Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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