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Saying that the EQ technique descirbed there is not a solution because it does not make the headphones sound like speakers is a strawman. NOTHING except for fairly complicated signal processing can make headphones sound like speakers, and with the problems of real speaker systems why would you want to? There is a limit to what headphones can do in particular with regards to getting the sound "out of your head" but that does not mean we cant bolster their strengths for affordable detail and almost total insensitivity to room effects.
I think its very unfortunate for audiohilia that speakers that measure flat in an anechoic chamber are the standard. Its kind of sucky that so many people are willing to plop down $10K for speakers, but will not spend anything on any sort of measurement or room-correction system. Nor will they even EQ by ear to compensate for the "$10K speakers in a room barely good enough for $500 speakers sound" and yes it sucks as bad as "10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound sack". The fact that the speakers measured flat in an imaginary room is good enough for most people, and Im pretty sure that the funky frequency response brought out by the room is a large part of why I think most speaker systems suck - and the funky interaction with the ear is the same reason I think most non-EQ'ed headphones could use a little help too.
The key for the EQ for me was in the highs. Pay attention to cymbal crashes on a few albums across a few genres. It goes without saying that you should try to find a variety of tunes that you think are well recorded. Even if one or 2 discs are bad the rest will form a consensus.... The thing I hear that is the biggest reason for my enthusiasm for the EQ is that with most headphones without EQ (and certainly the ones that measure the flattest) the cymbal crashes jump in front of the vocalist. Logic says that if the album was mixed well they should be hanging out with the drums. Other things happen weird too - saxophones spread from front to back, very weird indeed. Violins are alllllll over the place. Turn on the EQ, and everything falls into place ooh-so-very-nicely. What I think is interesting is that the same EQ settings work VERY similarly for most of my headphones. The EQ fixes a problem with how our ears work with headphones, not a problem with the headphones.
It's not about loudspeakers being a gold standard of any sort, nor trying to make headphones sound like loudspeakers.
The problem is how you're "measuring" frequency response with your ears, and you're also ignoring the difference in HRTF from distant sources versus near sources.
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Actually, I'm pretty sure that for speakers, flat for our ears is a flat FR curve at the listening position. i remember seeing the measured FR curves at the listening position for the room below and they were flat within a 2 dB dB range with only acoustic treatments.
Yes, you want to have a measured flat frequency response, and yes, the speakers should sound "flat" to your ears when playing back source material. The source material is recorded by flat response microphones and preamps, and played back on flat response speakers in a flat response room you should get exactly the same "flat" sound as if you were there in the first place (frequency response wise).
However...
If you were to play a sine sweep in that flat room with flat speakers, you should hear variations in apparent loudness varying widely over the whole band - at a given signal level, it'd be the opposite of your equal loudness curve - your "apparent loudness" for a flat signal curve. That would reflect your ears-brain system's frequency response just like the equal loudness curve - so we'd be looking at the same 3 kHz ear canal resonance, 8-10 kHz dip, etc. On a completely flat response system you would hear those peaks and valleys in a sine sweep - yet music and other real life sounds would sound fine, because we only want what we hear to go through that "apparent loudness" transfer function once.
The problem with nikongod's system is that you're attempting to eliminate your ear's natural resonances from the equation altogether - in real life we always hear these resonances/nulls and they sound natural. EQ a headphone to sound flat in a sine sweep to your ears, and you've just canceled out those resonances and boosted the nulls until they're no longer there. Once you've done that, you're no longer listening with the same response as you do in real life. If that's not unnatural I don't know what is.
On the contrary, I would say that the best way to go about equalizing your headphones as such would be to listen to a sine sweep (and individual tones if necessary) on a nearly perfectly flat speaker/room system, and equalize that sine sweep to sound flat to you. Then, use that equalized sine sweep to equalize your headphones to sound flat to you. By doing this you compensate for your ear-brain's equal loudness curve
before equalizing, ensuring that you equalize the headphones towards a truly measurably flat response (actually, towards what a flat response far-field source sounds like). You're not specifically trying to equalize the headphones towards a speaker sound, you're just need some totally flat response transducer to create the sine sweep (preferably far-field [i.e. loudspeakers] unless you specifically want to tune your headphones to sound correct only with binaural ear whispering...).
