it's great project. No idea why some people do not want to eq their headphones at least a little bit. It can make a huge difference. Also frequency response is IMHO at least partially a matter of taste.
Taste, yes; and individual circumstances. My hearing is so good it might count as a disability, but I know where I have peaks and valleys in my sensitivity and a good EQ can help with the spikes taken by tinnitus ringing from youthful big boom car stereo work and explosives.
I checked their suggestions for my headphones against my EQ profile and theirs is pretty good. I like more lowfreq and much less high freq than the "flat" they're correcting for.
They're offering a great resource for skipping the "what does this set of cans sound like" stage. I probably spent 60hr or more dialing these in when i got them.
How can you find out where the peaks and valleys in your hearing are? I've wanted to get basically an EQ curve for my own ear hearing issues if possible as I'm sure I have some minor hearing loss, but wasn't sure how to do that. Any tips?
listen to a frequency generator while twiddling its dial. I dunno what would be the easiest tool to do that with right now, i'd start in audacity or some "audio programming toolkit".
Yes, I know enough to know I can sweep a sine wave, but I also know enough to know it’s more complicated than that. There are various curves that affect the perception of sound volume at different frequencies, like the response of the headphones, the varying response curve of frequency perception at different volumes, the inherent differing volume response curve in your brain/ears that is the basis for stuff like LUFS. I was wondering if there is a correct way to do this that corrects for all these different effects, or something professional you can do or pay for to get this measured correctly.
AFAIK "professional/medical" tests like 8 bands and may have put a decibel meter to their equipment this month. or not.
some professional audio engineers have some special recordings they listen to on everything and use a faith based or at least difficult to quantify internal process to come up with the "right" sound. I'm more in that end of the spectrum.
Ah okay, I'm surprised there isn't something more precise and scientific out there. Interesting to know that the theoretical gold standard I would really want might not even exist.
Edit: I stand corrected, as the poster below mention (I can't reply), I'd want an audiogram from a professional. Thanks!
I don't hear "notes" and "chords", I hear frequencies. My range (at near 50) still goes up to where i can hear the bats talking. In a room with people, i cannot not hear their pulse, breathing, and other biological proceedings...
I had it as a kid, went away in my teen years and now I only have tinnitus. For me it was only on certain frequencies that were boosted and they are near the principal harmonic of my always-there ringing tinnitus or in the frequency of another noise I sometimes hear that's more like a pure sinewave.
As far as I know it's more of a brain thing and not like a super-ear thing.
I've experimented with this and the results seem to vary depending on the headphones. I have a set of planar magnetic hifimans that don't have enough sub-bass out of the box, but can easily make tons of sub-bass with eq adjustments. On the other hand, some of the other headphones I tried this on sound like they're just distorting more when I try to apply similar levels of eq compensation.
There's also no way to apply a system wide eq to an iPhone, so you'll need an external device.
from my experience, it's absolutely necessary if you listen to a lot of podcasts because every tech-illiterate podcaster dude will see an EQ setting on their microphone/recording software and think "low frequencies are manly and sound good" and boost the hell out of it, and it sounds absolutely awful.
Granted my home speakers might have something to do with it, and headphones/earbuds do tend to have a high-pass filter built in just from their construction, so it probably doesn't affect everyone the same way.
I've been using equalizerAPO for desktop for years. I can only think of a handful of content creators that don't pull that bass-boosting garbage anymore, so the high-pass filter pretty much always stays on unless I'm playing music.
Or don't even normalize. The one podcast I regularly listen too regularly has guests record over the phone or DIY and they are often inaudible (to my over used ears). That'd be a great feature on spotify if it doesn't exist
Somebody should really make an easy-mode podcast recording app that functions as a phone call, but records the speakers locally, and then sends the audio to the host. It could even measure the latency on the call can cut that time out. This seems like it would be pretty trivial...
