Oh, you're not supposed to try to get perceived flatness on a sine sweep. The brain expects certain frequency ranges to be louder, so if you get a flat sine sweep response, you're naturally going to have a really muffled and dead sound. Don't do that.

The sine sweep method can be helpful for identifying sudden peaks, but it should not be overused to try to make it sound flat the entire way.

do not use sine sweeps for flatness. as u/The_D0lph1n said, the brain perceives different frequencies as louder or not. Sine sweeps might be useful for dips/peaks and channel matching, but thats pretty much it. Use music (or pink noise) and adjust using a reference if you want flatness

Oh! Never really linked the points hahah The frequencies I tend to turn down when doing this are really the ones in the 2k-4k range, which is where we have the Harman peak... Thank you!!

Thank you! Some time ago I tried to match my little USB speakers to the sound of my headphones calibrated to the Harman target, and I managed to get a pretty decent sound, even from these cheap speakers! I'll try to do it using pink noise though, sounds interesting

If OP wants to know more- here's a decent wikipedia article on Equal-loudness contour - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

Equal-loudness contour

>An equal-loudness contour is a measure of sound pressure level, over the frequency spectrum, for which a listener perceives a constant loudness when presented with pure steady tones. The unit of measurement for loudness levels is the phon and is arrived at by reference to equal-loudness contours. By definition, two sine waves of differing frequencies are said to have equal-loudness level measured in phons if they are perceived as equally loud by the average young person without significant hearing impairment.

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I just read the page. Very interesting subject, specially about the changes the Fletcher Munson curve had and ended up being actually close to what we have today as the standard. Thank you!

You're welcome!

Boring and soulless tbh

How does soulless sound?

Flattest is probably somewhere close to the Etymotic ER4SR. Most people will say that they have no bass though. They measure flat in the bass with a rise where the lack of ear gain would be.

Boring

Headphones shouldn’t be flat on an FR graph like speakers because of the different way they interact with your ears. That’s why there isn’t a Harman curve for speakers. So if they sound like crap truly flat, that’s why. That being said, how do you know if it sounds flat? I’d say you’d have to have a trained ear and try to use songs with real unamplified acoustic instruments. If they sound natural, then it is probably close to flat. Not a huge fan of the sine wave technique because it isn’t real music so if you care about the music aspect rather than technical aspect I’d go with what I suggested above.

Robotic recessed mids, linear non rounded bass, and treble that makes it feel like icicles are getting gouged into your ears.

The Harman target isn't actually flat. If you go back and read the research, Olive et al started with their own "good speakers in a good room" and then took input from a group of trained listeners on tweaking the bass and treble response.

To be a bit more accurate: he asked a few hundred listeners, some trained, some untrained, to select their preferred sound, and he tweaked the curve accordingly. So the Harman curve isn't a neutral curve, it's a preference curve. Not flat.

Maybe just my purist preferences playing around here, but I don't think that flat necessarily sounds soulless like that, although definitely a bit boring. For me, flat means tight bass in quite meagre doses, unexciting but natural mids, and a somewhat cold but not harsh treble.

To be fair, I don't like DF either, because I don't think DF is neutral for mastered tracks, maybe for recorded tracks at most. For mastered stuff, something like IEF neutral is closer to flat for me.

Yeah, Etymotics are quite good at hitting the neutral target, although one should take the different HRTFs of people into account. For some, they're the epitome of neutral; for others, less so.

How much is there to really take in to account when they go in as deep as they do? They obviously bypass the outer ear, how much of the inner ear is left to change the sound person to person?

Is there any variant to the Harman target that's meant to be completely flat?

Harman is a bit V-shaped. Some will say it’s well balanced, but it’s definitely a bit V-shaped. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing though.