Can we people from this thread form the official Team Cheap-Fi?
President Joe Bloggs of Team EQ founded 2002 extends his greetings
If this is the official Cheap-Fi appreciation thread, can I plug my Philips SHE3580 here? (
link to review) From descriptions here I doubt these sound as good as the FX67 out of the box, these Philips have really recessed mids and overbright highs to start with. But I've been EQing them for 6 months and really struck gold when I came across
PiccoloNamek's EQ tutorial. Besides introducing me to the concept of compensating for headphone-ear-canal resonance, he also sent me out to experiment extensively with parametric equalizers for the first time, and I've never looked back (
though there are things he said that I don't agree with, see my response to his thread). This is like making a sculpture with a full set of chisels as opposed to trying to make one with an axe if you're using graphic EQ!
I've long since gotten the sound quality up to a level where I prefer the SHE3580 over the Etymotic ER-4P I had. Listening to music I was familiar with on the ER-4P I have to say that not only do I prefer the SHE3580's presentation (electric guitars are rocking fun like I've never heard them before), but
they even beat the etys on a strictly technical basis.
- detail wise, I had always been picking out extra instruments on the Philips that I didn't even notice on the etys, especially faint cymbals in the background. Before the EQ was perfected, this was at the expense of harsh highs. Now, the highs are silky smooth, yet at the same time energetic and just as detailed as before. With the highs tamed I am now evening hearing guitar and bass lines more clearly than I ever remembered. Plus the perfectly balanced frequency response allows me to play the music louder with the SHE3580 than would be plesurable with the etys, allowing me to pick up even more details and groove to the music like never before. Dangerous but oh oh so fun
(we're not talking about really loud volumes of course, I was a quiet listener to start with and have always been afraid of loud noises.)
- bass is looser than on the etys, but have a very pleasurable impact that I think is only possible with dynamic drivers and shallow-insertion canalphones rather than BA drivers and deep-insertion canalphones. I remembered trying to boost the low bass of the etys, I could feel this very tight, very low bass going up in strength but contained only within my ear canals, it hurt my head. And the ety bass may have been TOO tight for its own good, it sounds unnatural. Nowhere other than from BA deep-insertion canalphones would bass be SO tight and clean, it simply lacks any of the associated reverberation that our ears take for granted from bass.
- fidelity-wise, these do not suffer from the one-note bass that were the Achille's heel of the
EX70ER. And these phones are even more sensitive to distortion in the recording than I remembered the etys to be. If anything was overdriven in the studio, intentionally or unintentionally, you WILL hear it with these Philips. If it's analog clipping, you'll get this warm fuzzy feeling, if it's digital clipping, you'll get this nasty buzz--all as it should be.
I think part of the reason these sound so good after EQ is that they come with neither bass ports in the enclosure nor foam over the nozzles. The latter feature resulted in some of the overbrightest sound I've ever heard out of the box but also means there's nothing between the drivers and my eardrums when listening and the drivers need minimal excursion to reproduce treble details, minimizing distortion.
