rincewind
1000+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2004
- Posts
- 1,097
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- 44
For those doubters:
I just got the Hornet and Ety ER4-S and was alarmed that I was lacking bass bigtime. Now I had two new elements in my chain so I eliminated and experimented. Ended up concluding that if you feed the ER4-S a bassy signal, then they can reproduce it fine. Of course, if you boost the bass tooo much, you will loose the beautiful detail reproduction that they have. I find that on my iRiver H140, 14/24 is about right to bring the "impact" of the bass up to the level of the mids/treble. NB: The only reason I can use the ER4-S unamped from a portable is cos this particular iRiver has a huge output compared to a lot of other portables (at least, at the time it was released), and because I'm nearly always running off wall power. I daresay you'd get crummy battery life if you did it using battery power.
So yes the ER4-S may not have a purely flat response (what ear/headphone does), and it definitely leans towards brighter in the mids+treble, but the *detail* is there in the bass - you just need to give it a kick in the pants.
I'm also going to put Rockbox on the iRiver so I can fine tune to a higher degree what bass is being boosted, as the iRiver firmware only has bass/treble and a few other more 'gimmicky' tone controls.
I can't wait til my Hornet is burnt in. It's a too bright for me at the moment, which is what made me experiment with my signal chain. And yes, I believe the burn-in phenomenon. There's too many posts about it for it not to exist. I'll soon find out in about 12 days time (300 hours for the Hornet).
I just got the Hornet and Ety ER4-S and was alarmed that I was lacking bass bigtime. Now I had two new elements in my chain so I eliminated and experimented. Ended up concluding that if you feed the ER4-S a bassy signal, then they can reproduce it fine. Of course, if you boost the bass tooo much, you will loose the beautiful detail reproduction that they have. I find that on my iRiver H140, 14/24 is about right to bring the "impact" of the bass up to the level of the mids/treble. NB: The only reason I can use the ER4-S unamped from a portable is cos this particular iRiver has a huge output compared to a lot of other portables (at least, at the time it was released), and because I'm nearly always running off wall power. I daresay you'd get crummy battery life if you did it using battery power.
So yes the ER4-S may not have a purely flat response (what ear/headphone does), and it definitely leans towards brighter in the mids+treble, but the *detail* is there in the bass - you just need to give it a kick in the pants.
I'm also going to put Rockbox on the iRiver so I can fine tune to a higher degree what bass is being boosted, as the iRiver firmware only has bass/treble and a few other more 'gimmicky' tone controls.
I can't wait til my Hornet is burnt in. It's a too bright for me at the moment, which is what made me experiment with my signal chain. And yes, I believe the burn-in phenomenon. There's too many posts about it for it not to exist. I'll soon find out in about 12 days time (300 hours for the Hornet).
