Anechoic Chambers sound brutal for sure. I attended a large amount of concerts at the BSO, Carneigie. Mechanics Hall and other nice acoustic settings. I never found sound engineers to be overly trained in listening. Lots of times they listen to super hot headphones or monitors to wake them up to something wrong during the long boring hours. I'm a throwback to triple mics, and direct to disc. I think music should sound as close as possible to the real thing. Rooms? Concrete floor with 2x2 scatter rugs on half, solid walls, with ASC tube traps and Sound Flags scattered about. Sparse furnishings to the left/right of your ear. No overstuffed chair under your butt. Room dimensions like" my last home - 34'x21'x10-14', 6 apatures in the walls (doors and windows - all treated to not rattle). A pair of ML CLS IIz w/ Gradient subs or Verity Parsifal (v 3 or later). coule of Pass amps & pre-amp, Koetsu on a Clearuadio straight arm on a VPI TNT Jr. That was my norm. Not interested in "good loud speakers" in a "decent room".
I too think it has a tad too much bass so I simply reduce the low shelf. but I do think the Harman target in the high mids and treble is quite useful as it closely related to the average human ear gain anyway so the top half of the curve is a little less preferential and more widely accepted.
Sure I just specified under 100 Hz, over that they have things pretty screwed down tight. However, with planar headphones - they always follow the FR, there is no attention paid to frequencies of serious ringing. So when I look at what they have for my planar I have to get a waterfall plot to try and set it, and play around until its pretty close. And as I mentioned I wouldn't trust any settings for a dipole - that's measurements, then lots of listening, and some room corrections. It's an art, science cannot do the job on its own.
i mean put it this way. I used to do produce electronic music for years and have had several home studios decently treated and also have a decent 2ch setup and studio now. and while those rooms are not perfect, they are treated and there is some room correction. Oratory's curves are typically not too far off froom sounding to my ear fairly balanced. Again I usually reduce the bass about 1.5-2db from his parameters and sometimes I reduce the treble portion 1db or so depending on the headphone but again it's usually pretty close so ill double stand by my original statement in that i think oratorys eq parameters are a good starting point. of course you need to test for yourself and see what sounds right, do some comparisons.
I use them, that's how I came to find they were in every single case I've examined closely - about 10-11 - clearly wrong in the bass, and as I said for planar headphones - they ignore ringing. But magnetic planars all ring quite a bit.
Lastly, again, I don't just input his harman curve and call it a day. i said it's a good starting point to go with, see how it sounds then do some testing, adjusting and listening, rise, repeat...we all dont have GRAS' laying around so it's nice to have some other data points. and like i said earlier, the harman target is fairly accepted for the upper mids and treble portion in which ear gain is being accounted for.
Agree for the most part, but I have yet to hear a setting for any headphones under 100 Hz that's correct. I don't listen to closed ear cans, and I listen to almost all planars. I have a high quality system for cans - no match for my old room stereos, but very cost effective.
