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r/oratory1990

▲ 6 r/oratory1990

Unit variation on the HD 800 S?

Does anyone know what the unit variation is on the Sennheiser HD 800 S? I’m considering getting one open box (from headphones.com, if that matters), but I’m concerned that open box units may be more likely to have a worse frequency response than new units. For example, if a unit has less bass than average, then it might be more likely that a buyer doesn’t like it and so they return it and it ends up being sold open box, whereas this would be less likely with a unit that has a more average amount of bass. I know the HD 800 S has tight tolerances, but maybe this is still a possibility?

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u/7370657A — 20 hours ago
▲ 5 r/oratory1990

Audeze MM-100 or Sennheiser HD 490 Pro? (First open-back for Techno production & mixing)

Hey everyone! I need some help choosing my next pair of reference headphones.

I’m currently using the Adam Audio H200 (closed-back), but to be honest, I'm not sure if I'm totally happy with the results I'm getting from them. The thing is, I've never used open-back headphones in my life, and I really want to make the switch to experience the soundstage and see if it helps with ear fatigue during longer sessions.

My main focus is producing and mixing Techno. This means I need headphones that are surgical for mixing, but at the same time can deliver the low-end and transients quickly and accurately, since the kick and rumble/bass are the soul of the genre.

After a lot of research, I've narrowed it down to two finalists, but I'm really torn:

  1. Audeze MM-100: Because they are planar magnetic, I see a lot of people praising the bass extension and transient speed. It seems incredible for electronic music, but I'm a bit worried about the weight and long-term comfort.
  2. Sennheiser HD 490 Pro: I've heard they are absurdly comfortable and excellent for mixing (very flat and analytical), plus it's great that they come with two different sets of pads. My only fear is whether they will have enough "punch" and low-end clarity to properly mix techno.

Has anyone here had the chance to test these two (or at least one of them) in an EDM/electronic music context?

I am also totally open to other recommendations! If you think there is another open-back headphone around this price point that would be better for techno, please let me know.

Also, how was your experience transitioning from closed-back directly to an open-back for the first time? Any tips or insights are highly appreciated. Thanks!

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u/desorder_Br — 21 hours ago
▲ 3 r/oratory1990

How would you decsribe what neutral sounds like?

I'm a bit lost on how netural sounding a target/iem/headphone is. I've recently gone back to a pair of old iems and trying my headphones on some reference targets on squig after 4+ years of using wireless for convenience and decided to test them and play some 16-bit FLACs of disco pop that I saved. However, I do notice that whenver I use harman/jm1/ief/diffuse field on my headphones and trying my iems to their native setting that they sound "airy". Like they introduced some white noise to the song.

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u/ALRO090804 — 2 days ago
▲ 0 r/oratory1990

Could someone please suggest me best wireless over ear headphones under 10 to 12k ( 125ish in usd )with clean sound signature,ANC, feature set across all android phones and hi res and wired connectivity even if the battery is dead .

I researched some and found the following models:

Soundcore space one, Edifier wb830nb plus, senns accentum, 1more sonoflow pro and this moondrop one and tanchjim rita and jbl 770nc live and the sony ult and akg k361 bt and audio techinca m20xt bt and the general ones. And this must be under 12k with good build quality

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u/Histroricalmonk2010 — 3 days ago
▲ 8 r/oratory1990+1 crossposts

Built an audiophile-grade EQ app (Harmonic Bass, 6000+ AutoEQ profiles) - QCurve

Hey everyone, just wanted to talk about an app I’ve been pouring my soul into lately.

I’m a huge DIY audio person. I spend a lot of my free time building custom bluetooth speakers, 3-way tower speakers and tinkering with DSP code. I recently built a Bluetooth speaker using ESP32 and PCM5102.

I wanted pro-level audio engineering tools on my phone, so I decided to build my own engine from scratch. The app is called QCurve.

Here are some of the features:

Dynamic EQ (Fletcher-Munson Curve): Human ears naturally lose sensitivity to bass and treble at lower volumes. I wrote a real-time engine that dynamically adjusts your EQ curve based on your phone's actual media volume. The music stays perfectly full and punchy whether you're listening quietly at night or blasting it.

Smart Auto-Switching & 6000+ AutoEQ Profiles: I integrated the massive AutoEQ database directly into the app. When you connect your headphones, QCurve detects the hardware signature and instantly routes to the exact flat-response correction profile for that specific model.

Audio Scenes: Instead of just saving where your EQ sliders are, you can save the entire DSP pipeline. An "Audio Scene" captures your EQ, Bass Boost, Pro-Audio limits, L/R room correction, Harmonic Bass states so you can swap acoustic environments with one tap.

Preset QR Cards: You can export your entire custom tuning as a sleek QR code image. If you want to share a setup, anyone can just scan the image from their gallery, and the exact DSP parameters load instantly.

Pro-Audio Engine: It took a lot of math, but I built a custom soft-knee Bass Stacker so you can run Harmonic Bass alongside traditional sub-bass boosts without clipping or triggering the Android OS limiter.

It’s been a crazy technical journey getting the math and the Android audio sessions to play nice together across different OEMs, but seeing the real-time visualizer and the DSP pipeline finally work flawlessly is incredibly satisfying.

I’d love some feedback from fellow audio lovers!

Since this is built for people who actually care about sound profiles and frequency response, I’m really eager to hear what this community thinks. Are there any features, target curves, or specific headphone profiling options you feel are missing from Android EQs? 

Playstore Link  [ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qcurve.audio ]

u/Time_Explanation_868 — 8 days ago
▲ 148 r/oratory1990+2 crossposts

I reverse-engineered my DUSK-SP cable and built my own EQ app for it... turns out the "1 dB steps" limit isn't real, and I got a working preamp out of pure filter maths

TL;DR: these little Moondrop DSP USB-C cables (DUSK / MAY / FreeDSP) are WAY more capable than the stock app lets on. I built my own app that talks to the cable directly, does proper fractional-dB EQ, and adds a preamp the hardware doesn't officially have.

UPDATE: it's now open source. Code and Windows download here: https://github.com/EffectiveEquivalent/FreeDSP-Studio (grab the exe from Releases). MIT licensed, built via GitHub Actions. Windows will moan about an unknown publisher because the exe isn't code-signed yet.... signed builds are coming. More info, Run anyway.

A few things I found that I reckon are genuinely cool:

The EQ profiles live on the cable, not the app

The DSP chip inside the cable has its own memory. It holds a writable custom EQ bank plus the firmware preset voicings (the DUSK ships with Crinacle's tunings, the MAY has Moondrop's own Standard / Bass Head / Reference etc). Whatever profile is active gets applied by the cable itself, so your EQ follows the cable onto any phone or laptop with ZERO software running. My app just reads and writes that on-cable memory over USB HID.

The "integer dB only" thing is a UI illusion

Read a band back and the gain comes out as a whole number, so you ask for 2.3 dB and the stock app shows 2. I assumed that meant the hardware was locked to 1 dB steps. Nope. Each band actually stores two totally separate things:

  • a little metadata record (frequency, Q, filter type, and a gain value stored as a 24-bit integer in whole dB), and
  • the actual biquad filter coefficients that do the real DSP.

The metadata gain is basically just a label for the app's display. The sound is determined ENTIRELY by the coefficients.

How I proved it: I sent a deliberately mismatched write, metadata gain = 0 dB but coefficients calculated for a -12 dB low shelf. If the cable trusted the integer, nothing should happen. Instead the bass completely vanished. So the coefficients are what actually matter and the integer is just cosmetic. Which means fractional gain works perfectly.... I compute the biquad from the true value (RBJ cookbook), send those coefficients, and the cable plays exactly 2.3 dB. It always could, the app just never let you.

(Nerdy bit: it stores a separate coefficient set per sample rate, 44.1 / 48 / 96 / 192 / 384 kHz, so that's 5 biquads per band, as fixed-point numbers scaled by 2^22.)

The preamp is the bit I'm most chuffed with

The cable has no master volume or preamp control at all. But a preamp is really just a flat level shift at every frequency, and here's the trick:

A biquad's response is basically numerator over denominator. If you multiply the numerator (b0, b1, b2) by some constant k, you scale that filter's output by k at every frequency, which is a perfectly flat gain of 20*log10(k) dB. And because the 9 bands are cascaded (their responses multiply together), applying that flat k to just ONE band shifts the entire combined EQ curve up or down by that many dB without changing its shape at all.

So I set k = 10^(preamp/20) and bake it into band 1's coefficients. Free preamp. No extra band used, no firmware feature needed, just maths riding on a filter that's already there. I use it to pull the whole curve down for headroom so big boosts don't clip.

What it turned into

A desktop app with a live frequency response graph, EQ points you drag straight on the curve, squig.link / AutoEQ import, on-cable profile switching, save/recall, and clip protection that won't let you write a distorting EQ without sorting the headroom first.

Reverse-engineered by watching the USB traffic and reimplementing the wire protocol myself, for my own hardware. Honestly the coolest project I've done in ages and it works INCREDIBLY.

And yeah, I built the whole thing with Claude (Claude Code). Took a good few hours.... haha

u/EffectiveEquivalent — 9 days ago
▲ 19 r/oratory1990

How much does headphone position actually affect frequency response? — Some LCD-X measurements

Hi all,

Here’s another rabbit hole for everyone who likes to EQ their headphones :)

If you just want the very short version:

Position variation is a real thing, and it can have a pretty big impact on the FR we actually get at the ear — especially in the upper mids / treble.

Anyway, the slightly longer version:

I was reading through some old posts, measurements and blogs (yes, actual old-school blogs still exist) about the HD800S, and came across measurements showing how much the response changes depending on where the headphone sits on the head.

https://preview.redd.it/3ugw1nnlj0jh1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=979bdefee0a0164e8019a0bfbcd4ce495537173b

The first graph is a good example. Below roughly 2 kHz things are pretty well behaved, but once you get further up, especially around 4–10 kHz, the different positions start doing their own thing. And above that it basically turns into spaghetti.

That got me thinking about my beloved LCD-X.

So naturally, instead of doing something productive, I got out my DIY in-ear mic setup and started measuring.

I did.... way to many measurements ( just showing 2 here), taking the headphones off and repositioning them between each one.

https://preview.redd.it/tlrs403pj0jh1.png?width=1493&format=png&auto=webp&s=a7a9d1d3783a8a45f32d406b9f770801ee2bba11

And... yeah.

There was alot more variation than I expected.

The lower frequencies were fairly consistent, but once you get into the upper mids and treble the response starts moving around by several dB depending on position. Peaks move, dips move, and some areas change quite a lot.

At first I honestly thought my mesurements were just being weird.  - I even did a sine sweep by ear as a sanity check, and yep — things move around a lot above ~3 kHz just from repositioning

So I went looking to see if anyone else had measured positional variation on the LCD-X, and found this from Unheard Lab:

https://unheardlab.com/2023/08/29/review-audeze-lcd-x-2021/

https://preview.redd.it/mcw6bn3vj0jh1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=d3326ceab114ce77adb265cf661cc7aa32482c69

And their measurements seem to show the same general behaviour: relatively small changes down low, and increasingly large differences as frequency goes up.

So I guess my little DIY experiment wasn’t completely drunk after all.

The takeaway?

I’m not saying “don’t EQ” — quite the opposite, I love EQ.

But it does make me question how useful it is to obsess over correcting every tiny 1–2 dB peak or dip, especially high up in the treble. The response can change simply because the headphone moved a few millimetres on your head.

So maybe the sensible approach is just EQ the broad stuff, use your ears for the final bit, and don’t lose sleep over every little squiggle in the graph. (^_~)

Or, alternatively, spend another three hours moving your headphones around by 4 mm and measuring them.

...which is probably what I’ll do.

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u/OpaliusDK — 8 days ago
▲ 3 r/oratory1990

Weekly r/oratory1990 EQ Thread - Questions, Requests, Technical Support

This thread is for all questions about EQ / Equalizing

  • The list of EQ presets is found here
  • Please also read the Frequently Asked Questions before posting.
  • please no purchase advice here. There's r/HeadphoneAdvice for that.
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u/AutoModerator — 11 days ago
▲ 13 r/oratory1990

Offering the new Superlux HD990 for measurements (Slovakia / EU)

Hi u/oratory1990, I am planning to buy the new Superlux HD990 open-back headphones in early September. Since it's a completely new model and not yet in the database, I would love to send it to you for measurement and to get a proper EQ preset for my DAW workflow. I live in Slovakia and will cover the shipping costs both ways. Let me know if you would be interested in measuring this model!

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u/Humble_Individual476 — 14 days ago