SolarCetacean
500+ Head-Fier
Using autoEQ filters on a 10-band EQ is not advised, because the autoEQ filters have settings to adjust how wide or narrow each filter is, which is not possible using a standard 10-band EQ like the one on the Walkman. So by trying to use the autoEQ settings, you're probably messing up the sound even more.
I think that's the main issue with EQ. There are lots of ways to mess up the sound, and not that many ways to make the sound better. And a lot of ways that seem to be "better" are really just different rather than strictly better, because you probably gave up something else to achieve those gains. It helps to have a baseline, like autoEQ tries to make each headphone match the Harman Target Curve, which is a decent baseline for neutral-ish sound. But if you aren't aiming for Harman, then EQing by graph is quite hard, because deviations from Harman can interact in unintuitive or unpredictable ways, so it's difficult to tell if any one change will be better or worse unless you understand how that change can combine with other changes in different parts of the spectrum. The other thing you can do is tune by ear, like I can hear the 3K peak, the 10K peak, the dip between them, and a weird notch just below 3K when I do a sine sweep, so I know that those are areas that I can work on with EQ. But the issue with sine sweeps is that some parts are supposed to be louder than others due to interactions between the headphone and your outer ear and your brain's perception of loudness at different frequencies, so you can't just hammer everything down to equal loudness in a sine sweep, because that would also be messing up the sound.
As for attitudes towards EQ, there are several hundred regular users, possibly thousands, on Head-Fi. People here are going to run the gamut from the "EQ will fix everything" crowd to the "never EQ" crowd. In general, there are more non-EQers here than on Reddit for example. Personally, I used to be more into heavy EQing. In the past year, I've basically stopped using it for the most part. I don't dislike it, and I usually EQ headphones that I have at least at first to get an understanding of its sound, but I find that EQ rarely improves things holistically. It gives you better X, but does so by reducing quality Y. Like the lower treble EQ that fills in the large dip there on the Z1R diminishes its spatial qualities. Plus, parametric EQ that allows you to correct for headphone issues is mostly limited to PC setups, and more people on this forum use streamers or other gear that doesn't allow for that level of EQ.
