Some of you may have wondered why there's another DSP in the chain of the updated foobar package and why I haven't just posted the changed filters. This is because I took the Koss Filter 3 as a baseline and EQ'd some of its issues with the CurveEQ (with the help of the K701 and a few movie soundtracks). Because the changes are rather complicated and very subtle in places, I haven't yet incorporated them into the source plot, but instead directly captured what the CurveEQ produces. The result is in delta.wav, which therefore contains the changes relative to Koss Filter 3. To use it, one has to add a second convolver after the first one and tell it to use delta.wav. But since you cannot use a DSP plugin twice, I had to use the Stereo Convolver for this job. And that's why I just uploaded the folder instead of writing a guide about how to do this by hand. Of course this is only temporary.
So the situation is as follows:
We have a filter which sounds pretty good with stuff where my K701 also sounds good. And this is mostly classical, soundtracks, and a few better albums. But there's a lot of music which is too bright with that setting (ignoring that it may be possible to adapt to it), so I added a few variants with less treble. One can probably stick with this setting for audiophile music. But the next step is to carefully bring the groove back into the sound signature, to get another setting which sounds natural in the upper frequencies but also makes your foot tap like you'd expect with the Porta Pro
I've already added two settings which go into this direction, namely Koss Filter 3d_groove and Koss Filter 3d_cleanbass -- please tell me what you think.
The Filters can also be found
here.
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Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
If I had to make a preliminary generalization, close-miked sounds alright and recordings which already have some room ambiance built in sound wrong (the instrument influences that obviously). Largish resonant instruments in general seem to have more issues. One random track I tried which sounded really bad was partly, I suspect, a recording of speakers (live amplified performance). Overall, I'd say many acoustic recordings tend to sound reverby and wrong while electric guitars, electronic music and such tends to sound good to me. Binaural also has weird reverbs (I know it's not supposed to sound right).
Do you really think it's possible to solve those reverbs/room issues with EQ? how?
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You may be right in that the reverb of DH is a problem.
Theoretically, we could get rid of that with a bit of work (but EQ won't help there) but I'm not sure if this would kill the experience for the other recordings (those which sound ok). We'll see.
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No, I did't. Indeed, foobar's VST host is not exactly ready for prime-time yet. But it's still ok if you have only a single VST plugin to manage. The cool thing about that EQ is that you can zoom in and build any eq shape you want (because it's based on a spline editor).
Quote:
Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Yes. First, it's often said that one shouldn't compare IEMs with headphones when it comes to Headroom's graphs. Second, look at how the curves evolve, not at some kind of disjointed freq-by-freq average.
I think you've already gone in the right direction by replicating the bass roll-off but you don't have the other part of the "dome" which would form the mid-bass hump and what you have above 1kHz is a smooth roll-off totally unlike the jagged curve that pretty much all headphones have... look at the big hump around 6-8KHz for example. There's a reason the curves look like that (ask the pros for details... I know next to nothing about this stuff).
It might make more sense to use supra-aural headphones as models for the target FR rather than cirucum-aurals if you're going to apply the filter to Portapros by the way.
That said, maybe the FR Dolby assumes is nothing like those headphones and looks more like the ones you imagined. Do we have any documentation, interviews or whatever to give us a clue?
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You have a point with the supra-aural phones. Do you know of any good ones which can be used for reference? Because I'd guess that the Koss phones are already among the best of this type...
Btw: There seems to be no documentation around. Probably it's NDA'd.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
If you can make your Portapros sound like the K701 you borrowed, congrats! I'm not talking about sound quality or some such: just try to get a similar perception of where the sound comes from.
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Actually, I was surprised to find that the soundstage of the K701 is not so different from how I perceive DH. As a person who is not yet very experienced with different soundstages I'd say it feels like 2m wide and 50cm deep. What's cool about it is that the perceived sound altitude is pretty much on eye level.
With DH, it feels like 2m wide and 2m deep, but the frontal sounds seem to come from slightly more elevated positions. But I'm not sure that I get the full "K701 experience". This may be due to my soundcard or due to my habituation to the Koss. The problem is that it sounds very bright with a lot of music. The only things that sounds really enjoyable are movie soundtracks, classical music and some 20-30% of the other music.
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Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Here's the FR plot for a headphone that's bundled with DH hardware:
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showpo...0&postcount=38
What about using that as a target? It's more likely the DH unit was tailored to the FR of the headphone than the other way around but you never know.
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Thanks, I'll try that. Hopefully the thing which is diffuse-field corrected there is the sound of the headphone and not the plot itself.
... and if you want to sneak in some other plots, please go ahead!
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Originally Posted by PeterDLai /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Here you go, they actually have it on their own website: "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service (192kbps)
I still haven't found anything that comes even close to having this much of an effect.
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Thanks, it's nice (you mean the stereo effects, do you?). But I think I cannot fully experience it atm, b/c I don't have your phones. I think yours are somewhat brighter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HFat /img/forum/go_quote.gif
There was one last thing I wanted to address about post #15 (I'm not going to address everything), regarding DH's limitations:
You brought it up several times. Yeah, this might be part of the reason why I think DH mangles a lot of recordings but it seems to me that this is also a problem for what you propose to do: if you try to make an EQ by ear, you will also end up correcting the FR issues that come from the differences between your ears and Dolby's, right? Worse still, you will also correct the issues that come from the interaction between your ears and the headphone (the "small room"). So the EQ might sound good to you (and possibly to many) but, to others, your EQ might conceivably sounds worse than straight DH. This would be a problem for a collaborative process to build an EQ. Of course, all of this assumes that such individual differences are actually a substantial problem in practice.
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Well, if these differences would outweigh the differences between the Koss and the ideal phone for this setup, it would make the attempt futile. But I think they are not that large. If they were, they would also outweigh the diffences between various headphones and any general recommendations such as "buy a DT880, it sounds good" would also be futile. Because I want to create more than just my personal EQ, but something that I could also give to friends etc., it makes sense for me to have a few people vote how a certain filter sounds to them or even contribute by doing their own changes.
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Originally Posted by DoomzDayz /img/forum/go_quote.gif
i tried the new version and it gives me this error:
Unrecoverable playback error: KS output error: unable to find filter corresponding to selected device
replacing it with normal quality makes the seek bar just go back and forth with no sound and nothing gets played.
onboard sound here.
whihc filters are what? is there a graph for each one?
on the sound for the first version, i felt like the mids or maybe treble was too pronounced, and the stereo effects were the coolest for the channel test. this needs to be applied for a closed/isolating headphone
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Oh, I've made a mistake here (in the output section of the preferences, I had "DS: SB Audigy 2" selected, instead of the generic "DS: Primary Audio driver".
Its fixed now. Plus, I have added all the other new settings as explained above. So you're on the safe side when you redownload once again (sorry).
The filter descriptions can now also be found in the current filters.zip
Quote:
Originally Posted by DoomzDayz /img/forum/go_quote.gif
i was referring to the so called newer treble filters in the new zip, of which there are 2 more than in the filters.zip.
i will look into the matlab scripts, i am somewhat familiar with it, and am taking a class in signals and systems with convolution, fourier transforms, frequency response, phase shifts, and all that jazz. i guess i would take a graph from headroom or something? is there a way i can get that graph in matlab?
so assuming he gets the rest of the chain working perfectly, all we have to do is match the FR of our headphones to what DH expects? and i can turn in some 0 soundstage IEMs into full sized phones?
the new version seems to have 1 or 2 more DSP's in the chain, what do they do? what is new (ie how can i get the old version back because the link is gone and new one doesnt work for me)
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You just type mimic_filter('your_actual_headphone.png', 'your_wanted_headphone.png', 'the_result.wav',44100,2000);
But you won't get that far with the Headroom plots, because they are sometimes far from the actual response. So you'll have to tweak manually.
The additional DSP is a second convolver which adds my recent corrections on top of the sound. It will go away once I have incorporated the changes into the base filter.
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Originally Posted by baglunch /img/forum/go_quote.gif
FYI, I've just bought a pair of '75s and I'm burning them in now, but I'll try this setup out either tomorrow or Monday, and I'll let you know my thoughts. Thanks for your hard work!
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So it seems about time for me to get some KSCs myself!
... time to go to bed right now
