The vintage Ortho thread

Yes, SBAF compensation.

I listen at 9’ocklock on low gain with Vali2. Then use digital volume control on computer. On sensitive headphones I can not listen to some music because I cannot get low enough volume. With Yamaha I’ll have digital volume at like 1/2 to 3/4 volume depending. @dBel84 if @rhythmdevils willing I'll forward the headphones to you. And yeah, I'm a bit of a basshead.

 

So basically a flat line in a flat-plate coupler.

 

I will have another go at measurements. Maybe seal is off which is not hard to do with supraaurals. I wanted to post impressions before measurements but got worried I was way off base about the bass, so took measurements first. Perhaps I rushed to conclusion that the measurements were well-done because they aligned with my opinion, but I'm a basshead so maybe not accurate. Big apologies if messed up. dBel84 maybe will be up to receive and measure.

 

Thanks for being honest! Always appreciated.

I’m skeptical if these homemade measurements everyone is taking now especially seeing this. To me the HP-1a snd YH-1 I sent @Philimon were rolled off in the treble due to his preferences. So these peaks and lean FR are suspect to me. ( no offense @Philimon )

As for the HE6 and T50rp that @dBel84 has heard they lost connection before I heard them as they were when Don got them. These were just guesses on the way to a finished mod that I didn’t get to hear. (I sent them to Don because they lost connection and I never learned how to solder) I backed off the damping of the HE6 and both T50rp’s after getting them back. So not an accurate representation of my final mods.

not trying to be defensive I appreciate the honesty but also just want to clear some things up.

I’m definitely adding Don to the loaner

 

Not offended. EARS is limited and there is variation among units. Positioning is critical and difficult. My preference and knowledge is also limited by low exposure to audio gear. Most stuff is out of my budget, so I don't join loaner tours.

I messaged rhythmdevils beforehand that my impressions were bad and he said to post away. I appreciate rhythmdevils good attitude towards my bad review and for being able to handle criticism.

I can look to add more technical description but the tone is too off for me.

Remeasured HP-1a. I used trick of over tightening headband but could not acheive a better seal.



Click on my profile for link to my mehsurement rig if interested in seeing more about inherent imbalance in my EARS + compensation. I usually post only left-side measurements so as not to have to explain the imbalance. Also, left-side compensation I think is tweaked more correctly. The HP-1a above is more imbalanced than normal, but that may be just effect of improper seal (R).

A lean-ier frequency response with a side of extra treble was my preference for a long time. I think wear and tear and shift in musical interests and listening behavior now requires bombastic bass to awe me and lighter treble to facilitate non-disruptive background listening and smoothing of awful sounding recordings.

 

I think it is key that we all have unique impressions and are open to share them. (and to be prepared to accept that not everyone feels the same way ) It is also why I think it is important to tune equipment to your own liking - Dac/Amp/Driver - nothing is universally the same for all. I know I like a little second harmonic distortion , I do not need equipment to measure .000000000x THD , in fact I never look at distortion figures quoted on gear ( unless @atomicbob has had a hand in measuring them ) but then it is much more academic interest than to form my opinion. I also like a little extra bass because at low level listening this sounds much more balanced.

The YH2 can be a bass monster and offer the top end detail that allows for great spatial detail. By the looks of your measured FR, you should be pretty close. ( @Philimon )

..dB

 

definitely. I’m not about to try to silence negative impressions. I’m very critical of other headphones it is only fair that mine get scrutinized as well and by those with different preferences.

I’m just a little bummed @Philimon isnt super happy with my headphones because that is the ultimate goal and satisfaction in making them. But no tuning is for everyone and I have a very specific target.

You can see at least how similar the two headphones are in FR.

 

*rd = rhythmdevils

Not tried yet. The pads do seem a little more supple than mine so maybe not as uncomfortable and was easier to find a seal for measurements. These are silver badged.

 

I’m a little suspicious of that 7k bump that is on all your measurements of the phones I sent you and exactly the same size. Even between Fostex and Yamaha. But better!

 

YH-2 damping stage ii: the felt seemed not to have a great seal because of stiffness and having to bend around the driver wires, so I used micropore tape to help hold tightly together and to add another air barrier. Then put some random open foam I stole from another headphone's packaging about 1cm thick shaped to fit inside back of cup.

 

I can hear it man. Cymbals and certain electronic noises are too forward. Some stuff a little metallic sounding too. I'll share tracks used.

Edit: track list, apple lossless

 

^
Blast from the past.

RD's babies in the house. Funny both were manufactured even before I was born. lol.

Quick thoughts after an hour of listening.

• Are people in the past small-headed? I had to extend Aiwa's adjustment bar to the end. What's worse, NAD didn't even sit on my head comfortably with the maximum extension. Not very good choice for super big-headed friends... I may first give more time to Aiwa as NAD more obviously disqualify my big skull.
• Based on RD's preference inferred from his posts, I thought they could be a bit overdamped. That turned out a false guess. They're both relatively loosely damped (at least I hear so). But maybe because of that, both responded to equalizer very well.
• On the marginal recordings, Aiwa HP500 was a little too hot on highs to my ears. Came up with a few sets of simple filters. Worked like a magic. Will iteratively develop eq profiles as I explore. With the current calibration, the sound seems to have some unique texture. But will have to listen with more tracks to confirm.

 

Interesting. You’ve heard stock Audeze and Hifimans right? Thank you for the feedback and honesty!

 

FWIW I have a hot area around 6 KHz with my own pair. I hear it and it shows on my ear-mounted rig as well.

 

I'm feeling a little hesitant to lump them together lol. Maybe audeze could be lumped, but hfm had more serious (both positively and negatively) internal variance across generations and tiers. Excluding trashes, some survived in my preference zone (in stock form):

• Susvara (best HFM)
• HE6SE v1 (bearable northern boundary)
• LCD-X 2021 (best Audeze in tonality -- best balance among listed)
• LCD-4 (best Audeze in technicality).

Seems I have a general preference on their recent takes.

That said, both Aiwa and NAD were north to HE6SE v1 stock although either didn't have hfm's muted zone. I will take some measurements later to see if my ears broken lol.

 

yeah I didn’t hear it and I would I’m very sensitive to peaks. I also put them through much harsher test tracks than that to test for peeks. But whatever impressions are impressions there’s no arguing with what someone hears. That’s the whole point right?

 

YH-2 mod2 a little bass light. Treble at edge, maybe just needs more warmth. Not as detailed as HP-1a but would need to a/b to determine it wasnt just fake detail but I would bet real because aniso. @purr1n had a nice description for testing plankton in his D8000pro review that could help.:

Spoiler: quote

This is kind of tricky because the 10kHz peak of the D8000 will give it a macro-detail advantage. Both Clear and the D8000 Pro are very good at transients, so let's call it a wash there, with maybe the nature of transients being slightly different. What I do is examine to the guitar work at the beginning of the track and listen for the decays. The longer I can hear the decays and the more I can make out the frequency modulations during the decay, the higher I give the plankton score.

I did get sucked in by the detail of vocal / guitar when testing HP-1a but not at level I experienced with RS2e (ttvj deluxe).

I need mas bass to help overcome oft noisy environment: tv, fridge, a/c, laundry, etc. First time I setup my car stereo I tuned to flat 20-20k which sounded great when parked, but turn on the engine and go for a drive and you cannot hear the bass anymore. So, I made eq presets for different listening modes: engine off, idle, 25mph, 70mph. I used a mic to measure avg road noise in common situations and created the compensations from that. Today’s stereos probably have all that built-in, my 2012 GTI does not. 2016 prius may have some loudness contour I think, but thats not my car so dont care.

Im also constrained by budget and space. Ill have 1 phone for each situation. 1closed, 1open, 1portable, 1portapro. So, not much room for extra niche phones.

Then there is the problem where I dont have deep bass in home stereo because apartment life. And car stereo too because now I have passengers. So I (over)compensate with headphone bass.

Trying to explain some reasons why my preference and @rhythmdevils dont align.

I also have tinnitus/hearing damage from some accidents...

 

Dropping some preliminary measurements for Aiwa HP500 (RD-mod). They're more interesting than thought and contain a lot of tricky places that need high cautions.

Let me start from usual frequency response channel matching plots. Note that I am using sbaf compensation v3.0, which is a little different from Marv currently uses. Interested folks should find the original EARS thread. But I've not been seeing any meaningful discrepancies so far.



Edges and treble energies I found too much in my listening were shown in the plot: excessive energy around 4khz and at 8khz upward. Overall spectral balance is a little uprising to both my ears and eyes.

Another interesting point is a narrow discrepancy at 6khz. I will talk about this more in the next post with additional data points.

A couple of comparative plots below.



Comparison with my current references (I don't hear 650 kiss much but included because they're de-facto standard).



Above could be a fairer comparison (planar vs planar).





I don't want to put too much emphasis on harmonic distortions. One reason is, as shown in the plot, my room isn't the best place when it comes to noise floor. Nevertheless it's worth noting both channels had somewhat high D2 around 2khz.

Also commenting I couldn't associate any of those results with subjective negatives.



CSD could be interesting. Due to its closed structure, decay is kinda slow and there remained some energy in the housing.

Also attaching two CSDs I recently measured.




So-called ortho walls more evidently observed with HP500. Maybe its uprising tonality makes them more easily noticeable though.

Spectrogram reiterates findings above.

 

I thought this worth doing more investigations. To be specific I looked into phase information.



The results indicate HP500's phase response suddenly dropped at 5.5khz. This looks unusual as also shown in excess phase curve (defined as the difference between original phase and estimated minimum phase).

To understand what would be shown in "usual" situations, please see the below.



Excess phase starts to increase at 4khz and remain stable around 60 degree. And because those two completely different headphones resulted similarly, my takeaway is that's EARS's phase behavior (possibly related to artificial ear gains), rather than headphone-specific one.



HE400SE didn't differ much from HD650 or CMG. So, I believe HP500's sudden phase drop is caused by the headphone itself. There can be many causes including pads, reflections, resonance, etc etc -- Hard to tell which one is the case without further investigations (might be beyond my capability).


Now, let's look at the same (at least equivalent I believe) information from a little different angle. One of the reasons people are interested in minimum phase could be its property of minimum group delay (or vise versa). And group delay could be an easier illustration to identify non-minimum phase region.

In most cases in acoustic measurements, group delays would look like the followings (I'd recommend not to too much care dealy curves per se which could be affected by mic phase calibration). Focus on excess group delays.




As I said in the phase responses, excess delays look nearly identical, which may hint it's EARS's behavior.



HE400SE's result also added. Not different from the two plots above.



This is basically the same information as the phase response. But presented differently. Some may find this easier to understand (myself included).

 

Jesus. I feel ashamed.

first of all the HP-500 is a very challenging ortho to work with because it is fairly open so I want to keep it as open as possible but the enclosure as you mentioned is actually pretty large, cavernous and most of it is closed off. Even the part that is open back is not that open. I hear enclosure resonance with them but kind of gave up. I recently had another idea though there may be hope to get rid of that enclosure resonance.

as for the FR I’m puzzled. These did not sound like that to me. I hate that much treble. Generally if measurements don’t match what I hear then I don’t trust the measurements. But I believe you are pretty experienced @Vtory and two people are hearing and measuring basically the same bright target curve.

I have a few ideas of possible explanations

• my rig is the inverse FR of these measurements. This seems unlikely because I have 2 DACS the Gungnir MB A1 and RDAC which are both considered neutral AFAIK. And my reference amp is the same with the same tube I used to tune my last Yamahas which are still the flattest headphones Marv has ever measured by far. Dead flat. Treble roll off is something I figured out how to fix since then (obviously). A unicorn special build of the SOHA1 which is a giant killer of an amp. Neutral with a touch of warm tonality.
  
• The chronic illness (ME/CFS) I have and which took me out of this community for some 10 years has destroyed my once acute sense of hearing. This is a real and very sad possibility. Very little is known about the illness and it fucks with all sorts of systems throughout the body.
  
• Due to the illness I couldn’t listen to music at all not even once for 8 years and when I started an experimental drug that allowed me to start listening to music again (and use my phone snd post here again) I started with colored iems and never listened to a reference neutral speaker. So I could just be uncalibrated so to speak. I think and hope that this is the case. Because it’s an easy fix.

These results have given me the energy to overcome the sensitivity I have had to listening to speakers. (ME/CFS fucks with the nervous system putting you in a constant fight or flight response among other elevations causing extreme sensitivity to normal things. Like human contact. Or light for some people. Or sound). So I’m gong to put my Yamaha loaner on hold briefly, call all these orthos back and listen to my Mackie monitors as a reference to recalibrate. Hopefully that will be the answer.

it is still perplexing to me though because I have always naturally been very sensitive to FR peaks and resonance. It wasn’t something I learned or tried to learn it was something I always suffered from because all headphones sound like garbage to me.

hopefully comparing to my speakers will provide answers.

I’m sorry for wasting your time @Vtory @Philimon im embarrassed to be honest. This is something I pride myself on. Hopefully it’s not something I have lost. I’ve lost too much... I’m still bedridden with this illness to be honest. I’ve converted my room into a headphone factory my bed is surrounded by headphones, damping materials, tools, earpads, and my rig.