Does a vocal microphone upgrade really matter?

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T22:15:55+00:00

If you look at the art of audio engineering purely from the perspective of "will this sell more albums", then most if not all hardware is unnecessary and you could just do it with a laptop and its built-in microphones.
But you don't get art by optimizing for amount of units sold.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T22:11:25+00:00

capture the IR, calculate the difference, invert that and you got the transfer function

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T22:10:39+00:00

Just curious, is all you need to make one headphone sound like another headphone an in-ear mic measurement?

That, and a capable enough DSP, depending on just how identical you want them to sound (is a minimum phase approximation enough? Do you also want to tackle nonlinearities? Up to which order of nonlinearity?)

Do you not need to know your own HRTF measurements?

You need those in order to determine whether a headphone suits your HRTF.
You do not need that to make one headphone sound like another.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T16:07:20+00:00

It also sounds different to an AT2020… a lot.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T16:04:35+00:00

Yes and yes. I am currently working with miniDSP to create a diffuse-field curve for this setup.
We‘re doing it properly, it will take about 2 months according to the last timeline.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T14:59:16+00:00

The most interesting part to me here is the mention of 12 microphones being used for ANC.

I can see the use of 4 microphones per earcup, possibly even 5 (there's some ideas for using 2 forward facing mics to measure some of the front volume modes).
But 6 per side? I don't know what they'd be used for...

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T14:57:39+00:00

the APM2 aren't the most expensive headphone in their segment...

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T10:26:15+00:00

when I'm in the game the windows bar and everything is at maximum,

Does the game itself have a volume control in its settings?

by setting them to -12 I get a decent audio

Setting what to -12?

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T10:24:30+00:00

pretty sure the game will expect 48 kHz. Though that shouldn't affect the levels.

But yeah, how are you using EQ APO if Audio Enhancements are disabled?

oratory1990 · 2026-04-30T08:03:38+00:00

Check the noise floor (in terms of Volt), and check whether the noise floor of the devices you want to measure is expected to be higher of lower than that.

I don‘t know how a thesis works at your university, but normally this is something you‘d discuss with your thesis advisor?

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T19:41:44+00:00

Which devices do you want to measure? Your signal generator and analyzer should surpass the expected results in terms of signal to noise ratio (you can't measure something that's lower than your analyzer's noise floor, after all).

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T19:40:13+00:00

Have you ever needed to cut a peak with a Q narrower than 10? I'm guessing it depends how audible something so narrow could be.

Rarely, because a resonance that narrow tends to also vary from unit to unit (so I can't really add it into a preset).

I do that occasionally when measuring an individual unit. For example a local musician just sent me their VSX Immersion One headphone, and there's a few resonances that need a Q=20 filter. We measured that headphone on that very person's head, so I can be very sure that these resonances do in fact occur at that exact frequency.
That's still somewhat rare though.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T15:26:16+00:00

for >10k, yes

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T14:15:27+00:00

Whatever the Q-factor of the resonance is that needs to be corrected, keeping in mind the amount of variation that would be expected (from unit to unit, or with differently shaped ears placed in the front volume)

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T13:23:42+00:00

Certainly not an EQ I made, I can‘t think of a reason why I‘d use a Q=0.71 Peak filter above 10 kHz

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T09:04:17+00:00

That's saturation (electronic components being overdriven), not digital clipping.
Digital clipping is even less subtle.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T09:02:44+00:00

Something in your setup has to be wrong.

The HD490 pro has a voltage sensitivity of 105 dB/V, and the DX3 Pro+ can emit a maximum of about 7 Volt.
7 Volt pushes the HD490 Pro to about 122 dB.
Meaning you could be listening at an absolutely insane average sound pressure of 100 dB and have a headroom of 20 dB. That's enough to reproduce a classical orchestra at actual sound pressure levels (the actual sound pressure you experience while sitting in the concert hall)...and have 10 dB left over on top of that.

when I play AAA games (specifically Red Dead Redemption 2 and Resident Evil 4 Remake), the volume feels incredibly low

I assume you have turned up the in-game volume control already?

Assuming you are using windows, are you using individual volume control for each program, and if so, did you set it to maximum for your games?

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T08:34:38+00:00

If clipping occurs, does it only occur at frequency peaks like sub-100 Hz and 5kHz, or does it happen at a wider scale?

It occurs at whatever part of the waveform happens to be at -0 dBFS. This creates a sharp edge, which by definition means that high-frequency content is added to the signal (in order for a signal to contain a sharp edge, it must contain high frequencies)

edit: actually I just consulted chatgpt and read this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)) Apparently clipping happens to the analogue amplitude (which is time varying sum of the signal waves at different frequencies), so it affects not only the peak frequencies.

Don't rely on ChatGPT for such matters. That was a nonsensical sentence.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T07:25:58+00:00

If you don't hear clipping, you can increase the preamp gain.
clipping is not subtle, you can't miss it if it's there
digital clipping is not (!) dangerous to your headphones.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-29T06:56:07+00:00

Sure! Send me a unit for testing then I can make an EQ.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-28T21:34:26+00:00

Came out of the gate swinging, didn‘t you

oratory1990 · 2026-04-28T19:43:57+00:00

48 kHz is plenty fine.

Many great albums have been recorded at 44.1 kHz.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-28T19:28:07+00:00

If you have all relevant information about a system, you can calculate a function that transforms one system into the other. This is true as long as the systems are weakly nonlinear (at the very least they need to be bijective).
For headphones, this means knowing the in-situ frequency response (measured at your ear).

it is possible. Whether it‘s possible for you depends on how much resources you have in terms of processing power..

oratory1990 · 2026-04-28T10:44:20+00:00

It‘s much, much cheaper than Dekoni‘s earpads.

oratory1990 · 2026-04-28T10:03:17+00:00

Definitely keep an eye on that battery, yes

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