[Max Minimum]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lindrone Well, you're missing the key point... the reason why I brought it up is not to track down why ER-4P sounds worse than ER-4S in terms of detail.. but the "reason" as to why that happens. The important issue is that ER-4P and ER-4S has absolutely no differences in their driver design whatsoever. The only difference is the resistor used in the y-joint, hence shaping the sound differently. This is also the reason why you can get a P=>S adaptor, which is simply a resistor that adds the resistance to match that of the ER-4S. The decrease of the resistance allowed the driver to be more "active" by picking up more bass resonance as well as other resonance, which in terms will increase the perceived decay as well (since resonance is a part of the equation). Which in term also made people think they sound muddy as well. Overall though, ER-4P was a retrofit of a finely tuned earphone for its specific purposes, and retrofit never work quite as well as what was originally designed to do certain things. This goes to prove the point that sound shaping can easily be done using a variety of methods, as simple as presenting extra resistance in the signal pathway will change the sound signature. Which also means such issues as decay can be controlled using a variety of methods as well.

Actually, I understood your point, but I didn't express myself clearly enough. I agree that it's the decreased resistance at play here. But, I've heard this same phenomenon when increasing bass or decreasing everything else while increasing volume. I'm suggesting that no matter how it is that the bass becomes larger in the mix, it's the presence of it that counts. Well, I shouldn't overstate this. There aren't very many situation in the world where one solitary factor is THE cause of something - I just think it plays a large part.

And I agree with you that sound shaping can easily be done using a variety of methods. But that still doesn't resolve the matter of specifically getting at the decay rather than just any quiet sound. The decay of a guitar note or a cymbal crash (which is there in the recording and causes electrical force to reach the driver unit) is different than the decay of a driver movement. Ideally you would have no driver-induced decay - when the signal stops, the driver stops.

Now, it also occurs to me that there is another possibility. A driver that seems to exhibit truncated decay could have exaggerated dynamics. In other words, when it receives a signal relatively more powerful than what came previously, it's delivery of this is disproportionate to what it was being 'told' to do. And then the drop in volume is consequently more drastic. Since the attack often happens more quickly than we can resolve (I'm talking tiny fractions of a second), the impression one gets would come mostly from the decay. If you were to graph the volume across time of such a driver, it would appear spikey when compared to something more accurate. At the same time, it could still give you the impression of accuracy by exagerrating details through dynamics.

So, which one is more accurate as a whole? I think it'd be hard to say. The whole process of empirically determining relative accuracy among close rivals, as I think you, Lindrone, have stated before, is way too complicated to really accomplish today. How much does frequencey range count? How much does conforming to true life levels across that spectrum count? How much do transients count? How much does s/n count? And on and on...

And I'm glad people seem to have calmed down. The good points made on all sides are much more readily accepted that way.

 

[lindrone]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Max Minimum So, which one is more accurate as a whole? I think it'd be hard to say. The whole process of empirically determining relative accuracy among close rivals, as I think you, Lindrone, have stated before, is way too complicated to really accomplish today. How much does frequencey range count? How much does conforming to true life levels across that spectrum count? How much do transients count? How much does s/n count? And on and on... And I'm glad people seem to have calmed down. The good points made on all sides are much more readily accepted that way.

Very well said...

 

[Zuerst]

Hey lindrone, how does the Sensa compare to the A900. I'm pretty certain that the A900 would have a larger soundstage but does the Sensa exceed the A900 in details by a great amount? Does Sensa's cymbals sound better/more realistic than the A900? Bass? Thanks...

EDIT: and drum lines, and violins? and and and vocals?

EDIT2: I like the E5c overall but am a bit dissapointed in their high ends... cymbal response... Does the Sensa fixes that?

 

[lindrone]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zuerst Hey lindrone, how does the Sensa compare to the A900. I'm pretty certain that the A900 would have a larger soundstage but does the Sensa exceed the A900 in details by a great amount? Does Sensa's cymbals sound better/more realistic than the A900? Bass? Thanks... EDIT: and drum lines, and violins? and and and vocals? EDIT2: I like the E5c overall but am a bit dissapointed in their high ends... cymbal response... Does the Sensa fixes that?

Actually, I don't think A900's soundstage is particularly larger than Sensas... maybe by a little bit?

As for everything else, Sensa and A900 aren't in the same class at all, Sensa is much higher. Everything sounds more realistic on the Sensa, including cymbals. Shure E5c is nowhere near either.

 

[Big D]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zuerst I like the E5c overall but am a bit dissapointed in their high ends... cymbal response... Does the Sensa fixes that?

It does but you won't get the same bass you do with the E5c. Everything is more controlled and refined with the 2X-S (and UE-10 Pro). The bass is less exagerated and the highs more pronounced giving a more natural sound than the E5c could ever be capable of regardless of EQing.

Anyone that is having difficulty reading through this thread just has to stick hackeron on their ignore list and it is so much easier. Best thing you'll do all day!!

 

[Welly Wu]

I have no wish to incite another flame war having just returned home to Head-Fi and if my opinions count, then I am at a loss to understand why some say the Ultimate Ears Ue-10 PRO reproduces a compressed soundstage. I simply must agree to disagree. If I were to define a compressed soundstage as being that of the Grado RS-1, then I must state for the record that only this custom IEM does not pool the soundstage into a seductive homogeny of sound within the center of headroom. To the contrary, I ascribe it with an even wider soundstage because it trumps exceptional clarity and inviting immediacy sans the tipsy trebles of the aforementioned Mahogany cans.

On My All American Reference System, I absolutely hear a quasi-binaural, musical, and natural reproduction of all styles of music. I am so deeply connected to the music herself that I must re-frame all innuendos of a compressed soundstage associated with the Ue-10 PRO by being brutally honest and truthful: slipping them into my ears takes me to my own private sound sphere that transcends the boundaries of tissue and skull. Hear me here. The diaphanous Ue-10 PRO renders each colour, hue, shade, tone and timbre with stunning verisimilitude. Through close listening, Hilary Hahn's Bach:Concertos Hybrid SA-CD album is replete with carefully positioned spatial cues. For example, the violin duets in D minor emerge from far beyond center left and right stage respectively. As another example, the quickened strum of cello strings in B minor sets it much farther back toward the rear right of the stage. In conclusion, the Ue-10 PRO does not hem in the soundstage: it reproduces the signal of upstream components with ruthless precision. If you hear a compressed soundstage, then you now know to turn your attention to other components that may be the culprit.

Let us put an end to these feckless fights about custom IEMs regardless of brand name or model. It strikes all who view us -- the priviliged few -- as being so charged by our own egos that we have forgotten the most rudimentary reason why such products exist: to enjoy the music!

 

[Wmcmanus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Big D Anyone that is having difficulty reading through this thread just has to stick hackeron on their ignore list and it is so much easier. Best thing you'll do all day!!

I've made it a policy to never use the ignore function, but I've been tempted to make an exception in this case. I'm in agreement that this guy has proven himself to be a complete jack***!!!

The amazing thing about trolls is that they don't (probably can't) see themselves that way at all. You can try to reason with them (or simply to explain your position so they can see your reasoning) all day, but that simply adds fuel to the fire. They are so insistant on being the one who is "bright" and therefore must be "right" that they don't care how foolishly they come across. I mean, come on pal, what's up with this "you need to read so and so" approach? Then providing links to the mindless masses so we can all become enlightened like you? I've read a few things in my day too, but somewhere along the line, I've learned to think for myself.

Your problem is that you've somehow fooled yourself into believing that you are among the enlightened few, those with that "special wit" and intellectual superiority, that heightened sense of cultural alertness... and therefore you feel a need to teach us all... or else we will be doomed.

For the record, where you lost me was with this one:
Quote:

Originally Posted by hackeron What dont you get? -- If you are willing to choose the E2 over the E5, you are one of the people that prefer consumer grade equipment to audiophile equipment. You cannot be concidered an audiophile or an audio critic. You just had a lot of money to spare so well done on your financial situation.

Have you ever watched "Shallow Hal"? Yes, I think this is what you need to do. It's a great movie, and as you've said, "... I think you just might, give it a try, you might learn something". Here is the link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256380/

Big D, I'm grateful that you've taken the time to share your impressions and perspective concerning the UE-10 Pro and Sensa 2X-S. This has given us all another data point in addition to lindrone's.

 

[cosmopragma]

Thanks for posting your impressions, Big D.
I hope we'll get a follow up soon when you'll have the UEs at hand for a direct comparison.

I don't want to comment on hackerons behaviour.
Speaks for itself.

 

[plainsong]

I come mostly from the ety camp, and I'm happily wearing my new sensas as I type this. Yes there is less decay of the notes, in a much more natural way. In real life, one note doesn't stop before the next begins. The sounds mix together and are not seperate. The Sensas to my ears are towing a good middle ground between portraying how sounds actually mix together, while also giving me astounding depth and detail.

As for drumlines, it's one of the first things I tested. I had a good Cavaliers cadence, and the Santa Clara 1990 drum break, and it's the closest thing so far to what it really should sound like, and I do say this with real life experience.

 

[Welly Wu]

Hey Plainsong:

What other Ken Haruf books have you read?

Anyway, congratulations on the Sensaphons SOFT-2X. I'd like to know what your impressions are as they come along. Our timezones are worlds apart though. Write up a review some time, ok?

 

[plainsong]

Who's Ken Haruf?

If you mean my sig, Punslayer did that. If you mean the DCI references, I have some experience with what it sounds like live, and so it's a good way to test... that and it's a nearly impossible sound to reproduce.

Yeah, I'll post more impressions later - something about these things makes you not want to bother posting anything. Makes it seem unimportant somehow.

But I'll post more when I get to know them better.

I will say that physically, they match the impressions, and it's funny that two ears could be so different! I thought I had a fit issue, but I wasn't twisting them into the top flap of my ears. Ahh, now they fit.

I'll also say that one of the ear peices has the big driver on top and little on bottom, and the other is the opposite. Things don't sound weird, so I really don't think it's having a negative impact on the sound.

 

[wolfen68]

Big D...thanks for the comparison and your recent PM reply!

 

[jeffc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lindrone Not really, excessive resonance removal would just create an unrealistic representation of what the sound is really like. Artificially "cleaning up" the music isn't any better than creating way too much resonance and residual notes. Neither is more "accurate". Just that one would lead some people to think they're getting better sound because it all sounds cleaner. In reality it's no more accurate or better than the other way around.

Why is this artificial? If the instrument has a short decay and it's recorded to have a short decay, why would you want to extend the decay when it is played back? If the headphone can't handle the short decay, it obviously can't handle fast transients. If the decay is supposed to be longer, then the recording itself is bad.

If you play a square wave through the headphones, the transient distortion will show up as ringing about the rising and falling edges of the square wave. (On a frequency response graph, this will show up as a low-pass filter)

Etymotic has somehow tuned their transducers to handle transients very well. (see page 3 of the PDF).

Quote:

Originally Posted by lindrone Yes, Bangraman was talking about another issue, I was combining what he talked about as in accentuating the rising note in combination with the shortening of decaying note that I've always noticed... and drawing the comparison between how the "hyper-detail" is achieved with similar methods with the ER-4 as well as the UE-10. I believe they use the same principles to produce what seems to be more detail than there really is in the recording. Whatever it is, I think we agree that tonal qualities aside, the detail level that's produced on Shure earphones is more "realistic" than Ety's... thus to compare UE-10's method of producing detail to 2X-S, albeit on a different scale, one would draw similar conclusions. Anyway, addressing the issue of what constitutes a "natural decay" is not easy in the first place. Just like most other audiophile definitions, it is very much a subjective comparison between a wide range of product that is available to you. As some people consider Sennheiser the most natural and neutral sound, someone else will consider it laid back and too dark. By comparing a wide range of headphones, you pick out one that you think is the most life-like and mimics characteristics of say, if you were to attend live concerts or even, garage band practices.

How is "natural decay" hard to define? You play the instrument, you record it with a microphone and ADC that is better than human hearing (hard to do, but not impossible, ask Telarc how they do it), you play the recording with your speaker or headphone of choice, record how the headphone plays back the signal and compare the first recording with the second recording.

Under lab conditions, you'd probably want to estimate the impulse response of the headphones (from what I remember) by generating a square wave to see how the headphones respond to step function.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lindrone So with that in mind, addressing the decay on the UE-10 Pro in comparison to all of the headphone that I've auditioned/owned, which includes: Sennheiser HD580/600/650, Sony CD3000, Audio Technica A900/A1000/W1000/W2002, AKG K501, Beyer DT880, and many other headphone, UE-10 Pro has a very short decay comparing to just all of them. Sennheiser headphones has a lot more decay, CD3000 has a very fluid and fast decay, yet still has more of it than UE-10 Pro. The comparison can be drawn over and over again, UE-10 Pro's decay is just short. The next question is, how is this achieved? Tell you the truth, I don't really know, I'm not that technical about it. However, from what I do know... I had a conversation with Michael Santucci asking him some technical question a while back.. here's what I learned: All of the balanced armature driver on the market is made by companies that develops them for hearing aids. They have a whole range of different types of drivers for different uses, but in their own measurements, these drivers covers much less frequency than needed for musical purposes. Sensaphonics takes these drivers in, amplify them using their own circuits and designs, and drives the drivers to their threshold to get much wider frequency response from them than it was originally intended. Then, through very clever engineering, picking, choosing drivers with different frequency response, design amplifying circuits and crossover circuits for them. So obviously what produces the final sound from these IEM's aren't just the driver by themselves, there are circuits, resistors behind them that determines what the final outcome of the sound will be like. Through the manipulation of these circuits, you can easily eliminate what would be perceived as "decay notes" by.. basically as you said, filtering them out to a degree, or decrease their intensity. There's all sorts of way you can tune the sound outcome. Of course, combining that with the driver's own characteristics, not all of them has the same sized membrane, so of course the membrane itself has different resonance characteristics... It's all a pretty complex equation that's way beyond my understanding. The fact is that decaying notes can be adjusted, just as any other sound characteristics can be manipulated/adjusted at various levels of sound reproduction.

The "hyperdetail" of the ER4-s shows up as the sharp spike in the frequency response graph in the tail end of the graph near 16khz. The sharp spike is probably ok because most humans can't hear very well at 16khz (I can hear up to 18khz, but at that volume, sounds in the normal frequency range are very loud---I know I won't easily notice distortion at 16khz.). The result of this sharp spike in the frequency response is that the overshoot will be larger, but that the ringing will stop sooner. It's a trade-off: if the overshoot is too large, someone could experience the overshoot as a click. If the overshoot is damped, the ringing will last longer. Both of which are added distortion to the sound.

From the frequency response graph, the UE10's aren't tuned the same way, so the UE10's probably won't handle fast transients the same way as the ER4's