Gone with the wind… (Patreon)

…it would seem, because I wasn’t very active on Patreon lately. Sorry for my long absence but I was having a hard time, feeling somehow depressed, listless and useless with no will to even check my Patreon messages. Although I had received some new products in the meantime from Soundpeats and Anker including the Q45, A40 and some sleep earbuds which I haven’t even opened yet, trying out all these made me even more frustrated.

Please apologise the lack of content, in fact I wasn’t sleeping the whole day but was silently “working” in the background and did lots of tests end experiments with my binaural microphones, when I finally noticed that most I did so far seems to be flawed. We had a couple of windy days lately which I made use of trying to capture this natural smooth spectrum as good as possible (you maybe remember my birch recording a while back). The video above already has my new and improved compensation applied, which should result in a pretty natural and smooth spectrum which was manually matched to a reference spectrum I captured simultaneously with a normal omnidirectional microphone. The trick by capturing wind moving leaves is that it’s a more distant and diffuse sound covering a large area and remains smooth and constant even if you move around, while trying to do this with 2 speakers in front of you will result in lots of changes to the spectrum if you move back and forth etc.

You can see the reference spectrum I captured in green and my final binaural spectrum in blue.

You should notice that they align quite nicely from about 2khz upwards, I ignored the area below 2-3khz as I know that HRTFs do not alter the incoming sound below these frequencies much, while lots of peaks and dips are introduced by the concha above that. I was quite excited about my improvements, because my former recordings always appeared way more jaggy when looking at the spectrum. A natural continuous spectrum like the one captured doesn’t contain any peaks thus it should sound smooth and equal to the real spectrum when listened over a headphone or speaker. With familiar sounds like rain, wind etc any errors become way more obvious than with music which was recorded by someone using some microphones, processed by some sound engineer in the studio and mastered by someone else…

The real problem started when I noticed that my final recordings did not quite sound the same like I was hearing in real life regardless which headphone I was using. You can hopefully understand my frustration that’s why I had sleepless nights wasted for further tests as I was sure that my compensation may be flawed. Everything was on halt because I couldn’t offer any videos knowing they do not represent the real sound I am hearing until I discovered that the headphones must be simply flawed and cannot reproduce this smooth spectrum properly. Even my HD600 which I thought I had already equalised for a flat response before just didn’t sound right. With the recorded wind noises, rain etc I started to hear lots of further errors in the perceived sound despite my EQ.

Then I started to correct for these errors again one by one trying to match the sound I was hearing in real life to this I had just captured with my binaural microphones. My first results are quite intriguing. On top of my original EQ for the HD600 I started to add further filters to make the smooth captured spectrum to appear also smooth and more or less the same I was hearing in real life when listening over the headphone. I must confess I am still far from it, but interestingly also “normal” recordings started to sound more lively and exciting to me with this new EQ, and I am currently trying to optimise it and match the response I am hearing over the headphone to that I am hearing in real life. This will of course result in a completely different sound that I would regard as “neutral” for a headphone then I did before. This will also result in a completely new IEM tuning in future. I already spent lots of time to tweak my settings for the Free Pro 2 as well as I want these responses to be matched as good as possible. I had already sent some first results for the Free Pro 2 to my trusty listeners with the same ear canal resonance like me to get some initial feedback but I will need more time to achieve my final goal.

All this finally gave me some meaning of life again and I am quite eager to explore and dig deeper into the mysteries of sound although it can be really frustrating doing the same over and over again ending up with completely different results.

I am so thankful about all your continuous support as my wife again blows everything off I am currently wasting my time on thinking I must have become crazy.

I know I promised to give away the Anker Soundcore Motion Boom+ for last month, and I will catch up on everything soon, so stay tuned!