[zyboz]

I use 10 and 20 Hz burninwave to test how low can my headphone produce. At very low volume i hear some cracking. But when i turn the volume up, the cracking disappear, and i can hear the normal low frequency vibration. Is this normal or my headphone damaged?

 

[IpodHappy]

Be sure your plug is really clean.  Outside of that, it is not normal for a driver to crackle at low volume and not at high.  What is your source?  Do you have a bass boosted EQ setting turned on?  Ipod's are notorious for bass clipping through their EQ (not enough bit range in the digital signal path).  Perhaps this distortion is more apparent at lower volumes on your particular IEMs.

 

[goodvibes]

Digi volume on source?

 

[zyboz]

Thank you so much for the answer.
Source is my Laptop. EQ is off. My Laptop has digital volume. 10 Hz wave has 14000 kbps.
Just tried out with my iPod 1st Gen rockboxed. The crack doesn't appear on the iPod.
If i scale the volume of my laptop from 0 to 100. The crack appears on 3 to 7.
At high volume it sounds like helicopter in the movie, which is normal.
But between 3 to 7 it sounds like a rat or some kind of signal at 10 Hz. (i'm not sure if this means cracking or poping)
This happens to both my sennheiser IE8 and Ultimate Ears 700.
I hope that the problem lays on my laptop not my IEMs.

 

[kingpage]

If this happens to most (if not all) of your IEMs, and as soon as you switch source the problem vanishes, then it's most probably the fault of your laptop. Laptop generally have notorious soundcards. As you said, it doesn't disappear with a different source so I'm not sure what 's going on. But it's only an issue with volume levels between 3 and 7, I wouldn't worry about it unless it's normal listening volumes.

 

[zyboz]

I'm very curious about this and have just took my HD595 to try out too. And it's got the same Problem.
Now i can be relieved, because i can't think that my HD595 damaged.
I'm guessing (don't really know) that, the headphone doesn't get enough power to produce the real 10 Hz sound at very low volume.
Maybe the diaphragm can't overcome the basic resistance with low power at very low frequency and amplitude, which produces this cracking noise.

 

[koonhua90]

Perhaps it's your laptop soundcard that cannot handle such low frequency. There is a limit usually..and more so with the cheap ones.

 

[zyboz]

Quote:

Perhaps it's your laptop soundcard that cannot handle such low frequency. There is a limit usually..and more so with the cheap ones.

This should be the right answer. Why would i blame my headphone at the first place. Silly Me

.

 

[kingpage]

I too once was scared to hell when I couldn't hear anything above 12000Hz with the low end earphones, but I soon found out the highs were rolled off and that I could hear much higher frequencies when I used even some cheap Altec Lansing 2.0 speakers.
 
Still, the story of cracking noise only at very low volume is just plain weird.

 

[rawrster]

I guess I'm lucky that my onboard sound from my netbook isn't totally horrible surprisingly. I'm selling my dac tomorrow so have to live with onboard or my clip+ for a couple weeks.