MiniDSP EARs measurement rig

Just chomping on these a bit for the past five days... here are some preliminary results using the miniDSP HATS (L channel on my unit) with custom compensation curves. I did not mod my HATs. Used it stock with the microphone set into the canals.

Sennheiser HD650K - I didn't get a good seal and forget to save the other measurement where I did.


Focal Clear


ZMF Auteur


Audeze LCD2C

 

CSDs are unusable for HD6XX and Clear. I had the same result as @Hands even after compensation.

The miniDSP EARs has too many resonances - sharp peaks. GRAS might be usable tho.

Let me check distortion. Flat plate for distortion might be better because no ear gain = less noise.

 

Yeah, the whole rig kinda makes me a bit mad. The mics themselves are serviceable if you can tolerate compensating for each. And the USB convenience is awesome for L/R mics. But everything else feels half-baked. Ears seem more like fake mannequin ears than an attempted average of a real ear, or, heck, even a mold of an ear. Canal is just a straight tube and causes major resonance problems that aren't fixed at least with basic compensation. Width of rig is narrow, thus less clamp than is normal.

If they wanted to go cheap, I'd vote just put the mics at the entrance of the canal and make spend a few more bucks in materials to address the width and make the ear more intricate and closer to a real one. Of course, I'm guessing. Maybe that would cost noticeably more. But this really could have been a great, sub-$200 measurement rig that gives good enough results for more people to measure stuff and compare with like rigs. Instead...kinda trips on itself.

And then you can get things pretty close with compensation and/or mods. But then it tugs you by always having weird quirks yet almost getting you close enough to what seems right, to the point you wish you could just splurge on a mega-buck measuring system. Or, at least, it does for me.

 

You could use it to get relative measurements. To get any kind of accuracy will entail mods a la @Hands and/or custom calibration / compensation curves given the variances and channel imblances that we've seen with measurements.

 

Auteur sounds a lil bassier to me than that, but we've already established this rig can get weird with ZMF stuff at the very least. I'd say, " You all know I'd die if the 650 had that noticeable of a 5KHz spike," but Marv did mention a possible lack of seal, and it's not my particular mod + pads on that 650.

But those results do overall make good sense.

 

My feeling that is that there is a little bit too much 4-5kHz as reflected in Clear and HD650.

 

FYI, that was the HD650K, not HD6XX above. I made the appropriate changes to text.

 

FYI, that was the HD650K, not HD6XX above. I made the appropriate changes to text. A stock HD650 should have more mid-bass than the K modded ones.

 

Another MiniDSP EARS set here with some minor tweaks to compensation.

 

Let me know if anyone wants the data points. No guarantee it will work as this compensation only works for the L ear of my EARS. The R will need a different compensation curve.

 

You could always take out the mics and board to use in something else.