Your totally right about room treatment and why I don't spend more than the budget end of HiFi, because I know how terrible my room makes everything sound..
Ive measured a few rooms and sets of HiFi and the biggest issue I find is not the general frequency response, but room modes, they peak far more than even the frequency response from a cheap boom box. Without active EQ or a notch filter and extensive room treatment then trying to flatten out the response of a speaker is futile if you ignore the room modes. Add in transient and phase responses and you add additional challenges to getting good audio.
The improvement is so noticeable that I assume it would take a lot of resources to fix the room physically in order to achieve similar results.
I don't want to sound to enthusiastic but I'm pretty certain I'll never buy a receiver that doesn't support Dirac Live.
https://twitter.com/TLAlexander/status/1569181219446980608
The 50mm headphone drivers were globally out of stock for a year so it is safe to assume the new drivers are from a different manufacturing batch. But my hope is that the problem lies in my headphone design, and the new and old drivers are roughly the same. I don't know anything about headphone design and seemingly got lucky with the old design, so if I need to adjust my new design that's not a big deal. But if the new drivers aren't performing like the old ones, I may not be able to fix things. So next step will be to swap drivers from the old and new headphones and see if the problem follows the drivers or the headphone design.
Images of the old design as well as the link to the onshape files on this git repo:
It'd be most interesting to see them.
What I wanted to do was build a little headphone test dummy head. But for my relative tests I just shoved my podcast mic, Audio Technica AT2005USB up to the center of the driver on one side of the headphone. Do look at my linked tweet for those FR curves.
However this little adventure has encouraged me to consider building the little head dummy. I have some nice little capsule mics I was playing with that would work nicely, and I have a datasheet for those that probably includes a curve.
This hobby work of mine goes slowly, but I appreciate your suggestion. I will try to tune up my FDM 50mm headphone design so that it sounds at least as good as my original resin printed design, and then look at building a better characterization rig.
Would you have some pointers on this?
I've been looking into this and while I've found pointers on "what to do", what's missing is where to actually find the necessary panels and how to figure if they're actually worth anything.
You can put your room dimensions into a calculator and get a rough idea of some of the try and find the modes of the room - which you want to treat, though sometimes it takes trial and error as well. But you want to treat the point of first reflection and then have bass trapping in the corners.
Don't buy that "acoustic foam" that looks like egg cartons, it's rubbish.
I use this for looks: https://www.camirafabrics.com/en/contract/inspiration/acoust...
You can probably reduce some room resonances.
> Ultimately, this is a bandaid for a poorly treated room. If you're serious about getting a flat response curve from your monitoring room, you're far better off learning how to treat the room properly and how to position your monitors within the room for the best results.
Well, doh, but it costs zero dollars and very little effort.
In fairness, the readme does state:
> A good microphone is needed, with a wide frequency range and preferably with a flat frequency response.
By 'preferably' I assume it's implied that it can curve-fit (whatever's needed, I know next to nothing about this) to a non-flat microphone response, as long as it's known, but if it's flat then no need.
If it's unknown (and non-flat or assumed non-flat because it's cheap and doesn't make any claims about it) then that's the real problem, no point trying to do anything because it's like trying to construct a level floor with a shoelace for a spirit level.
i just picked up a pair of KZ AS06 iems [1] and my listening preference is U shaped (which is how these are dialed in out of the box), but i imagine with quality hardware and e.g. 3+ dedicated, drivers it should be possible to flatten them out in an eq.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/eqpsen/kz_as06_...
AutoEq (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/) does something like this so... yes?
But targets various HRTF curves which aren't neutral or flat, and they usually aim for a Harman target of sorts, so no...
But there are some neutral-sounding curves that seek to just emulate pinna gain, so they have a ~3KHz peak which is required to 'emulate' the natural resonance of your ear, which you don't get naturally when you jam a driver all the way into it.
There's no AutoEq preset for the AS06s. Here's a representative sample targeting the 2019 Harman in-ear target for the KZ AS10s for funsies though: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...
https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/afsro3/review_o...