flightsimmer
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2014
- Posts
- 6
- Likes
- 10
I've been using my new AKG K7XX's for a while now and everything I hear is pure bliss. Being a home theatre enthusiast though, I bought a cheap SPL Meter (Scosche SPL1000) to calibrate the speakers to achieve matching volume.
I was wondering though, can this also be applied to headphones to achieve equal volume in frequency response as well? My soundcard has a basic equalizer built-in, and given the AKG K7XX doesn't need much volume I have headroom for tweaking it.
I already tried experimenting with the equalizer, and using the SPL meter and circular cardboard to prevent sound escaping, I calibrated every test tone from 31Hz - 16Khz to produce an output at 80db. The tones came from http://www.ronelmm.com/tones/, which give test tones from 10-20,000Hz at 0db.
My meter can only detect down to 50Hz so I needed to do some guessing for the 31Hz.
The resulting eq settings came out as the following:
31Hz : +4db
62Hz : +3db
125Hz: -1db
250Hz: -5db
500Hz: -8db
1khz: -7db
2khz: -6db
4khz+: -5db
The most noticeable difference of course was the rather large bass boost. Although it might be that the meter had trouble at low frequencies, everything certainly sounded better. Drums seemed clearer I'd say? I don't know, maybe it's just me. The mids though definitely sounded okay. Details were still there though, and enjoyed listening to music more longer. Compared to no equalization everything felt "fuller".
My question is was this all placebo? Did the SPL meter actually create flat output or is it just the enhanced bass that made things sound good?
I was wondering though, can this also be applied to headphones to achieve equal volume in frequency response as well? My soundcard has a basic equalizer built-in, and given the AKG K7XX doesn't need much volume I have headroom for tweaking it.
I already tried experimenting with the equalizer, and using the SPL meter and circular cardboard to prevent sound escaping, I calibrated every test tone from 31Hz - 16Khz to produce an output at 80db. The tones came from http://www.ronelmm.com/tones/, which give test tones from 10-20,000Hz at 0db.
My meter can only detect down to 50Hz so I needed to do some guessing for the 31Hz.
The resulting eq settings came out as the following:
31Hz : +4db
62Hz : +3db
125Hz: -1db
250Hz: -5db
500Hz: -8db
1khz: -7db
2khz: -6db
4khz+: -5db
The most noticeable difference of course was the rather large bass boost. Although it might be that the meter had trouble at low frequencies, everything certainly sounded better. Drums seemed clearer I'd say? I don't know, maybe it's just me. The mids though definitely sounded okay. Details were still there though, and enjoyed listening to music more longer. Compared to no equalization everything felt "fuller".
My question is was this all placebo? Did the SPL meter actually create flat output or is it just the enhanced bass that made things sound good?
