Comment by ofalkaed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ofalkaed | Hacker News Reader

The bass heavy tendency of western consumer grade headphones/speakers is tuned for western pop music and does not sound very good with much else, some of the non-western pop traditions are not bad. Headphones/speakers with a flat response will sound lacking in bass but will not sound piercing with sources which were not mixed with bass heavy systems in mind and will play better with EQ. While flat may lack the deep powerful bass you will get used to it and you will be able to hear everything else in the track better, including the bass.

The way they get that deep powerful bass is not just by increasing the bass, that would leave everything outside of the bass too quite in comparison, they also put dips in the frequency response to accentuate the bass. These dips work fairly well as long as the instruments are fairly consistent in their ranges which is quite regular in western pop, everything is essential a bass, a guitar and vocals even when they are not and you have 10 instruments in the mix, everyone sticks to the various ranges which sound right and the engineer (assuming they are good) fudges things with the mixing. But the dips come at a cost, you lose detail.

If you want flat response but your music has lows that go down to around 20hz, the relative power required to make the 20hz audible to an equivalent volume is exponentially higher than to make 200hz audible. And drums will always sound better if you can hear 20hz, regardless of the genre.

I find even with "western consumer grade headphones", I need to add about +3db to 20hz, 0db to 200hz, -3db at 2khz, and 0db at 20khz, to be able to turn up the volume and hear all the instruments without any single freq range dominating. This makes such an improvement on every pair of headphones I've tried it on, that I wonder who came up with the "standard" frequency response curve of human hearing that the manufacturers are using as reference.

I setup an EQ with that shape on my girlfriend's headphones, and she was surprised how much more comfortable it sounded. Then she got new headphones, tried them out, and immediately said "ew, can you change the sound the way you did before?" I set the EQ in the new headphones' software and "much better."

Note that human hearing frequency response changes with age: https://journalotohns.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

So headphone makers also have to target an age group, or at least average things out so it’s not right for anyone.

Except that the argument here was about bass, and the paper shows that age dependent hearing frequency response varies mostly in the mid-high range.

This is true, I sometimes refer to my Grados headphones as "my first hearing aid"

Eh, I was responding to someone wondering why the singular curve used was wrong. My point was that there is no universal answer that works for every individual, even if you are opinionated about how things should sound.

Just tried your tweaks in Spotify. Can't adjust at those exact frequencies, but after one A-B test, flat is simply unlistenable now. What the heck!

> If you want flat response but your music has lows that go down to around 20hz, the relative power required to make the 20hz audible to an equivalent volume is exponentially higher than to make 200hz audible.

That can often be the case, but it isn't necessarily always the case.

There is nothing in particular that absolutely prevents a transducer from having reasonably-flat (in an amplitude-vs-power sense) response in the bass region -- including all the way down to 20Hz or below.

Sean Olive. It's motivated by the fact that engineers are mixing audio on (actually-) flat-response monitors in studios with a slight echo, and a "flat" headphone response is the best way to emulate that. This curve is something they measured and published a paper on. If your headphones sound better with your EQ then they probably aren't meeting the Harman/"flat" target, or you're deviating from the norm in your preferences.

https://headphonesaddict.com/harman-curve/

Flat response is flat response. If the drums are barely audible in the mix at a comfortable listening volume, they would've been barely audible live at a comfortable listening volume.

People have been shown to enjoy different eq levels, and they are generally consistent in their preferences

My music lover friend.

I get it.

We all have preferences.

"How much more comfortable it sounded" ????

Musical instruments, live concerts, studio sessions, acoustic sessions? There is nothing warm and fuzzy comfortable about the above 4 things I mentioned.

I wish the stereo review industry would be honest and stop saying it's all about preference. It is,,,,but,,,some speakers/headphones are indeed better than others. If speaker A's output signal is closer to it's input signal than speaker B, it is a better product, period.

If music sounds off in your flat response audio reproduction system, it's a poor mix or poor compression. A lossless version of a professional and well done mix always sounds amazing on my flat response system.

i agree, I feel the same with my studio monitors in my home office. The issue seems to be that flat frequency response with a full range is extremely hard to achieve with IEMs, there is something to the room and distance transfer function that is missing to IEMs, and even headphones. Thats why you're not supposed to mix on your headphones. You can master some in headphones, if you know how they compare to a room, but not in any IEMs I know of, but mixing exclusively in headphones is considered a no-no by all professionals.

> The bass heavy tendency of western consumer grade headphones/speakers is tuned for western pop music and does not sound very good with much else.

As a basshead myself, this reminds me of these Drum & Bass artists that found the speakers in the venues they played at were not tuned for the music they were producing, so they built their own soundsystem to bring with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-kq6g0-QY

Oh yeah, this is definitely a thing with a lot of bass-heavy EDM. I'm always a bit wary of trying new venues because I never know if they're going to have proper subwoofers or not, since some genres just do not sound right without a sound system that gives sub-bass frequencies the room they deserve.

As an example, give a quick listen to Turn Off the Lights[0]. It sounds incredibly empty and tinny on small sound systems, but add a subwoofer and you discover a whole other layer of chest-shaking bass. This stuff is made to be played live on a properly tuned sound system.

0: https://youtu.be/OgT9IpTUudc?si=pxOVShecpDbs_UCH&t=46

I disagree that your ears get used to flat tuning eventually and then even the bass sounds better. This might be true for some people, but I know for a fact it is not true for me.

quiet*

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