May I add that once you have found your personal preference, it's not difficult to design for that.
Very familiar with it for a very long time, thanks for the suggestion though. I carry the curves by angle on my phone. You might consider revisiting how long it took until designing high fidelity equipment with human beings in mind was accepted instead of the simplistic model of chasing +-0 dB from DC to light. It's a great opportunity to test ancient assumptions still vigorously defended, for example in forums like this one.
I am nearly 52 and frankly too young to remember a time when headphones were supposed to have a flat FR if there ever was such a time.
It should be a trivial matter for you to provide examples over those 50 years showing the HRTF curve was always the industry acknowledged ideal design target and Sean Olive is just wasting our time. To my knowledge only Etymotic seriously pursued and marketed it. But then my involvement in the industry only does back to the early Seventies.
Prof. Dr. Ing. Jens Blauert published related work in 1974 and the first headphones I ever bought back in 1978 were eq'd thus. They were Sennheisers but the same would be true for Beyer or AKG.
I didn't know Sean Olive does work on headphones.
And remember: Headphones aren't speakers.
I didn't know Sean Olive does work on headphones.
And remember: Headphones aren't speakers.
Headphones have been a central focus for Olive for years and the suggestion I confuse them with speakers remains amusing. Ironically there are elements of 2 speaker audio reproduction in which HRTF may still guide improvements regarding centre images, which returns to the original point of keeping an open mind.
And yet you keep posting headphone specific eq curves in an attempt to discredit something although I'm not sure about what exactly.
May be if you'd express yourself more clearly as to what you are really trying to say there would be a greater chance of a productive discourse.
Oddly enough my speakers sound remarkably like headphones if you stand right in between them and last time I measured them they were +-2dB from 30Hz to 20k but obviously my own head is applying the HRTF.
Not sure the centre image is in any need of improvement, it only suffers if you were to move them too far apart. In that case you eventually get a hole in the middle but that distance is greater than my room is wide.
May be if you'd express yourself more clearly as to what you are really trying to say there would be a greater chance of a productive discourse.
Oddly enough my speakers sound remarkably like headphones if you stand right in between them and last time I measured them they were +-2dB from 30Hz to 20k but obviously my own head is applying the HRTF.
Not sure the centre image is in any need of improvement, it only suffers if you were to move them too far apart. In that case you eventually get a hole in the middle but that distance is greater than my room is wide.
Mebbe it's worth noting that this is pretty much the way most music is recorded and engineered nowadays - using near field monitors, positioned fairly close to the ears, with the head and speakers positioned more or less at the three vertices of an equilateral triangle.
-Gnobuddy
I do practically all of my listening nearfield.
Probably because I got into HiFi via recording studios.
When I say 'right between them' I mean the speakers and myself form a straight line rather than an equilateral triangle.
(Not currently using the equilateral triangle, I prefer the speakers to be further apart from each other than from me with the speakers I am currently using)
Besides HRTF 'phones can differ either being free-field eq'd or diffuse-field. I've owned examples of either and the difference in sound can be replicated with my speakers too.
If I stand between them and they are still pointed out to my regular listening position they sound like diffuse-field 'phones and if I turn the speakers to fire inward towards each other they sound like free-field eq 'phones.
You still get the in head stereo image but unlike 'phones you can still feel the bass.
Unfortunately it makes no difference whatsoever to my neighbours whether I use my speakers as speakers or as headphones.
Probably because I got into HiFi via recording studios.
When I say 'right between them' I mean the speakers and myself form a straight line rather than an equilateral triangle.
(Not currently using the equilateral triangle, I prefer the speakers to be further apart from each other than from me with the speakers I am currently using)
Besides HRTF 'phones can differ either being free-field eq'd or diffuse-field. I've owned examples of either and the difference in sound can be replicated with my speakers too.
If I stand between them and they are still pointed out to my regular listening position they sound like diffuse-field 'phones and if I turn the speakers to fire inward towards each other they sound like free-field eq 'phones.
You still get the in head stereo image but unlike 'phones you can still feel the bass.
Unfortunately it makes no difference whatsoever to my neighbours whether I use my speakers as speakers or as headphones.
Good way to put it, however you're missing the fact that generally we do not playback the recording at the same volume level as a live orchestra.
Think of Modigliani painting in bright light, and with the intention that the painting will be hanged in a similarly well lit room. And then moving the painting in a very dim room. No, the noses won't be any longer, but the tonal character of the painting would be different when viewed in much dimmer light.
So either you turn up the light (volume) or you change the painting's contrast / hues etc.
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You may try a "fatigue" test, i.e. how much time the subjects would stay entertained by the system before deciding they had enough.
Crappy systems tend to make one lose interest very quickly.
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Congratulations, you must then have one with Zout = 0.
Pretty hard to achieve but hey, who am I to say it's impossible....
I've used a few Icepower amps that had tiny, tiny output impedance. Not zero, but small fractions of an ohm. Not that hard to do.
I don't think so, but if a little Class-D amp can manage 2/100th of an ohm output impedance, I don't think a conventional amp should much trouble.
I think you're talking about the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness contours, and they way they change with loudness.
If so, I actually mentioned these in my earlier post. But IMO it is a bit of a red herring in this context. For one thing, each human ear has it's own individual frequency response curve, and it's own individual set of Fletcher-Munson curves; even your own left and right ears usually do not match very well!
So if the amp is not going to be flat, but is going to have some sort of loudness compensation built-in, which curve are we going to impose on everybody? The average one that Fletcher and Munson actually published? The one for your left ear? The one for your right ear? The one belonging to your most favourite family member? The one that is easiest to produce with a tapped pot and a few convenient resistor and capacitor values? 😀
That way lies madness. Which is why I want simple tone controls (good old Baxandall is fine) on any amp I use. I can dial in a little bass and treble boost if necessary at low listening levels, to provide a little approximate loudness compensation.
I recently found an old Yamaha stereo receiver at a local thrift store for $20, if I remember right. Almost everything works perfectly (with one exception, which will be revealed later). This old Yamaha even has a loudness compensation knob, which can be switched in or out as desired.
Guess what, the loudness knob is the only thing in the whole amp that doesn't work. 😀
-Gnobuddy
Classic Baxandall + "ultra bass" (i.e. a third knob for boosting <100 Hz) would cover most listeners. Unfortunately they don't make preamps that way anymore.
I agree, omitting all tone controls is/was a very poor choice. I'm shocked that it became virtually universal. (But at the same time, much more invasive audio signal processing - "theatre mode", etc - became acceptable.)
Personally, I won't buy an amp with no tone controls. Fortunately, for now, there is a plentiful supply of 20 - 30 year old receivers to be found at thrift stores, on Craigslist, and so on. The only real downside is the lack of HDMI inputs, but I can work around that.
-Gnobuddy
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