Mission impossible: finding a neutral sounding headphone! (Patreon)
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My original goal was to create a flat sounding compensation for my binaural sound samples which turned out to become a nightmare, as no headphone could render those precisely equalised samples correctly. I had to find a headphone target which would allow for my sound samples to be rendered as faithfully as possible and at the same time sound neutral on it's own, which became some kind of mission impossible. A properly equalised headphone to render my flat equalised samples won't sound neutral, while a neutral sounding headphone won't playback binaural sound samples that were equalizsed to flat properly.
In the meantime I made some changes and decided to dump the "precise" target I am talking about in this video to make everything more simple. I already had to depart from strictly neutral for my sound samples to be rendered faithfully with common headphones at all, therefore I will simply apply the necessary compensation to my recordings so that a headphone follwoing my "neutral" target will be neutral on its own and will also render my samples as lifelike as possible making the "precise" target simply obsolete.
Here you can see the delta between my neutral and precise target:
All my upcoming audio recordings will be compensated properly including this delta and playing them back over a headphone following my "neutral target" you should get the most lifelike possible result, which should give you an even better idea about the sound of all that audio gear out there. I am quite baffled on my own how realistic the results turned out thanks to all the effort I invested into this.
Instead of music I included some pink noise samples which you can check if my EQ for the Sennheiser HD600 works for you. With music it's hard to judge the coloration if you don't know the recording well, therefore judging natural sounds or pink noise like in this case should give you a better idea of all the EQs demonstrated. You need to use a Sennheiser HD600 for these to check if my target will work for you. This won't work with any other headphone of course.
I am planning to create profiles for additional headphones every month, which will be available to every Patreon subscribing to the enthusiast level. These headphone profiles will be only available for this given month but can be also purchased separately afterwards. I am planning to cover most popular headphones, but I am not sure how long I can do this, as proper equalising needs endless hours of listening and tweaking, you just cannot expect great results by simple graph matching. Any support from you is welcome to also encourage me putting my entire energy into this. I am of course very curious about the results you will be getting, if my sound profiles can also give you some significant improvement, otherwise all this simply makes no sense, just like buying different headphones every month thinking the next one will be "better"....
Thanks for all the support I got from my trusty followers since the very beginning I started this!