luisdent
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2012
- Posts
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- 470
Interesting post @luisdent, thanks for sharing. The discussion on the comments section is equally interesting: my own experience is summed up nicely by what Don Wilson from Etymotic says in this post:
"The point with Custom fit, is to get a consistent, and comfortable seal. There are some slight frequency response trade offs, but for the most part they are not enough to worry about. You can find big changes in the insertion depth, and sometimes even the eartip used. (...)"
Also interesting is his earlier reply:
"The custom fit earmolds work well for most people who have comfort, or seal issues with eartips. You can find response issues with people who insert the eartips to different depths, use different eartips, or have different ear canals. The curves you posted with the dampers moved look pretty good. The best comparison would be against the diffuse field response, not strictly comparing it to the stock eartip response."
Yea. I think everyone has a different view of what is acceptable. 3db even in boost somewhere is not acceptable to me. But for someone who wants comfort and is willing to sacrifice that, sure, what he says may be true. But the difference I got with my tips was enough that I could have picked another headphone like the pfe112, and it sounded closer to the stock er4 than my customs did. So I could have just used that and called it a day. But thefew db here and there that the er4 corrects in the treble makes them better than the pfe. So dealing with custom tips response seems like a huge waste of time and effort. Not to mention, expensive or not the closest to neutral matters to me.
But like he also said, perhaps some have larger canals. I could definitely see some having better luck getting the nozzle deeper with a custom. But for Rin and I that wasn't the case, as I assume many others it would not be the case either. That's why I said it absolutely could be worthwhile, so long as you are willing to take the risk or have some guarantee to fall back on when it do6esnt go well.
By no means would I ever want to dissuade anyone from customs. In fact I still consider trying another company sometimes. But o just k ow it sucks having these great expectations and then having them all crushed at a high expensive of money and time. I literally wasted multiple trips to an audiologist for molds and hundreds of dollars for the tips I never even got to use. But I digress.
I'm also lucky enough that for the most part i have zero issues with the stock tips now. I whet them slightly and rotate as i insert and i almost always have a comfortable, deep, great sounding fit.