[Ghoostknight]

Headphones/IEMs being minimum-phase systems means FR fully describes their output.

wait

In this case, it means that at any time, the loudspeaker's movement (and the resulting sound pressure at the ear drum) is within one phase-cycle of the input signal,

if phase still gets shifted up to one cycle than a FR doesnt fully describe the output...

in my "casual" book minimum phase always means phase shifts where linear phase is completely linear

 

[fevers end]

Also, the Sony N3 has more energy in the upper frequencies than the Meteor. This improves bass transients, which could also correlate with "impactfulness".

From my experience, even when I downshelf everything past 5kHz on storm -5db, I am still able to retain almost all of the subjective feeling of detail and dynamic contrast of the bass instruments/bass sounds overall. So I think there is something missing from this theory.

 

[Doltonius]

From my experience, even when I downshelf everything past 5kHz on storm -5db, I am still able to retain almost all of the subjective feeling of detail and dynamic contrast of the bass instruments/bass sounds overall. So I think there is something missing from this theory.

It could just mean that your subjective perception of detail and contrast is very coarse-grained, in relation to changes in FR.

 

[Ghoostknight]

From my experience, even when I downshelf everything past 5kHz on storm -5db, I am still able to retain almost all of the subjective feeling of detail and dynamic contrast of the bass instruments/bass sounds overall. So I think there is something missing from this theory.

depending on the setup this actually might be even "better" to retrieve details depending on FR/room with speakers etc since for example too much highs can actually mask other details

this is also a big topic around "house curves" .... the house curve i typically land on are once that AUDIBLY are the same loadness in bass and highs.... so for example with a good house curve you can play two sine waves, one at 100Hz and one at 12000Khz and still perceive them as the same loadness, i usually need -5-8db at 20khz and a bit of a additional bass bump for this

by no means i would say this "reduces details", it actually lets you hear more into the mix and depending on how right you got the housecurve it sounds more natural.... IMO pretty much all "flat" measuring devices are way to hot in the highs for me.... maybe its preference but for me the right house curve works like magic and i dont feel like "losing details"

i know this sounds strange, specially for people that come from "flat speakers" or completely flat room correction, i was one of them too but once you start playing around with house curves you get the most important thing....

not each room is the same and specially with speakers the speaker output has to be MATCHED to your friggin room to get a NATURAL response.... most people dont get this

 

[Ghoostknight]

just so people get a idea what my housecurve looks like, i measured the room response with REW, noted room mode frequencys and what REW suggested, then i went on manually transfering the values and double checking with a tone generator how the corrections plays out on making everything the same perceived loadness and finetuned it

YES roommodes at 700Hz still can matter... even if some suggest just to correct up to 200Hz or whatever.... personally i think up to 1k is the right value since up to around 1k you still get heavy desk/wall reflections

and just if someone wonders.... the major low frequency room mode lies at around 40Hz ... my speaker start rolling off at around 45-50Hz, so in my case its kind of free lower extension...

 

[Doltonius]

wait


if phase still gets shifted up to one cycle than a FR doesnt fully describe the output...

in my "casual" book minimum phase always means phase shifts where linear phase is completely linear

From wikipedia:

A minimum-phase system, whether discrete-time or continuous-time, has an additional useful property that the natural logarithm of the magnitude of the frequency response (the "gain" measured in nepers, which is proportional to dB) is related to the phase angle of the frequency response (measured in radians) by the Hilbert transform.​

​

Also from wikipedia:

In general, unfortunately, the phase cannot be uniquely predicted from the magnitude. A simple example of this is a pure time delay of time T, which has amplitude 1 at any frequency regardless of T, but has a phase dependent on T (specifically, phase = 2π × T × frequency).​

​

There is, however, a unique amplitude-vs-phase relation in the special case of a minimum phase system, sometimes called the Bode gain–phase relation. The terms Bayard–Bode relations and Bayard–Bode theorem, after the works of Marcel Bayard (1936) and Hendrik Wade Bode (1945) are also used for either the Kramers–Kronig relations in general or the amplitude–phase relation in particular, particularly in the fields of telecommunication and control theory.​

​

Maybe the statement that minimum phase systems "don't shift phase at all" is wrong. However, they have the more useful property for our purposes that phase information is uniquely predictable from the frequency response.

​

 

[fevers end]

It could just mean that your subjective perception of detail and contrast is very coarse-grained, in relation to changes in FR.

So do you believe you would be able to EQ these subjective experiences of dynamics/texture/blah blah?

 

[Doltonius]

So do you believe you would be able to EQ these subjective experiences of dynamics/texture/blah blah?

In theory, yes. In practice, not yet possible to reliably and accurately do so, due to difficulty of precisely measuring FR at the eardrum.

 

[Doltonius]

wait


if phase still gets shifted up to one cycle than a FR doesnt fully describe the output...

in my "casual" book minimum phase always means phase shifts where linear phase is completely linear

I did some more research. It seems that "the output follows the input as closely as possible in terms of impulse response" is indeed true of minimum-phase. it is in fact FALSE for linear phase. Linear phase keeps the phase relationship between the frequencies constant. But that doesn't mean that the output impulse response follows the input as closely as possible.

Also, minimum-phase really has the property that FR determines the phase information uniquely. Linear phase doesn't do that.

 

[KinGensai]

We are talking about the same thing, just that you don't quite understand my point or the article's point. The author manipulated the frequency response, i.e., just changed the amplitude of a narrow band of frequencies. He did nothing that is directly related to the time-domain. However, it made the decay time of the frequencies in that band shorter. This is a clear example of the FR affecting the time-domain. It follows from tenets of Fourier transform and the properties of a minimum-phase system.

In essence you can generate the CSD graph from the FR graph, given that your system is minimum-phase. It is really that deterministic. You don't need to separately measure IR, as long as you know the FR. All you need is the FR, the algorithms of Fourier transform, and a mathematical description of the impulse.

He made a part of the IR shorter by reducing the amplitude in a specific frequency band, thus directly causing a shorter decay, that's not in dispute. However, you wouldn't have an indication of how much the IR was shortened by exactly going by just the FR readout, and the fundamental frequency decay in the bass remains unaffected by that EQ adjustment.

What I'm arguing is that you would not be able to derive that the FF MSE has an IR of ~2.5ms to a Dirac pulse just by looking at it's FR graph using frequency and amplitude axes only. If you could I'd like to see an example of this calculation done and verified by an IR measurement, otherwise FR by itself is not sufficient to comprehensively describe an IEM's sound.

 

[bigshot]

Whenever I see a nice even bell curve, but all the way at the "good" end there are suddenly a handful of outliers at the very end of the chart, I suspect people are cheating the test. Cheaters never seem to throw in one or two misses to make it look honest. They have to make it look like 10 out of 10. Just something I've learned about human nature in sound science...

 

[Ghoostknight]

Whenever I see a nice even bell curve, but all the way at the "good" end there are suddenly a bunch of outliers at the very end of the chart, I suspect people cheating the test. Just sayin'

Sorry i havent cheated.... how could i proof it? screen video? tho even with this i could cheat, who says i dont have a hardware analyzer?

seriously i have not cheated, i was surprised as you as i tested the two tones test and noticed how audible it is compared to the music samples

its one thing to have different opinions, is another thing to "cheat" on things like this to make it look like im right, i dont put myself that low you know...

 

[Doltonius]

He made a part of the IR shorter by reducing the amplitude in a specific frequency band, thus directly causing a shorter decay, that's not in dispute. However, you wouldn't have an indication of how much the IR was shortened by exactly going by just the FR readout, and the fundamental frequency decay in the bass remains unaffected by that EQ adjustment.

What I'm arguing is that you would not be able to derive that the FF MSE has an IR of ~2.5ms to a Dirac pulse just by looking at it's FR graph using frequency and amplitude axes only. If you could I'd like to see an example of this calculation done and verified by an IR measurement, otherwise FR by itself is not sufficient to comprehensively describe an IEM's sound.

That EQ adjustment mostly targets the decay of that specific frequency; it is very narrow band. The causal relationship is clear; if you change the FR and the phase information/impulse response changes accordingly. If there is a causal relationship, science will make sure that you can calculate the effect from the cause.

I found this very technical answer on stackexchange that gives a mathematical exposition of the relationship between frequency response and impulse response. The conclusion is that they are inter-convertible for linear time-invariant systems, which IEMs are (minimum-phase systems are a subset of linear time-invariant systems). https://dsp.stackexchange.com/quest...stems-impulse-response-and-frequency-response. This essentially means that if you know the one, you know the other. I don't know if you still have doubt at this point? The crucial conclusion in that answer is this:

So, given either a system's impulse response or its frequency response, you can calculate the other. Either one is sufficient to fully characterize the behavior of the system; the impulse response is useful when operating in the time domain and the frequency response is useful when analyzing behavior in the frequency domain.​

 

[Doltonius]

He made a part of the IR shorter by reducing the amplitude in a specific frequency band, thus directly causing a shorter decay, that's not in dispute. However, you wouldn't have an indication of how much the IR was shortened by exactly going by just the FR readout, and the fundamental frequency decay in the bass remains unaffected by that EQ adjustment.

What I'm arguing is that you would not be able to derive that the FF MSE has an IR of ~2.5ms to a Dirac pulse just by looking at it's FR graph using frequency and amplitude axes only. If you could I'd like to see an example of this calculation done and verified by an IR measurement, otherwise FR by itself is not sufficient to comprehensively describe an IEM's sound.

Another quote from wikipedia, on the page for Frequency Response:

The frequency response characterizes systems in the frequency domain, just as the impulse response characterizes systems in the time domain. In linear systems (or as an approximation to a real system neglecting second order non-linear properties), either response completely describes the system and thus have one-to-one correspondence: the frequency response is the Fourier transform of the impulse response.​

 

[castleofargh]

He made a part of the IR shorter by reducing the amplitude in a specific frequency band, thus directly causing a shorter decay, that's not in dispute. However, you wouldn't have an indication of how much the IR was shortened by exactly going by just the FR readout, and the fundamental frequency decay in the bass remains unaffected by that EQ adjustment.

What I'm arguing is that you would not be able to derive that the FF MSE has an IR of ~2.5ms to a Dirac pulse just by looking at it's FR graph using frequency and amplitude axes only. If you could I'd like to see an example of this calculation done and verified by an IR measurement, otherwise FR by itself is not sufficient to comprehensively describe an IEM's sound.

This is an impractical question given how frequency responses are mostly measured with sine sweeps that most tools will make an impulse response out of(and CSD or whatever else, BTW). That makes it unlikely that you acquired FR without also getting the IR.
To be clear, while they are an expression of the same thing in freq and time domains, they do not fully define a transducer! Some non-linear stuff are left out.

If I extract the FR I measured into frequency samples, I have frequency, amplitude, and phase in that data.