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West-Cheek-156 OP t1_ja4j7n2 wrote

Reply to comment by SupOrSalad in How do I listen for "detail" in music? by West-Cheek-156

Yeah that's what I've heard particularly in the upper frequencies. Thanks

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huemac5810 t1_ja5960h wrote

Folks who believe it's all or almost all about FR are fairly odd to me.

Try convincing music studios of the mentality. They'll laugh at you. Sound is more than just FR, otherwise post effects beyond equalizers would be far more rare. It definitely is of great importance, but the whole story has much more going on, or music production would be much simpler.

For example, closed headphones often lack acoustic dampening materials on the inside. In studio monitors, you'll often find polyester fiberfill inside their cabinets to kill excess resonances, which muddy the sound and can give speakers a "boxed-in" sound. Closed headphones tend to "sound closed" for their lack of fiberfill inside, or sound like they apply a "hall reverb" to everything. Occasionally, some may actually have fiberglass for dampening. Equalizing the headphone can never mitigate this issue as it has nothing to do with frequency response in the first place. The Beyerdynamic DT660 (discontinued) was famous for being a closed headphone appropriate for classical music. It had dense cotton padding inside to kill excess resonances, in addition to a balanced FR. It "sounded open" rather than "closed" as a result, so it wouldn't mask and muddy music with a "hall reverb" over everything. A comparable, more modern headphone (but also discontinued now) is the Pioneer MHR5. Another closed headphone with dampening to purge internal excess resonances is the HRM7, a superb studio can.

Cleaner and finer articulation of sound is also related to other aspects of headphone design; you can't make it happen with EQ, but it can help subtly at best. I'm guessing this is affected by the voice coil and chemical treatment of the diaphragm. I have no idea. The articulation of sound is fuzzier in cheap headphones versus my HD650 and K701, for example.

Clearer, tighter bass out of a headphone is a bit of a tough job to pull off, but the kinds of modifications that can contribute would probably blow your mind. Impossible to replicate with only equalizers.

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Egoexpo t1_ja65lof wrote

If you listen to a speaker in a room with some reflection, you will likely also hear bass reverberations. Harman's research takes into account these reverberations because they consider the type of environment in which people normally listen to music.

You are unlikely to see someone listening to music in an anechoic chamber.

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huemac5810 t1_ja66m56 wrote

And tweaking a closed headphone to be pretty close to an anechoic chamber is not a difficult thing to do.

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thatcarolguy t1_ja8fouv wrote

What do you think that post effects are manipulating besides timing based ones like reverb/delay?

I see what you are getting at but there is no true equivalent to reverb/delay in the physical behavior of resonances in headphones. Resonances affect the FR in an exact 1:1 fashion to the point that one can be calculated from the other.

A resonance at a certain frequency causes a peak at that same frequency. Or does the peak cause the resonance? I dunno, they are inseparable.

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