lindrone
King Canaling
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2003
- Posts
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By now, we all know how Ultimate Ears has been advertising its "flat curve" as the holy grail of sound for quite a while now. However, the fact remains that no other headphone manufacture even claims that flat curve is the way to make headphones. Today I went to my audiologist to pick up my new box from Sensaphonics, and I talked to her a bit about why other manufacturers (not just IEM's, but just sound equipments in general) don't seem to be concerned with this flat curve idealism.
Well, I learned something that I didn't know before. Apparently that human ear doesn't preceive sound level being the same at all frequencies, so if we do indeed get a flat frequency response in our perception of sound, we're actually not getting frequencies that are flat, but those that has been adjusted against our sound perception to become flat. I tried doing some more research on the web to see if there's more information about this... and this is all I managed to come up with:
http://www.termpro.com/articles/weight.html
http://www.termpro.com/articles/hearing.html
Two articles written by the same guy. Here's the quote to take away from the article if you didn't read it all the way through:
"In order to appreciate the need for weighting networks, it is first necessary to acquire a basic working knowledge of the way we perceive sound. Most significant is the fact that our ears are not equally sensitive to all frequencies, and although they may appear to work very well, their frequency response is actually far from "flat." To complicate things even further, this variance in hearing sensitivity is more pronounced at low Sound Pressure Levels (SPLs) than at high ones."
Basically, what it comes down to, is if you were able to measure a flat curve coming directly out of the equipment, it will not be perceived as flat by our ears/brains. I guess additional equipments needs to be used to simulate the how our ears perceive sound in order to get a true, perceived flat response.
So this brings me to the question, when Ultimate Ears conduct these measurements, are they using any sort of a weighted measurement? Or are they simply taking measurements in some sort of a chamber directly out of the equipment? In fact, does Headroom do any sort of a weighted measurement when conducting their frequency response tests?
Anyway, I'm just very curious as to how speaker/headphone manufacturers measure their equipment, and perhaps the way that we've been measuring our equipment has been wrong all along? Technical measurement is something I'm not very familiar with (not just reading the charts, but actually conducting the test environment). Can anyone chime in on this?
I was also told that Sensaphonics accounted for the way that ears responds to different frequencies when they designed their headphone. I'm sure that other headphone manufacturers does as well, could this be why we don't get a measured flat curve coming out of our speakers/headphones?
Well, I learned something that I didn't know before. Apparently that human ear doesn't preceive sound level being the same at all frequencies, so if we do indeed get a flat frequency response in our perception of sound, we're actually not getting frequencies that are flat, but those that has been adjusted against our sound perception to become flat. I tried doing some more research on the web to see if there's more information about this... and this is all I managed to come up with:
http://www.termpro.com/articles/weight.html
http://www.termpro.com/articles/hearing.html
Two articles written by the same guy. Here's the quote to take away from the article if you didn't read it all the way through:
"In order to appreciate the need for weighting networks, it is first necessary to acquire a basic working knowledge of the way we perceive sound. Most significant is the fact that our ears are not equally sensitive to all frequencies, and although they may appear to work very well, their frequency response is actually far from "flat." To complicate things even further, this variance in hearing sensitivity is more pronounced at low Sound Pressure Levels (SPLs) than at high ones."
Basically, what it comes down to, is if you were able to measure a flat curve coming directly out of the equipment, it will not be perceived as flat by our ears/brains. I guess additional equipments needs to be used to simulate the how our ears perceive sound in order to get a true, perceived flat response.
So this brings me to the question, when Ultimate Ears conduct these measurements, are they using any sort of a weighted measurement? Or are they simply taking measurements in some sort of a chamber directly out of the equipment? In fact, does Headroom do any sort of a weighted measurement when conducting their frequency response tests?
Anyway, I'm just very curious as to how speaker/headphone manufacturers measure their equipment, and perhaps the way that we've been measuring our equipment has been wrong all along? Technical measurement is something I'm not very familiar with (not just reading the charts, but actually conducting the test environment). Can anyone chime in on this?
I was also told that Sensaphonics accounted for the way that ears responds to different frequencies when they designed their headphone. I'm sure that other headphone manufacturers does as well, could this be why we don't get a measured flat curve coming out of our speakers/headphones?