[Staple2]

Fairly new to all this - I got my first decent pair of headphones (HD555) and now I'd like to know how you guys work your equalizers? Do you set different settings for different genres etc? Presets or do you do everything on your own?

 

[Ilovebeef]

As with everything, it's personal preference. There's a big thread on equalising headphones to match your hearing for the most accurate results, but I'm just too lazy to spend months sorting that out so I keep mine flat. I used to use presets but they all sound odd to me now.
 

 

[Staple2]

Reason I'm asking is because I used to keep my Aerial7 Chopper2s on a "Rock" preset which sounded fairly good all round, and adjusted it slightly when listening to more bassy genres, and I'm just not sure if this would be the optimal setting. So what is basically being said is that keeping it to it's default setting is not something frowned upon. Was uncertain whether or not everyone toys with there settings.

 

[RPGWiZaRD]

I start with the EQing almost instantly when getting a new headphone. For me it's not a hazzle, it's the opposite, I find it interesting to find out the ideal curve for it. I only EQ by ear listening to music as that's what always brings the best result in the end for me as I'm not striving for a perfect flat response for example as that's not my ideal response curve. I'm using a hardware 10-band EQ. The way I do it I usually start out by taking one of the sliders at the time, both dragging it to the very top and to the very bottom so I get a quick glimpse of whereabouts it should be set, if it sounds worse at the very bottom I know it'll need to be closer to the top than the bottom, do the same for all sliders. Then when I have an "initial" setting I start finetuning by listening more carefully to different songs, again taking one slider at the time and adjust it so it sounds as good as possible to my ears. The initial curve setting which brings a reasonably great result usually takes a min or two but the finetuning process may be going on for months due to my "perfectionism" when it comes to tweaking settings, be it headphones or TVs for example, I just have this "habit" of wanting the best possible result out of my gear and I can't sometimes understand who others don't want the best possible result either.
 
If I was to picture my "ideal" frequency response curve it would probably look something like this and probably roughly what I'm aiming for when EQing: