The Stax Thread III

[padam]

Not to mention that oratory1990's measurements show that it is impossible to match the Harman target curve to start with. (He even gives them scores to reflect how 'successful' that was.)
So even disregarding everything else besides frequency response, significant differences will still remain, one can easy see measurements EQ-ed curves how different they still are. (I don't even want to mention that testing certain Harman EQ curves versus others really shows who has more of an idea how to do it properly.)

Just because let's say there are two similar curves in the bass area, the perception or quantity punch etc. might still be vastly different in real life.

Nevertheless, I still don't oppose the idea of manufactures providing certain things via to their products to test out (like certain minor software tweaks for certain amp+headphone combos to be more specific) if they consider it worthwhile, more effective instead of trying to tune it differently, but it doesn't seem to be a popular trend.
It would be like 'an admission of guilt', saying: "yes, we don't think that it has a 'nice' factory tuning in that frequency area."

 

[SolarCetacean]

That seems to me to be a frequency response issue.

So if you had the 007 and the 009, and loaded up EQs for the Harmon-Target with the same bass boost from this website I wonder if they would sound the same:
https://autoeq.app/

There was a user on reddit who used to own Stax and sold everything and settled on some mid-range Hifiman headphones because he said he had realized after getting to the $500+ range differences in headphones are just differences in EQ.

You can get very close tonally with EQ, but two headphones will rarely sound exactly the same after EQ. FR is simply too fine-grained of a metric to EQ based on measurements. I tried to EQ my Sundara to sound like my Shang Jr based on Crinacle's graphs. They did not sound alike at all, with the EQed Sundara being much harsher than the real Jr. I got closer when EQing by ear, but never exactly the same. The soundstage size of the Jr could never be replicated, nor could the separation of sound (another part of detail resolution). The tonal details were of very similar levels. However, the remaining issues lay in very small and narrow differences in the upper treble where both measurements aren't accurate and tuning by ear is very difficult. I was at 18 filter bands at that point in my EQ and I would have needed at least several more to finalize the last bit (and still wouldn't have addressed soundstage). And that was with two headphones that started with similar tunings.

I remember that Reddit user (I started out on Reddit years before I joined Head-Fi), and I recall the user's reasoning was that EQ got him close enough to the kilobuck headphones that he couldn't justify keeping them. That's a fine reason, but it depends on the person's tolerance for "good enough". For me, I'm not in the "good enough" phase. For me, at the moment, I follow "close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades". That last inch makes all the difference in enjoyment. Frankly, I'm not quite sure what one person on Reddit chose to do with his time and money should mean for me or anyone else.

 

[catscratch]

Yeah the whole EQ one headphone to sound like another thing never worked for me. They just don't, unless they were already very close to begin with. My approach to EQ is to fix FR problems and generally get the headphone to within the boundary of what I call neutral, but also do as little as possible. Doing too much with EQ degrades sound quality and it's always a tradeoff of how much SQ you gain by fixing FR issues vs how much you lose from post-processing.

 

[Kiats]

Been suffering from insomnia, waking up at around 5 am. Thank goodness for music. Been enjoying the Lambda NB off the 007t that @spritzer kindly sent across to me. Using it alongside the ED-1.

 

[number1sixerfan]

The 009BK is for listening and the Lambda is for feeling, honestly I can't imagine a headphone that can combine the two without sacrificing in one direction or the other. Perfect example is the X9000, it does a really solid job of coming down between them and is more musically engaging than the 009BK and waaay more technically proficient than the NB Lambda, but it loses a bit of the secret sauce in either direction as a result. (On an unrelated note that's also my issue with the 009S vs the 009.)

Insightful post overall, but the bolded part I wanted to emphasize. At least for me, across the board the tradeoffs almost always exist when talking about more analytical/brighter headphones in comparison to warmer headphones. Each have their own correlated strengths, but as a headphone is tuned in either direction, there becomes clear tradeoffs that some won't mind and others will solely based on preference. It's annoying really, as it would be amazing if one headphone could check every single box, but I keep each kinds of these headphones to complement each other specifically for this reason. I'd never be a single headphone type of person just based on my own preferences of having contrast available.

 

[oneguy]

Been suffering from insomnia, waking up at around 5 am. Thank goodness for music. Been enjoying the Lambda NB off the 007t that @spritzer kindly sent across to me. Using it alongside the ED-1.

Didn’t realize they made a silver ED-1

 

[Kiats]

Didn’t realize they made a silver ED-1

Ah OK. The rare ones I have seen pop up on Yahoo Auctions JP have all been silver. It might be a market specific thing.

 

[oneguy]

Ah OK. The rare ones I have seen pop up on Yahoo Auctions JP have all been silver. It might be a market specific thing.

I’m not sure where mine originally came from but I suspect it wasn’t Japan because it came with the multi-voltage jumper.

 

[gammi]

It would be like 'an admission of guilt', saying: "yes, we don't think that it has a 'nice' factory tuning in that frequency area."

RAAL actually did this with their CA-1a headphone, they've stated that their goal was to make a very technically capable driver first and then worry about frequency response second since that can be fixed with EQ. I think that's quite a good engineering approach.

 

[Svperstar]

Thank goodness for music. Been enjoying the Lambda NB off the 007t that

One thing I don't have is a normal bias Stax for my T1S, have a bit of analysis paralysis on that one. Not sure what to get.

 

[oneguy]

One thing I don't have is a normal bias Stax for my T1S, have a bit of analysis paralysis on that one. Not sure what to get.

SR-Lambda is probably the safer bet as it will be less power hungry than SR-Sigma.

 

[KDS315]

I recently got a SRA-14S (the predecessor of the famous T2) which has both NB and PRO, lucky to have that for my LAMBDA NB and SIGMA NB.

 

[oneguy]

Nice, the SRA-14S has the highest output voltage of all the Stax amps that came with NB outputs.

 

[KDS315]

Yep, one of the reasons I was after that. Plus came with all (!!) the EMM-, EMC-1, ECC-1 cards for the two slots! Quite powerful it is indeed!

 

[oneguy]

Yep, one of the reasons I was after that. Plus came with all (!!) the EMM-, EMC-1, ECC-1 cards for the two slots! Wuite powerful it is indeed!

Looks like there is one more card needed to rule them all. I had now idea there was a 4th.

EDIT: looks pretty inconsequential as it appears only to be a board to add an extra input.