver wires make the sound brighter so I was thinking....

 
Just because the metal looks brighter (and shiner) doesn't mean it sounds brighter

...makes no sense whatsover. That's a silly audiophile myth that doesn't hold muster when the physics is actually considered. The only reason copper is used so widely is the price difference between that and silver.

 

[fiascogarcia]

   
Just because the metal looks brighter (and shiner) doesn't mean it sounds brighter

...makes no sense whatsover. That's a silly audiophile myth that doesn't hold muster when the physics is actually considered. The only reason copper is used so widely is the price difference between that and silver.

Don't bring physics into this.  This is Head-Fi audio!! 

 

[MacedonianHero]

  Don't bring physics into this.  This is Head-Fi audio!! 

 
If you base your planes on science they fly, if you base your medicine on science it cures diseases, it works.....(you can fill in the rest 

).

 

[twister6]

 

  Heard silver wires make the sound brighter so I was thinking....

 
Just because the metal looks brighter (and shiner) doesn't mean it sounds brighter

...makes no sense whatsover. That's a silly audiophile myth that doesn't hold muster when the physics is actually considered. The only reason copper is used so widely is the price difference between that and silver.

 
Peter, I have a feeling he probably meant that due to lower resistivity and higher conductivity of silver vs copper material, and taking into considering multi-strand Litz wire config (since electric signal travels on the surface, rather than core, thus Litz wire config increases effective surface of conductive area) - we should expect some difference/improvement in sound perception 

  You know, every aftermarket cable has a "silver lining"

 

Material	ρ (Ω•m) at 20 °C Resistivity	σ (S/m) at 20 °C Conductivity
Silver	1.59×10−8	6.30×107
Copper	1.68×10−8	5.96×107
Annealed copper	1.72×10−8	5.80×107
Gold	2.44×10−8	4.10×107