[Joe Bloggs]

Quote:

ive downloaded the electri-q pmeq  but it was downloaded as a dll file...how do i open this?

 
You need a VST host such as George Yohng's VST wrapper for foobar
http://www.yohng.com/software/foobarvst.html

 

[reli029]

Incredible tutorial ... this whole time my headphones were torturing me but not anymore
Thank you guys, this was an awesome experience. So far with my headphone I have found 6 peaks and 3 of them are terrible 11KHz, 8250Hz and 952 Hz ... end results - crap headphones looking forward to some Beyerdynamics.

p.s. I had to join just to share my experience and for the awesome community

 

[Vkamicht]

Long time equalizer and supporter of this thread here. I've been in hardcore mode the last few days:
 
 
 
What you're looking at is part of my sound card's built in EQ settings. I have fb2k set up to route the L/R channels to their own ASIO channels. With this, I can set up EQ for each channel individually, and solve for problems that dual-channel EQ cannot. After I had the tone of the sound near perfect, I realized that my ears are both quite different (or the headphones themselves) and the soundstage was suffering. I've used a combination of pink noise and mono-mixdown music to help center specific frequencies that were off balanced. The result is pretty damn awesome.

 

[vid]

^ xnor has also made quite a decent (and free) stereo EQ for foobar. Also, a non-manual (non-perception-based) alternative to stereo EQ to fix channel imbalances is the convolution method, outlined there: http://www.head-fi.org/t/566929/headphone-csd-waterfall-plots/855#post_8796228 (well, somewhere in that thread anyway), which I've not yet seen anybody else here attempt, but have had good success with myself.

 

[-xX-Mew-Xx-]

How do you measure your headphones FR?

 

[rhythm is life]

My audio-technica ATH-M50 balanced EQ using SineGen and Equalizer for iOS:
 

 
Settings:
 
375 Hz: +2, Q=2
3600 Hz: +3, Q=4.319
4500 Hz: -4, Q=4.319
5800 Hz: +2, Q=4.319
9100 Hz: -6, Q=4.319
 
The M50S Headroom graph for comparison (their regular M50 graph is the same)
 

 
Notice the dip between 300 and 400 Hz, the slight peak between 4 and 5 KHz, the dip between 5 and 6, and the peak around 9. I must have dummy head ears.

As for my 3600 Hz adjustment, the FR sounded like it dropped off a table after the natural peak near 3 kHz. I don't know if this is normal or not, but 3600 Hz sounded way quieter than any frequencies in its vicinity. Getting rid of that 9100 Hz spike really smoothed out the treble response. The other settings really don't make much of a difference.

 

[factro]

Thank you for such in-depth research work... had to register just to comment this.. Please keep up the good work and keep sharing the information...
 

 

[bonfirehay]

Quote:

Oh, you don't have to dress it up. If my attitude offends, you so be it. It's not like I'm going to take it to heart (note to self: do not let him see you crying).

Ok, let's take this slowly: the analogy with light is as poor as it would be with flavours or colours. Simply put, our ears can hear different frequencies concurrently. This is why we can hear a bass drum at the same time as the vocals. A thing like a jet engine will cover noise because it's approaching white noise and goes across the entire spectrum. So when a person says that they want to alter the characteristic of a headphone so that the mids don't cover the highs, they're looking at it wrong. If they needed to move the spectrum due to a design choice or fault they would require a parametric equaliser and a fine ear, so they could literally take a section of the sound and alter its pitch.

Likewise, you cannot really remove the sibilance, only make it quieter. Sibilance is the price you pay for having treble detail. If you make it quieter, you don't fix it, you just have less treble, sibilance and all. Why would you pay for some of the best headphones in their category, just to muck with them? I know I pick my headphones according to mood and the album, and it seems like the whole point of using headphones: you can have more than one setup.

To shift a paradigm, all of this messing about with settings is like when you go to a bad cooking forum and people have mind-blowingly complex ways of making very ordinary food. I just thought it was a very verbose and loose post; the kind of hearsay and guesswork which audiophiles are known for making.

If it had been about the crystalline structure of oxygen free cables or some other ridiculous thing, I wouldn't have even put my view across. I'd have just walked on by.

So which one is it? Pro-skub or anti-skub? It has a time and place, and if we're going to discuss the science of mastering, we should probably leave it to the experts.



And no i am damn well not to point out every single little loose point in the original post. Life is too short.

 
When a person says that they want to alter the characteristic of a headphone so that the mids don't cover the highs, they mean that the louder your mids are, less highs you are going to listen, because the louder the mids are, the quieter every other frequency is going to sound. Your perception of sounds adapts according to the sound pressure level, which not only the mids contribute to.
If you don't understand this it is no surprise you say what you do.
Also you acuse others of audiophile guesswork, but you seem to be quite eager to collect headphones without understanding the function and usefulness of equalizers. 

 

[streetdragon]

Even on the same headphone, being in a quiet home and being in the noisy subway can cause them to sound different, being that the latter causes the bass to become anemic, therefore a warm tilt is needed to compensate for this by using the eq.
But of course you can't make a Sennheiser sound like a Grado and vise versa, so different headphones are still required. It just helps you like more headphones with this added degree of sound flexibility.

 

[freeeekyyy]

Anybody have the installer for sinegen? For some reason, it doesn't seem to be available anywhere. The original link still works, but it downloads a different application. Also, if you have or know where I can get ahold of the pink noise file, that would help a lot too.

 

[streetdragon]

Quote:

Anybody have the installer for sinegen? For some reason, it doesn't seem to be available anywhere. The original link still works, but it downloads a different application. Also, if you have or know where I can get ahold of the pink noise file, that would help a lot too.

Not sure about sinegen, but you could try this,
http://www.audiocheck.net/audiofrequencysignalgenerator_sinetone.php
and for pink noise:
http://www.audiocheck.net/testtones_pinknoise.php
Also check out the rest of the site, there are some really cool tones there

 

[freeeekyyy]

Quote:

Not sure about sinegen, but you could try this,
http://www.audiocheck.net/audiofrequencysignalgenerator_sinetone.php
and for pink noise:
http://www.audiocheck.net/testtones_pinknoise.php
Also check out the rest of the site, there are some really cool tones there

Thanks. Appreciate the help.

 

[freeeekyyy]

Unfortunately, that still doesn't cut it. No way of knowing what frequency you're listening to at any given moment, or to control it real time. It doesn't work for this purpose. If there's anybody who has the sinegen installer or knows where I can find it, please tell me. I really want to EQ my headphones, and it's not exactly easy to do with just electri-q.

 

[streetdragon]

Quote:

Unfortunately, that still doesn't cut it. No way of knowing what frequency you're listening to at any given moment, or to control it real time. It doesn't work for this purpose. If there's anybody who has the sinegen installer or knows where I can find it, please tell me. I really want to EQ my headphones, and it's not exactly easy to do with just electri-q.

what method do you plan to use to eq your headphones? the sine sweep method?

 

[freeeekyyy]

Quote:

what method do you plan to use to eq your headphones? the sine sweep method?

Yeah; manually controlling the frequency response, finding the peaks, and then going into electri-q to remove them.