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Comment by clzerv | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the effort and talent to pull this off, I find the results to be awful. I call this kind of overblown sound processing "Bose barf" since pretty much all Bose audio sounds like this, and it just grates on my nerves. Now TVs, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, etc. all seem to perform this kind of aggressive audio processing to overcome the limits of super cheap tiny drivers. It's getting hard to find devices which have a more neutral sound profile. All this audio processing makes music sound like it's coming out of a garden hose duct taped to a 1950's grade school hall speaker. I can't understand the appeal.

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Same here wrt to Bose. I respect their tech and science but then they add a bogus aesthetic layer on top.

I think it is meant to make jazz sound good. The eq-d bass and attenuated mids make a standup bass more apparent and the piano and vocals more present.

But it made me start to wonder if I started hating my favorite band: I was packing up to move this weekend and stumbled on my CD collection. Many Stereolab CDs. I played them in my basic acoustic waveguide radio. A slick bookshelf I inherited and rarely use.

45 minutes later I was telling myself "god this music sucks...just agonizing repetition." Turns out yes the motorik bass is repetitive...but the other key point of the band is the gentle singing and intricate delicate synth and organ melodies...all foreclosed on by some evil twin combo of an audio eng and marketer overindexing in mid low bass.

There's a subwoofer slider (around the icon) if the bass feels too heavy, and some songs require it to be toned down if it's already processed to be bass-boosted.

My Jabra headphones don't seem to apply any processing by default, and I prefer how they sound with the processing. If your headphones already boost bass or apply another effect, stacking the processing can be grating (which I've experienced when I record a video and play that through the daemon running).

I guess it's a matter of taste. I just like music sounding as though it's coming from a little farther away, and I suppose the bass-boost might be what you're finding unpleasant.

Seems to depend on the source audio too. The demo at the top of the page sounded good, but in the demo at the end I tried some rock music that already has a pretty wide stereo image, and it made it sound very 'squished' and like it was coming from inside my head, on top of lots of weird distortion/phase issues.

That sounds intriguing. I've only noticed it making sounds feel wider, or at most do nothing rather than squishing an already wide sounding track. What track were you trying, I'll see what's going on.

It was 'Square Hammer' by Ghost.

Yeah the default bass boost is too much. I set it to point straight left and its sounds way better.

I skipped this detail in the blog, but the spatial filter in the original processor already had bass boosting within the effect which I carried over and interpolate (non-linearly of course) now.

I've made the default 20% in the page for now.

That is why I refurbished my Harman-Kardon amp from 1991 and listen CDs and LPs through it increasingly these days. It drives either some Revox speakers I be also bought at that time or a HifiMan Edition XS. That thing is outright amazing. The pinnacle of mixing was in the 80s as far as my collection is concerned. The 70s were much experimenting and the 90s already too compressed.

You’ll want to get something from Etymotic, they target the “precise and neutral” profile you’re after.

OP wants the `earwax` audio filter in ffmpeg.

Any headphone/earphone can be EQed to "precise and neutral" if the distortion is low enough. IEMs like the Etymotic IEMs often do well here, but if you dislike things inserted in your ear canal you might prefer planar magnetic headphones. These typically have lower distortion than dynamic drivers, especially in the bass. I have a set of HifiMan HE400se headphones, which used to be exceptionally good value before the price went up a lot recently.

To get the best possible results from equalization you need to do it by ear by comparison to a calibrated reference loudspeaker, but you can still get good results using other people's measurements. And there's no consensus what the best target curve is. Studio control rooms aren't anechoic chambers so "flat" won't necessarily give you the intended sound. You might find AutoEq useful:

https://autoeq.app/

I generally prefer no spatial processing, except in the case of 60s-style hard-panned stereo, which is intended for loudspeakers and does sound a lot better with the "earwax" filter or similar. "Precise and neutral" is a lot more difficult with loudspeakers, both because it's hard to keep distortion low when you're moving a lot of air, and because you have the off-axis response and room acoustics complicating things.

> Any headphone/earphone can be EQed to "precise and neutral" if the distortion is low enough.

EQ can help a lot, but there are limits. The response curves you see are usually very smoothed and they’re only from one sample. The peaks and valleys and resonances can be narrow and can differ from unit to unit or even more from one manufacturing run to the next.

The response is also a function of the interface to your ear and leakage to the outside world. Some headphones are more sensitive than others.

I have a few high end headphones and I’ve tried a lot of the published EQs for all of them. In theory they should sound like they have the same frequency response but they still sound very different. Closer together when EQed, but you can tell they’re not the same.

I am an EQ proponent, but doing EQ on headphones doesn’t level the playing field so much that it only comes down to distortion.

The best case for EQ is in a sound controlled room for speakers when you can sit in the sweet spot and reflections and room effects are not a problem. Set up multiple sets of decent (distortion free) speakers in that environment with a moderate EQ and my listening skills aren’t good enough to identify differences most of the time.

True, and that's why you have to EQ by ear for best results. But even that won't be perfect, because the frequency response changes depending on exactly how the headphones are seated on your head, or exactly how the IEMs are inserted. And if there's foam in the construction, it will gradually compress over time, also changing the frequency response. It's still likely to be better than what you can get from loudspeakers in a typical room.

> I generally prefer no spatial processing, except in the case of 60s-style hard-panned stereo, which is intended for loudspeakers

Pretty much all audio is mixed for loudspeakers (in a room). It's fine if it is your preference but objectively the vast majority of music, film & etc sounds worse, or at least wrong with headphones. The main problem with these spatialization/binauralization techniques is that they are trying to model something that involves a deeply personal thing, the shape of your ears and head, and the way your brain interprets all that. They usually make these techniques with an average listener "head" in mind but if you are not lucky enough to fall in that average window the effect is likely sound bad or very fake.

Thanks, I hadn't come across earwax before. I listened to the examples here: https://hhsprings.bitbucket.io/docs/programming/examples/ffm...

It sounds very close to what I was going for, and feels much softer to hear. I wasn't able to find anything similar earlier with any search engine or an LLM.

I can also recommend Westone as being precise and neutral.

I've tried hard to pin down why I appreciate listening on some devices more than others - and your comment made me realize that I'm the kind of person that actually appreciates "more" spatial information rather than the "dry signal" - to the point where I made my own app to do that with all my audio sources (surraura.com). For some reason it helps my ADHD, and lets me focus easier.

100% agreed.

This fashion of cranking the base and the high end and removing the middle (simulating a subwoofer with some tiny speakers, basically) can't die fast enough.

I mean, fair play for the writer. If he wants it to sound that way he's of course free to do so. But this style is used a lot in concerts and open air amplification and I hate it.

My theory is that this style is popular with people playing their music too loud. If your ear feels 'blocked' after a while, your music is too loud.

One thing with this style is that, because it leaves the middle (speech) frequencies relatively empty, it feels less blocking. And the high base makes that it doesn't really sound tinny or harsh. But they high base cane easily damage your hearing still.

OSHA uses A-weighted sound pressure to estimate hearing risk, which roughly follows the ear's sensitivity and gives low frequencies much less weight, much like Fletcher Munson curves. Check section 10 here: https://www.osha.gov/otm/section-3-health-hazards/chapter-5. So bass having more volume/power doesn't by itself mean it's equally damaging to the ears.

I also wonder about the opposite situation: someone turning the whole volume up because the bass doesn't sound loud enough, raising the other parts with it. Having the bass adjustable could help there. Some songs already have plenty of bass, so it makes sense to turn it down for those, and perhaps have a dynamic limiter when it gets excessive.

By "blocked" I meant the impression of music sounding too close to my ears, rather than my hearing feeling blocked after listening. Of course, feeling softer doesn't completely establish that it's safe either.

Interesting about that OSHA curve. I also read some (dutch) research once where they had a slightly different conclusion (though I now can't find it anywhere): People tended to underestimate the volume/sound pressure of bass , and coupled with the fact that bass is much harder to block with earplugs the loud bass at concerts was a major contributing factor to hearing damage for concert goers.

Now this does not contradict what you say, of course. It's very well possible that the human ear is less sensitive to bass and that people are underestimating the volume of bass.

It's not a new fashion. In the 70s/80s hifi often had a "loudness" button which boosted highs and lows, although not as much as they're boosted by EQ settings today.

The more recent variant is "smiley curve" EQ - high at the extremes, drooping in the middle.

EQ can mess with transients, especially in the bass. You get more volume, but at the expense of some time smearing.

Yup. As driver size goes down this hollows out the middle of most music. All my songs have a punchy kick and the midrange around 150-300 is just as important as bass and treble. A small driver can't do midrange.

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