(C)IEMs and Equalization

Hi folks,

I've avoided IEMs in the past because my experience was just with painful shitty versions that come with phones. I do a lot of travelling and decided I should reevaluate, so I got a pair of Shure SE215s barely used for $50. I figured that would be a good way to evaluate comfort and see what an entry level decent set sounds like.

Well, turns out they're relatively comfy and they actually sound pretty good. In fact I found I really like the 'in-head' experience vs. my KEF on-ears. Count me impressed for the money. And the portability can't be beat.

So now of course I'm looking at IEMs as a viable possibility to spend some real money on, and I'm researching. I know for full-size cans there are sonic characteristics that affect things, HD800 needing mods to manage the treble spike and so on. I also know Tyll is an advocate of equalising headphones, and it makes sense in terms of either getting a target flat/reference response or tuning for taste. So, take a glaring hardware 'flaw' and mod to suppress that and then tweak via EQ. All sensible.

But in the IEM world it seems there is much more a practice of selecting an IEM based on its sonic characteristic and apparently completely ignoring the option for equalising. Some of course come with varying tubes for 'manual' tuning, but often a V shaped signature is sought, or a specific bass-heavy curve.

Why is this? Why not just get a generally neutral phone and equalize for the curve you want? Surely that's a more flexible way to adapt to different types of music that baking it into the bloody hardware, especially when we're heading upwards of a grand? I've seen reviews touting an earphone that is almost two grand over a one grand 'neutral' phone just because its signature is v-shaped and rolled off at the top and so is less fatiguing. With the admission that the more expensive phone sounded less resolving and detailed to the reviewer.

What am I not getting here? Why would I pay a grand extra for that?

 

In the 50s, B.F. Skinner and his disciples thought that you could basically train an animal (or person) to do anything with the proper stimulus/response training. In WWII, he had proposed a pigeon-guided missile to the army, where the pigeon would be trained to peck control in the missle to steer it to Berlin or wherever. The army declined, saving us all from extinction via pigeon suicide bombers.

The limitation with this theory was that animals turn out to be hard wired for certain behaviors. For example, you can't train a pigeon not to peck. They'll peck, even if it means they don't get fed. Same with pigs and rooting around for stuff. Add your own joke about audiophile conditioned behavior here.

In the same way, you can't simply EQ any iem to have any FR. anything other than mild EQ and you run into a lot of limitations of the transducer, adding distortion when you want to correct for a dip, or you run into issues of resonance in the ear canal where certain peaks aren't easy to eliminate, etc.

Basically, it's a lot better to pick an iem that has the response you want than EQing a lot from something you don't.

 

Yeah, I agree something significant you probably need to correct physically. But in terms of adjusting for personal taste, are we really talking about more than mild equalization?

I'd also argue every track doesn't need equalization, given that we equalize towards a correction against a reference standard, ie: what the studios gravitate to, in terms of neutrality so they can reproduce the music the way they intend it. We may elect to correct for some other signature than neutrality, but neutrality is the reference, otherwise our adjectives are meaningless...warm, bright etc. As much as I want to hear music the way I want to hear it, I also want to hear the music as the artist/producer intended it, so I'd like to start there for lack of a better place.

Ih an unequalized output is 'better' then for my money I'd opt for neutrality anyway. Which seems to mean I save a bundle!