More headphones guff

Hi-Fi Corner
1

Update on the iFi GO Link Max. What seemed like a good idea, using some Sugru to cover the fragile-looking cable, turned out to be a mistake. The unit overheated alarmingly do it’s now back in its original state.

With the Mark Levinson 5909’s, I developed a concern about their tuning, which is to the “Harman Curve”. This is apparently the most optimum EQ map for the human ear to listen to music. Can’t say one way or the other whether this is true, but the ‘phones sound better than my previous Momentum 4’s, which are tuned for a completely different presentation, so benefit of the doubt and all that.

But it got me thinking and after consulting my AI consultant bot, it appears that when using the phones in passive/semi-passive (ANG engaged) mode with cabling, this curve is not active.

I had a think and it occurred to me that if I could get an EQ app to sit between the signal source and the DAC, I might be able to get all three modes to be SQ congruent.

I ended up with “Poweramp Equaliser". After a couple of attempts to manually replicate the Harman Curve, it didn’t sound right. I think I was over-correcting, and so it proved to be. I discovered list of “pre-Customised” settings in the app, which featured, among others, three presets under the title “Crinacle 711”. One of these turns out to be a copy of the Harman Curve.

Having locked it in, the result is that I have optimum quality across all three playback processes. It even seems to have brought the LDAC Codec quality nearer the lossless quality of cabling.

If you’ve got this far in this take, you might very well be interested enough to try the app yourself with whatever ‘phones your have and if so, and if your experience is as enjoyable as mine… you’re welcome.

Happy days.

2

I think if is more that it is a popular response, and nothing to do with optimal. And a lot will depend on how the music was recorded. If the music was recorded exactly as it sounded in the venue where musicians were playing, then actually flat is what would give you closest to hearing the performance, with the Harman curve departing significantly from that. When as a teenager I first started playing records on my brother’s Dansette type record player, I always wound the treble and bass controls to maximum because it sounded better that way – but unsurprising as the frequency response was pretty curtailed at lowest and highest frequencies, so maybe more a compensation than producing my own equivalent of the Harmon curve. With speakers in a room received wisdom suggests that best sound in-room is with a near flat frequency response gently sloping upwards from treble to bass.

but I wonder psychoacoustically things are different with headphones.

3

The Harman curve was the fruit of a large experiment to find which headphone tuning pleased the listeners who took part in the experiment. Most headphones follow this curve, with the bass end and treble end being shifted upwards, compared to a linear response. Some deviate from this curve, mostly with more bass than the original curve. It is a one size fits all tuning.

Studio Engineers look for a flatter field, and Bass Heads, want a V shaped curve. Some music types need a slightly modified curve. Reviews generally point out a headphones tuning.

4

I reckon so.