From what I have experienced, your headphones/earbuds might have a siginificant peak somewhere in their frequency response. Play a sine sweep and if one frequency becomes too loud try to remove it in EQ. My particular headphones have a vicious peak at around 9000Hz that makes them unusable for long periods without EQ, so I'd try that first

I also came from an hyper x cloud to the 560s, but took several years and a bunch of iem and headphones in between

This is probably the direction I will go in eventually, pretty happy with all my current cans tho. Congrats on a killer set of headphones!

FR is a lot, the $10 earbuds would have atrocious FR. Either non existent or bloated AF bass with ridiculous peaky treble that you can't do anything to fix. Soundstage and some other things aren't modifiable at all really typically has to do with things like physical driver orientation in the housing etc.

I'm a huge fan of EQ. At this point it's readily available in things like the Qudelix5K for a very reasonable price allowing you to PEQ all the things. Why wouldn't one opt for making their headphones sound better given the chance. With auto EQ there's even a reasonably easy means of going to a neutral signature and making modifications from there.

That being said not every driver is created equal. Just because you've made modifications in an EQ does not mean the driver will be up to the task. Lower end cheap drivers will be too shitty to EQ and "fix" it'll just bleet and distort. Also just because a headphone is expensive does not necessarily mean it will EQ well.

Some headphones like Planar IEM's are well known for their ability to respond to EQ.

I just noticed the 1266 laying on its side in the background. It looks ridiculous, especially with that cable hanging off of its earcup.

Anyways, I am quite interested in the X9000, though with a move mostly likely coming up in the next year, I don't want to buy anything yet to avoid the hassle of moving it. I've read that it's a tangible upgrade from what I have, but that its softer presentation isn't for everyone. It appears it's perfect for you though, so that's good news! I'll just have to find a place to demo it myself.

You won't get any nasty artifacts. Games will output what they support, and any modern version of Windows will resample it properly. There is no need to worry about it at all. Best to keep it at 48000Hz these days because most new content is at that rate unless all you do is listen to CDs.

As far as 44 being generous, that isn't the case. The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem tells us that in order to reconstruct audio of a given frequency, you need at least double that in sampling rate. The next rung down from 44,100Hz on PCs - if it's even supported - is 22,050Hz, which would only allow for frequencies up to 11,025Hz. Keep in mind that 44,010Hz is for each channel and is not divided amongst each ear.

The frequency response just shows the idea of what it would theoretically sound like. Frequency response doesn’t show you how it sounds. You have to test the equipment to hear it.

I may be wrong, but the M50’s became popular and earned their reputation before satandalone DACs’n Amps were even a thing.

I can hear it pretty clearly with my AirPods Pro 2, don’t know if that makes them good tho.

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>So how a headphone looks on its FR, and how it is perceived by the individual, is totally subjective.

I find this highly debatable. First of all as the study points out the individual hrtf is basicly the same as the mean up until 2khz for open ear canal and 5khz for blocked ear canal. This means that at least the bass and mid frequencies are perceived the same. Which you can also see on your picture where the lines basicly deviate 1db up or down at worst, thus we can say based on the just noticable difference for sound (1db) the stimulus is pereceived the same. Above 2khz and 5khz the difference get's larger but still when you look at the right graph which shows the individual hrtf variations for +-1 std are still very low (+-1.5db variation for ~70% of the people) under 7/8khz. Above that deviation get's quite big but that is also the area where tweeters stop to play, music has less content and hearing loss starts to become very frequent. Thus the importance of that is debatable imo.

It really depends on how noticable amplitude change is perceived to be but based on the known theory and my own experience I would say that for at least the majority of the people most headphone will sound the same, differences probably will be in perceived treble levels which other research also proofs (treble sensitivity etc.).

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one of the charming adventures ever

Just to add in, literally everyone on this sub screams minimum phase this, minimum phase that….in theory… sure! In reality, a very small number of headphones actually behave this way, most of the favorite headphones in this sub and totl cans do NOT behave as minimum phase systems for their FULL bandwidth.

That is all . That’s the only point I wanted to make. Headphones aren’t often TRUELY minimum phase. The end. Let the downvotes begin.

• a headphone designer who has measured many many headphones.

>oh wait, actually frequency response tells you literally everything you could possibly want to know.

For iems, frequency response tells you almost everything.

Trying to EQ low quality headphones, say some cheap ones from ebay, is like trying to make your pebble shine by polishing it. In my opinion, for the most part, frequency response is basically almost everything. Except for soundstage and imaging. Frequency response does have a play in soundstage and imaging, but there are other factors, like with over ears, the space between the driver and your ears, your pinna, the shape of your ear canal.

I’ve worked out in my Bang & Olufsen H4s for years now and nothing has happened to them. Sure the lamb skin leather pads are a bit discolored but that’s to be expected. I don’t do cardio in them, just weight lifting so I sweat a bit on them but not a huge amount. Functionally, they’re still perfect. Obviously this is true of my B&O cans, so YMMV.

Not even just ear anatomy - room acoustics, humidity/air pressure, ambient noise, dust and pollen levels, the amount of hair on their head, head size, skin temperature, the exact angles of the headphone mounted on their head, etc.

And that's on top of the fact that literally no two headphones - even of the same make and model - are exactly the same.

You mean the space that loves their In Ear Monitors?

Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. He snaps his fingers, most is really hard to hear but 0:32 and 0:43 is noticeable. After that your hears will start to pickup more.

I love mine….plugged into a Soundblaster X and does just fine

Yeah for real, x9000 is built and designed with such elegance, and a good throwback to omega as well. Really like the looks

I’m not a huge fan of the z10e personally, especially with the 9k, but plenty of people disagree with me there.

And totally. They’re perfect as complementary headphones.

Can’t wait until someday I finally own 560s. It’s gonna happen eventually.