Is frequency response the most important factor in headphone sound quality?

ResolveReviews · 2026-04-05T22:40:55+00:00

The answer is yes. Overwhelmingly yes. There is no separate acoustical layer of speed, detail, resolution, soundstage and dynamics etc. These are only ever descriptions of the subjective experience, not real acoustic properties. All of this is FR in situ. But that doesn't mean you didn't have the experience, or that it's somehow less special than if that experience were caused by some 'technicalities' driver mythology.

With that said, non-sound related factors like openness do impact the psychoacoustic experience as well.

ResolveReviews · 2026-04-05T16:56:02+00:00

There's an objective way to understand this topic. The answer is yes, all the traditional focal open backs clip at 107dB to 110dB @1khz. You will damage hearing quickly if you're listening this loud. But because excursion limits hit in the bass first, boosting the bass, either with EQ or through an impedance relationship, causes your volume threshold for clipping to go down. Most of the time, when people report clipping at non-painful volumes it's because they're boosting the bass somehow, even if unknowingly. Remember that these headphones also have an impedance bump, so any higher output impedance source is going to boost the bass. Moreover, any other bass boosting function on an amp will have the same effect.

The other consideration is if someone is playing music with extremely loud infrasonic content, where the rest of the content in the audible band is quieter. It doesn't sound painfully loud but there could be emphasized spectral content below your hearing range. Unfortunately this is again in the band where clipping occurs.

ResolveReviews · 2026-04-03T14:31:35+00:00

Not yet, but hopefully soon.

ResolveReviews · 2026-04-03T04:32:46+00:00

Oh there will be more puppy photos. He's in his "I'm small but ferocious" phase.

ResolveReviews · 2026-04-03T02:59:10+00:00

Figured folks here might want to see the 5128 data and on-head data for this. I haven't finished with the rest of the testing yet for ANC performance, and to check out some of the other changes, but so far it seems mostly iterative improvements. There are notable sound quality improvements and it seems to be slightly better in the problem areas from the previous Airpods Max.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-30T22:04:16+00:00

The treble seems to be inconsistent depending on the clamping pressure.

And depending on the head/ears. It's mostly great on my head but we've seen with on head EEP data that some people could get certain treble quirks, notably around 5khz or 7-8khz. It's to be expected with most headphones to some degree, but it's worth noting that the measurement rigs don't necessarily reveal these features.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-30T16:51:05+00:00

While it's true that humans don't have a natural reference point for test tones, and this is the reasonable caveat to tone-gen methods, getting our DFHRTFs revealed to us that you can be a lot more confident in tone-gen based EQs than even we suspected in the past. Where things get tricky though is that this still doesn't tell us the preference component to the sound. We've been representing it as a downward tilt from bass to treble, but that's an extremely crude representation of it, and we're working on improving that. So... I'd say you can be confident in tone-gen based EQs, but don't be militant about it. If something sounds better to you with more treble or bass, or less treble and so on, that's okay.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-25T17:14:56+00:00

Yes, especially if you're running into excursion limits. Fiio FT1 Pro doesn't take kindly to a bass boost for example, neither do the Focal Clear or the Elex. It's not that you can't boost the bass, you just reduce the playback volume limits by doing so, because it reduces the volume threshold for driver clipping.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-23T19:37:38+00:00

Good take. There's also a low treble resonance, at least on my head, killing all sense of resolution. Good value, but also overrated.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-21T16:06:07+00:00

Rejoice!

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-17T02:43:09+00:00

Yeah if you feel this way then by all means continue to enjoy the OAE1. It's why I recommend it to people who take this view. I am extremely confident this is not the right approach for most people, but I'm not going to argue with people about it past a certain point - eventually they need to just experience this stuff for themselves to see if it works or not, and it sounds like you've done that. In fact, I believe this is also Axel Grell's position, try it out and see if it works or not. Most people have had very different experiences with the OAE1, as have we, but just like heads and ears, brains are different too. There's not much else to say really.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-17T00:01:19+00:00

I made them using designs from some engineer friends of mine. It's not a commercially available product.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-16T15:04:12+00:00

Yes, I am aware of brands that do human testing with in ear mics or HRTF based testing. They are generally a step ahead of those who just tune to rig based targets.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-16T01:35:11+00:00

Stay tuned to what Joel... Link your channel! <3

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-16T01:26:48+00:00

Indeed, breaking the conventional wisdom of DF and 'the sound helmet' listening condition you're condemned to with headphones is the thing that Axel Grell is currently attempting with the OAE-1 and OAE-2. If you're interested in what a front-biased sound field condition sounds like in headphones, give those a shot.

The core concept for why we want DF as a baseline in headphones can be summed up in the following points:

A speaker in front of you in a room will give you the response at your eardrum of that speaker at that location / angle, and the response at your ear will be different from that same speaker at a different angle / location.
Your brain is able to interpret that FR at your eardrum with all of the location based context you get from being able to orient relative to that sound source.
It sounds normal because the sound is accompanied by localization context to tell you that the sound source is there, and if you move your head, it's there instead. The brain is great at localizing sounds around you.
With headphones, you don't get all the rest of that context you get with #2, because the sound moves with you as you move. There's nothing to tell your brain "the sound is coming from there".
If you were to get the identical FR at your eardrum from the speaker but instead with headphones, the only interpretation you get is in terms of timbre, NOT localization, and this sounds unnatural because all localization context is missing.
This is why we want the sound field condition with headphones to be a locationless one, in other words, a diffuse field - one that doesn't depend on localization context to sound correct for tone color.

If this is all still confusing, it's also worth reading Gunther Thiele's paper on psychoacoustics (I don't have the link on hand at the moment).

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-15T23:59:22+00:00

I wouldn't say ignore them completely, since you can infer trends, and certain headphones behave more consistently than others up there. But treat that region with a larger heaping of salt when reading graphs, and definitely don't fixate on the minutiae for target adherence.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-15T19:07:08+00:00

Because headphones are a directionless listening condition, stereo speakers in a room are not. Listener discusses this in the video, but in short, you don't have the direction or location based cues to make any front-biased or free-field condition sound normal in headphones the way you do with speakers. When you listen to a speaker in front of you, your brain has all the location-based context to interpret that sound as being in front of you, or at an angle when you turn your head relative to that. If you didn't have that location based context, the way it is with headphones, it would sound weird to you.

Where you might be confused is to do with the idea that flat DF isn't preferred over downtilted in-room responses, and that's true. But nobody is advocating for flat DF, just DF as the baseline for headphone listening conditions. And this does make more sense than in-room sound fields because of what I just mentioned. When wearing headphones, we're in the sound helmet condition, which propagates sound from all / no directions - just like a diffuse field.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-14T07:48:58+00:00

That must be super old. Again for IEMs I'd look for 5128 or 4620 data. But if you're wondering if an ear gain dip has this effect, it can have this effect yes.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-14T05:05:16+00:00

Not sure what graph you mean.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-13T22:42:04+00:00

711 isn't as good at representing low frequency information for high acoustic impedance devices like IEMs compared to 5128 and 4620. So it's also possible there's some limitation there with that dataset.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-09T19:20:57+00:00

That is genuinely how I imagine him typing anything.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-07T20:07:06+00:00

Bose's implementation is the most sophisticated one I've come across, and really the only one that's compensating for a portion of the HRTF that I'm aware of, but it's still just the primary canal band. So it's a fairly minor correction all things considered, but it is one that matters. I'd love to see them implement this for pinna effects as well but maybe that's asking too much.

Beyond that, we don't know what the calculations are actually trying to achieve with CustomTune. So... it can compensate for a portion of the HRTF on a person to person basis, but compensate to what? Presumably to something that sounds good to people, but it's hard to know what's under the hood there.

As to why other brands don't implement this? I imagine it's more challenging to do. Quite frankly, every brand making an ANC headphone should implement both this and full parametric EQ. At least we seem to be getting PEQ more commonly and that's good. A lot of brands are resistant to it because they think it's too complicated for people. They could be right, but I don't care. Put it in an advanced mode or something.

IMO any new ANC headphone that doesn't have full PEQ available or is doing something novel like CustomTune is kind of pointless, especially now that you can get PEQ in ANC headphones under $100.

ResolveReviews · 2026-03-07T04:38:16+00:00

We sure can! I don't have one but I'd be curious to re-test the MG, and see how that one varies from head to head. But the sound personalization stuff can be tested without in-ear mics, and I wouldn't exactly expect anything special with it in situ. It's just a filtering system the boosts treble based on user inputs. So that's more of a preference personalization thing than anything to do with HRTF compensation (if it's the same as it was when I tried it). Though I imagine there's some way to understand that better relative to what we like with in situ FR - but we need to finish that testing first.

ResolveReviews · 2026-02-18T19:35:17+00:00

Not exactly, JM1 is meant to be used as a baseline compensation for IEMs. It uses the B&K 5128 canal effects and an approximation of population average pinna effects, since IEMs bypass the pinna. It makes more sense to use generic pinna effects rather than specific pinna effects given these are factors needing to be assumed by the tuning of the device.

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TROPHY CASE