[olddude]

Well, I'll just come on here and not insult any IEMs or people's responses to them. I'm a real believer in talking in non-absolutes when it comes to this stuff. Individual preferences in sound signature, types of preferred music, age of ears, knowledge of music, etc. all factor in.

Hell, I love the Zeus and most folks here, being bass-oriented, didn't like it at all. I like a clear and transparent sound signature, I listen to 60's rock and Motown so bass slam is not in my ballpark, I know what the music I listen to has sounded like SINCE the 1960s on a variety of players and through a variety of speakers. You hear a song more than a thousand times over 60 years and it gets pretty easy to determine what sounds "right" to me though IEMs and a DAP.

I'm still playing with my Odin. I replaced my regular Sedna Azlas for their XELASTIC brothers and wow did the lower end fill in. Not bloated, just stronger. Probably mostly a matter of a great seal, coupled with the tip material difference. So the Odin went from this to that with simply a tip change. This is coupled with my AK1000SS. That's 12 bucks to really change the sound sig. The only downside is the tips really grab, so taking them out is a matter of careful wiggling, or it's time to go for the tweezers.

Ok, back to the regularly scheduled programming.

 

[meomap]

I feel Odin is best enough for my taste.
Coming from Sultan, Khan, Encore, and 10K house of Noble Audio.
I grabbed the Odin 95% of the time among the rest.
Don't feel like upgrading to anything yet.
Perfect combo with Mojo2 or DX300MAX Ti or SS.
Bass is perfect to my ears already. Eq a little bit then can feel the rumble.
Don't need anything else further.

 

[zoidbb]

Actually the whole DD bass thing has been figured out by the use of the new 5128, and it IS just FR at the DRP. The issue is that 711 couplers weren't representing that difference. By contrast, the 5128 shows that difference due to having a more accurate acoustic impedance to the ear canal (Crin demonstrated this as well with the Blessing 1 comparison). Now, with that said, it does also mean that you may see the u12t being lower in bass level than you may prefer, but to say it has "no bass response" is demonstrably false, even if you're just looking at a 711 measurement. It is, in fact, a warmer sound signature than what people on average prefer.

Changing your measurement rig doesn't suddenly change the fundamental nature of DD and BA drivers. Please re-read what I said, as I don't believe you fulled ingested it. I'm saying that BA drivers alone fail to properly render bass, thus leading to fundamentally poor bass response. This isn't a quantitative matter, but rather a qualitative matter. "Bass response" doesn't /just/ mean loudness. To the extent that whether U12T sounds "warm" or not (in other words, is balanced toward more /amplitude/ in lower frequencies vs higher frequencies") doesn't change whether the U12T has fundamentally poor bass response. Does it have high total energy in the bass frequencies? Sure. Does it have abysmal attack leading to a lack of perceived energy and a misrepresentation of bass percussion, certain types of bass synths, and plucked bass instruments? Absolutely.

So, bottom line is that while yes, FR doesn't tell the WHOLE story alone, in this instance it does explain the heard difference. Beyond that, we really need to be careful not to have experientially descriptive claims spill over into the acoustic/physical domain (I've certainly made this mistake in the past). So when you describe things as 'attack', there's actually no reason this can't in fact be down to a particular FR relationship or behavior. Here's where we can cite the whole bit about time domain information being proportional to frequency response in headphones, but it turns out with IEMs there's a trickier deep dive involved.

In any case, my point is this: it is important to remember that what something may sound like isn't a sufficient explanation for what's in fact going on acoustically, in large part due to HpTF variation, HRTF differences across individuals, the very real influence of psychoacoustic effects, and most importantly the fallible nature of human perception.

Edit: One other thing I shouldn't leave out, BA drivers do tend to exhibit elevated third and fifth harmonic distortion products. This may also be responsible for some of the perception, although in the bass that's usually kept under control, and in general it may be below the threshold of audibility - I've always suspected this was responsible for 'BA timbre'. But we don't know yet.

"Attack" is a measurable, quantifiable thing. It's not "experiential." So is "decay." Over here on the actual engineering side of life, we actually use real words to describe real measurable things that we actively try to improve...

 

[gLer]

At the end of the day, what matters is what you prefer. But it's also important to remember that you are just one person. And what suits one person may not suit everyone.

This should be pinned to the entrance door of the hobby. It's rule #1, that every other 'rule' that follows defers to.

 

[duas2noites]

Does anyone here tried EE Evo with pc games? Thinking about using evo or Raven for music and games too.

 

[Trance_Gott]

FR looks like crap and that's a 4K IEM.

 

[Tristy]

FR looks like crap and that's a 4K IEM.

What does a good FR look like?

 

[Trance_Gott]

What does a good FR look like?

Not like this in mids and highs. I understand that Resolve takes U12t any day vs Raven.
I don't like this kind of IEMs with far far away from neutral and natural sound. Sorry that's my opinion. Who likes it can buy it I accept other opinions sure.

 

[Tristy]

Not like this in mids and highs. I understand that Resolve takes U12t any day vs Raven.
I don't like this kind of IEMs with far far away from neutral and natural sound. Sorry that's my opinion. Who likes it can buy it I accept other opinions sure.

So I assume that you think that the KR5 qualifies as a neutral / natural FR and graphs well in the mids and highs considering you’re looking at picking one up on the classifieds? …

 

[Trance_Gott]

I don't bought a KR5 but RN6 soon. Will test how kinetic bass works.
Dead neutral is also crap can be to boring. But Raven the great drip in the mids that's not normal sorry.
But now I let you EE fanboys alone. I had an Legend X worst IEM ever for me that's enough. Bass boom bleeding into the mids with no treble when someone like it ok I not.
Now I have the MEST MK3 in my ear only 1,9k and all the fancy things like bone conductor, dynamic bass, e stats for highs and that's in a balanced tuning! Why paying double?

 

[Tristy]

I don't bought a KR5 but RN6 soon. Will test how kinetic bass works.
Dead neutral is also crap can be to boring. But Raven the great drip in the mids that's not normal sorry.

I’ve heard all of the IEM’s in question and would take Raven in a heartbeat.

- U12t was a snore fest, owned it for a month before selling it
- KR5 had weird mids, like it was low resolution compared to the rest of the FR
- RN6 was nice but bland, no stand out features and it didn’t excel in anything besides being spacious with its open back design.
- Raven was not only a clear step up technically compared to the others (to my ears), but its BCD actually had tangible effects outside of the bass. It felt much more immersive and impressive.

But of course you’re entitled to your opinion just like I am.

 

[Trance_Gott]

Maybe I must try it. Measurements only are not the whole story that's also true. I respect and agree Andrew Parker he was absolutely right in the past with the LCD-5 and I agree 100% with this story and his EQ profile.

 

[TomKorn]

So, Raven is not an upgrade from Odin, correcr?

1) Odin and Raven are quite different. Odin leans more to a reference tuning while Raven has way more bass and stage. I'd call it a "bold" sound signature. Does that mean one is better than the other? That depends on your personal taste and the music you're listening to. I personally use both.

2) I can't comprehend why anyone would just look at / discuss graphs and judge gear solely this way. You can't unless you are a computer.

A friend who develops his own IEMs and has measured all kinds of IEMs and headphones was surprised to be proven wrong about what he saw in a graph and what he actually heard while testing the measured IEMs (Legend EVO).

Nothing will ever replace actually testing equipment yourself. We all have different ears and brains and of course taste.

 

[Resolve]

Changing your measurement rig doesn't suddenly change the fundamental nature of DD and BA drivers. Please re-read what I said, as I don't believe you fulled ingested it. I'm saying that BA drivers alone fail to properly render bass, thus leading to fundamentally poor bass response. This isn't a quantitative matter, but rather a qualitative matter. "Bass response" doesn't /just/ mean loudness. To the extent that whether U12T sounds "warm" or not (in other words, is balanced toward more /amplitude/ in lower frequencies vs higher frequencies") doesn't change whether the U12T has fundamentally poor bass response. Does it have high total energy in the bass frequencies? Sure. Does it have abysmal attack leading to a lack of perceived energy and a misrepresentation of bass percussion, certain types of bass synths, and plucked bass instruments? Absolutely.

To your first point, it doesn't change the nature of those drivers but it does provide an explanation for why those drivers are heard the way they are. On the subject of qualitative differences, this is where you get into what I can only describe as a language quagmire - one that I often find myself in as well, because these subjective reports are important.

I don't for a moment imagine your subjective experience isn't a genuine one, but it should be treated as precisely that, a subjective experience. And with that in mind, subjective reports are only descriptions of the experience (they are the most important part for all of us, but nonetheless those reports are experiential in nature). Usually you can correlate them with the graph, but sometimes you can't - or there's more to the experience than what the measurements tell you. This is once again where the headphone-to-ear transfer function (HpTF), head-related transfer function (HRTF) and psychoacoustic effects play a very important role.

In other words, just because your experience doesn't necessarily line up with the graph, that doesn't mean the existing metrics aren't capturing what's going on acoustically. You have to think of measurements not as "the truth about this product in all conditions", but rather "the truth about this product in the condition of being on that particular rig or 'head'". When you change the condition to your head, the result may once again be different.

"Attack" is a measurable, quantifiable thing. It's not "experiential." So is "decay." Over here on the actual engineering side of life, we actually use real words to describe real measurable things that we actively try to improve...

To this second point, yes it is true that these are measurable things, but when referring to those qualities in headphones, those are indeed purely descriptions of the experience. They are metrologically described in headphone acoustics by frequency response relationships. Other metrics like CSD or impulse response don't give us additional information here since headphones are generally minimum phase, meaning time domain information is proportional to frequency response information. Technically with multi-driver IEMs the question of minimum phase gets more difficult, but in these instances there's nothing that would indicate time-based views give us any additional information - or in other words, the Raven seems to behave normally in that regard.

 

[Hoegaardener70]

Does anyone here tried EE Evo with pc games? Thinking about using evo or Raven for music and games too.

I am very happy with the Evo for games. The bass is very “tactile” which is exactly what I want for media. Plus, the Evo is a bit on the darker side which I find very important for games which are usually rather treble-heavy.