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Edition XS, Sennheiser Hd600, Letshuoer S12 and Beyerdynamic DT700

It took me many years. Every time I tried EQ I hated the changes until I tried convolution EQ impulses a couple years ago and suddenly I loved it.

The only thing I use EQ on is my Audeze, and that is not always either. For everything else I prefer the original sound.

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Oratory's EQ is computer-generated. I suggest using the EQ as a rough base and adjust by ear.

I think it's absolutely fascinating how it can change the sound of your headphones. And makes me question what is the purpose of searching for the "perfect reproduction". Reproduction of what? The artist who didn't mix it? The producer with hearing loss? The mixing engineer who used speakers? The DAC or amp that has a slightly warmer or brighter signature compared to another DAC or amp? I'm a EQ believer: I can hear the difference!

I use profiles from the AutoEq project. It's a big improvement on my Chus, barely perceptible on my Sundaras, and makes things atrociously bad with my Blues.

One thing I'd double check since you said it's actively bad across four different headphones is make sure that you're either preamping down or taking the curve and only reducing frequencies (i.e. peaks at 0).

Could also be that you don't like Harman.

He also tweaks it himself. he spends a fair amount of time on each one. And does measure each headphone himself. Oratory's eq is different from autoeq which are all fully auto generated.

Possibly re your last sentence. Should Haan sound flat? Just no ooomph to it.

Someone isn't Harman positive... In all seriousness, you like what you like

It just sounds flat to me.

It's supposed to be neutral, so I can see it being described as not having oomph. I know I certainly prefer more bass than a "true neutral" curve.

I'm sure he spends a lot of time on them, but some of the EQ are just questionable, such as a massive subbass shelf on the hd600/6x0. It sounded noticeably distorted and I highly recommend anyone who use the EQ to also adjust by ears.

Well yes Harman is mimicking Flat speakers in an anechoic room (crude TLDR I know) so of course it would sound flat... But if you read the notes attached to the oratory preset... He mentions which filters to adjust to preference since we all like different iterations of Harman or some form of Harman 🤷🏾‍♂️

I looked at those notes and adjusted accordingly. Maybe I just like the stock sound

Yup like I said... Tastes very much differ from person to person all because of some lovely phenomenon called the HRTF

+1. EQ for your own enjoyment.

You're not alone. Everytime I've applied AutoEQ to a headphone I've been quite unimpressed and would rather just use the default tuning.

Edit: Let me rephrase, whenever I've applied a target curve to a headphone (be it AutoEQ results, or a custom curve tweaked by someone like Oratory) I haven't liked it more than the stock tuning.

So far I've tried EQ on all the headphones I've got that have a corresponding oratory EQ and whilst I agree it does take some of what you may call the character out of them it does also do what it says on the tin which is that it equalises the overall sound reproduction.

For example it balances out my meze 99 Classics but depending on how I feel I might not use EQ to enjoy their increased bass.

Granted not all the oratory EQ are going to be to your liking and it does state that on the sub. Using the 99 classic example above I actually have the oratory EQ and my preferred EQ as separate presets as I had to reduce one of the bands as I found it sharp to my hearing.

Same. I know what I'm about to say is almost certainly wrong, but it always seems like when I add eq, no matter the headphone or target, it just sounds a big off like the EQ itself is causing some king of distortion

I have the 560s and although I prefer the EQ I could understand someone preferring no eq

The 5xx and 6xx lines are excellent in that aspect

The AutoEq is to solve a problem with some headphone if you don't really appreciate the sound of it , I only use it basically with my KZ IEMs , not because they are bad but because I didn't know what I were buying at the time

Try manual Oratory settings from PDF. It's different than AutoEQ presets (even his).

What is that?

I'm not saying it isn't, but why would that be the case?

I don't like the harman preset on a sundara(especially for the bass, probably the same case for edition Xs)

I felt the same way the first 2 or 3 times I tried autoEQ profiles (I kept coming back to it because it was so strongly commended, but every time was revulsed that it sounded "wrong" and uninstalled again). What eventually converted me was that I got treble fatigue after a few days of using the HD800S, a headphone that I otherwise absolutely adored. That was only as self-diagnosis, but I'd experienced something similar with the analytic pads on the DT1990, and both of them have spikes at 10khz. So I set it to Harman to get rid of anything "weird", and was initially just grateful that the ear pain didn't come back.

Now I'm used to it, and deviations from Harman are what sound off to me (sometimes Peace resets to a flat EQ, and I'll notice immediately that something is wrong). I don't feel too strongly that it's better sounding, I think it's mostly an issue of the sound you're used to.

I've also grown to like Harman on other headphones, but an exception is the 7hz Timeless. I don't know why it's an exception since I like Harman everywhere else, but I think they go from being exceptional to sounding like ass.

I've never liked any of Oratory's EQs personally. I've used Crin's graph tool to AutoEQ to his target with some good results sometimes. K702s are the one headphone that gets vastly better IMO with EQ. My 6XXs get maybe 5-10% better, Meze Elites get maybe 5% better and I don't like my DT 770s with any EQ at all.

i'm sorry for the stupid question but if every headphone are tuned to the harman target, won't everything just sound similar? isn't the point of different headphone is the different sound each one produce or is there something i'm missing?

I agree that it's silly to try and search out a "perfect reproduction" of someone else's idea of how a song should sound, but if you were to do that, it would probably be the mixing engineer, and Harman is basically designed to mimic the sound of speakers in a room. So that kind of fits.

I also think it makes some logical sense to use EQ to smooth out the things that makes a headphone weird (e.g. a massive spike at 8khz), because nobody would mix/master music on the assumption of a bizarre frequency pattern that is idiosyncratic of a particular Grado (for example). The Harman curve is the closest thing to a "normal" that there is. Then from there you can adjust to taste, like by boosting the bass. Or maybe by adding back some treble if that's what appealed to you about the Grado in the first place.

With my DT 770 I initially thought the AutoEQ and Oratory presets just make them sound boring and unexciting. I tried a couple of AutoEQ ones, Oratory manual preset and random presets from youtube and reddit. People said they make them way better, but I always came back to stock.

But lately they've been growing on me a little. I can listen either with stock or with the more neutral EQ presets, depending on my mood. Sometimes I want more oomph (stock) and sometimes I want more relaxed, less fatiguing sound.

With my AirPods Pro I prefer the stock sound, presets make them sound kinda thin. I actually like the neutral sound here and feel like presets take it away. I just manually boost treble, and sometimes sub bass when I feel like more oomph.

My Porta Pros are a lot better with Oratory preset. It makes them less muddy and gives them some sub bass and bass separation.

My Sennheiser Momentum In-Ear is the biggest improvement with presets. On stock, the bass overpowers everything, except the high treble. After EQ they sound very decent. I was honestly surprised how good the presets make them sound.

So all in all, it really depends on the headphones. The presets can be used more as a correction for bad tuned headphones which sound you don't like, rather than enhancing a pair that is already good.

AutoEQ just takes the measurements from various sources (like Oratory) and the software automatically makes the EQ preset correction. It's not the actual people like Crinacle, Oratory etc making these presets, they just provide the raw measurement data.

The Oratory PDF presets on the other hand, as far as I know, are manually crafted by him for every individual headphone.

You're not the only one, the only pair I've tried an Oratory preset on that I've actually liked are the PC37X

EQ is to fix the tonality to your preference.

Oratory EQ is drive toward Harman target. Maybe Harman target is not your liking.

However, to say no EQ is always the best is not valid argument either. All your headphones have different tonality. So you cannot say every single one has perfect tonality.

It's exactly this. I once asked him that.

I'm not an expert and may be wrong but from what I understand:

1. Measurements are an imperfect representation of personalized sound. Unless your ears and head match the rig exactly, what you hear is not what is measured on the rig. Placement of the headphones, pad seal, and unit variation will change the FR at your ears. Treble measurements are also inaccurate on the older standard rigs, above like 10kHz or even lower the measurement is unreliable.

2. The harman curve, as well as most measurements, are extremely smoothed and zoomed out to make them easier to read, but you lose the nuances in return. All the little dips and peaks that you don't see on the FR change the sound. It's basically impossible for two headphones to have the exact same raw measurement and thus sound the same, even if their smoothed compensated graph closely matches.

EQing to harman gets you close to the overall shape, but the small dips and peaks will still remain. It's like trying to draw a perfect circle by hand. You probably won't succeed and there will be different squigglys each time, but people will still recognize it as a circle.

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so the point of oratory1990 is to be as near as possible to the harman curve? and the measurements that we see is relative to the measurement tool as well then? what is the margin of error on a measurement rig?

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Seems you got down-voted for claiming oratorys profiles are computer generated, but your conclusion is absolutely spot on. In-ear FR varies depending on ear and skull shape/size, and sensitivities to particular frequencies are amplified compared to listening to speakers.

One needs to understand what's being adjusted in each EQ profile, instead of blindly applying them (although it's not surprising in an era of auto-everything). Your personal EQ settings should always be tuned to fit your ears and preferences.

100%. I've tried AutoEQ and also manually dialing in the EQ settings from the PDFs and on all the headphones I've tried (Sony Z5/XBA Z5, Sennheiser IE 800, IE 600, HD 6XX, HD660S, Moondrop KATO) they all lose their charm and end up sounding dead.

My theory is the EQ profile to "flat" doesn't take into consideration the specific driver/housing resonance and therefore can't compare to the stock tuning.

On some cases the difference is minimal (like the KATO) but on other cases you loose a lot of detail, sparkle and layering (HD 660S).

I love a tiny bit of EQ, especially in the treble region but changing the whole sound signature never yields good results for me.

I believe that if a headphone needs EQ then it's probably not a good headphone. This is probably not a popular opinion around here.

Yeah I'm not a fan of the Oratory sound. I just tune it to custom with Harman as a base.

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I thought mixing engineers used speakers that were "flat", and Harman wasn't "flat"?

The only eq I tried of his was the adi2 specific one for the LCDX and it’s incredibly good

> they just provide the raw measurement data.

Did it change so they provide it directly? It used to be that an image reading program was used and that is why sometimes the filters are in the wrong place.

EQ isn’t the end all for headphone tuning. Not even close lol. It’s also only good on certain headphones, especially planar dynamics that have remarkably low distortion. EQ also is more of a bandaid for things you want to fix, and an enhancer in other areas, rather than a complete overhaul.

There are multiple EQ targets on AutoEQ, I myself am not a fan of Harman I do like IEF neutral + bass though

Yeah I thought my take was reasonable lol. Yes, oratory most likely tweaks some stuff, such as making sure the algorithm doesn't try to compensate for the dip at 10khz, not going overboard with weird treble peaks, or trying to correct resonances. Again, correct me if am wrong, but I am pretty sure Oratory's EQ is generated by some algorithm that tries its best to match 2018 Harman, with his own tweaks. However, I have never seen anyone with an HD650 who boosted the subbass by nearly 10 decibel and thought, yeah this sounds appropriate and not distorted. My bad I guess.

Not sure :) By provide I meant that it's their measurements. I don't know if they are somehow involved with AutoEQ or what's the process.

AFAIK oratory has access to a measuring rig and people send him their headphones to have their specific unit measured. He creates EQ presets manually based on these measurements to equalize them to Harman and shares it with the community. People who like Harman use it, otherwise EQ by ear or don't EQ at all; it's entirely preference.

The goal of the Harman curve was to define what the average listener would prefer. A headphone that matches Harman should sound and measure like a pair of flat speakers in a studio. The bass on that target is entirely subjective and something they've adjusted through revisions. Love it or hate it, it's important to have reference curves like Harman/Free field/Diffuse field so that we have a point of comparison between different sets.

Every measurement has context, yes. It's why graphs made with the newer B&K rig are not 1:1 compatible with older GRAS rigs, causing people to rebuild their measurement database. I don't think it's the margin of error that is the issue, the rigs are plenty precise. Accuracy is what is questionable; how certain are we that a measurement represents sound in the real world? Even if you control placement and seal, there will still be unit variance and differences in physiology. Even then FR graphs are mostly reliable for telling you the overall tonality of something.

You didn’t list any headphones so it’s hard to comment. You may just be one of the rare people who doesn’t prefer harmon tuning. You may also be using eq incorrectly and not applying the correct values and settings. No way to know since you left no information.

Wtf is auto eq. We’re talking about incredibly specific tuning backed up by measurements.

Same...and even then just my LCD-X. The LCD-2 are just great as is. The X is horrible without it and great with it.

Thats fine, I'm the same I dont EQ my headphones even when they do sound better. I dont feel the need to put in the extra work, my ears can adjust to the way they sound. A lot of EQ profiles to me dont always sound better either way, I like the way a lot of headphones sound stock usually.

I mentioned my headphones in a comment further down. And yes I did enter the correct values when EQing.

For ease. The headohones are Edition XS, DT700, HD600 and Letshuoer S12

Harman isn’t flat because flat speakers don’t sound flat inside of a room. The resonance off the walls makes bass seem louder and absorbs some frequencies.

He has some cognitive dissonance, I think. You can't say that a bassy headphone is as good as a bass rolled off one. That's totally illogical.

It's that, plus Oratory EQs to Harman, which AutoEQ does not, the default AutoEQ target curve you'll find in Peace, Qudelix 5K, etc has substantially less bass than Harman. This is why it kills the bass on basically all IEMs.

https://imgur.com/a/rwHJxPP

>None of these targets have bass boost seen in Harman target responses and therefore a +4dB boost was applied for all over-ear headphones, +6dB for in-ear headphones and no boost for earbuds. Harman targets actually ask for about +6dB for over-ears and +9dB for in-ears but since some headphones cannot achieve this with positive gain limited to +6dB, a smaller boost was selected.

https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/

It's extremely misleading that these curves are labelled as Harman, everyone thinks they are Harman but they are only Harman for the upper mids.

AutoEQ has also historically EQed too high up, and too much high up. This has been addressed in a more recent revision and the precomputed presets now limit themselves to a high shelf above I think 10,000Hz which is a big improvement. Oratory has historically taken a lighter touch in the treble.

Oratory's EQs also tend to be smoother and less extreme, with broader peaks, you can see there is a broad theme but the Oratory curve is smoother.

It's great software and works very well if you use it yourself manually but the precomputed target curves are junk, especially for IEMs. Took me ages to figure out exactly what it was doing. They are getting better, the introduction of low and high shelves is great. But Oratory1990's EQs still better.

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Every headphone I have even totl ones, I apply a mild v-shape in EQ and that’s it, neutral snobs sue me.

Tbh i don't get people who use premade eq profiles. The whole point of eq is to tune it to what YOU like, not what someone else likes.

> I highly recommend anyone who use the EQ to also adjust by ears.

So does he, that's why he has specific bands to tweak depending on what you would like to change about the sound. That's a great starting point. 90% of people aren't going to know how to adjust EQ by ear.

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Idk why you got downvoted…

Listen to a $200 headphone EQ’d to harman and then listen to a $2000 headphone EQ’d to harman and your question will be answered.

Maybe it's something to do with loudness ? Did you volume match ? Also some bright headphones (shouty if you may) are quite good with details, so when you apply the oratory EQ, the highs are brought down a notch so it does give the impression that there are less details in the music.

Also Note that the Oratory EQ doesn't always bring you to the harman curve as many variables are at sake here like the shape of your head, variations during manufacturing process...

> It's great software and works very well if you use it yourself manually

What do you mean manually? They are automatic presets.

That's exactly what I meant... I know Oratory's EQ has some suggested bands that you can adjust if it's too bassy, has too much presence, too little treble, etc. How would you know if the EQ has personally too much bass or too little treble? You listen with YOUR ears! Not Oratory's ears, yours. Please read my comment again. I said "I highly recommend anyone WHO USE THE EQ to also ADJUST BY EAR." I am not saying to start using your ears to EQ from scratch, although that would be the endgoal. Oratory's EQ is a good base, but everyone should listen and adjust as necessary.

AutoEq is both a tool to generate EQ parameters to go from a source frequency response to a target frequency response, and a collection of EQ parameters (presets) generated with this tool. The problem is that the target frequency response used to generate the presets is (according to most people) crap. So the presets don't sound good. But AutoEq (the tool) can still be used to generate EQ params for the target of your choice, and does it very well.

You mean the function inside Crinacle's graph tool?

To be honest I don't think these two are the same. AutoEq is written in Python, Crinacle's graph tool is written in JavaScript, and they don't seem to share much code, if at all, or even to be developed by the same people. But yes, Crinacle's graph tool should do the job just fine.

So how do I use the AutoEQ manually for my own targets?

I'm the exact opposite. I much prefer (almost) every headphone with Oratory's presets than stock. There are a limited few that I would even care to listen without EQ anymore. Which headphones for example and are you sure you level matched? Louder is always better when A/B:ing. Any specific aspect that you didn't enjoy since perhaps dome aspect of Harman is not good for your taste or ear?

I second this. The AutoEQ presets have been garbage and very different from his PDF's.

Harman EQ sucks. Is biased by an average listener preference. As in ipod user and mp3 listener.

Crin's graph tool, squig.link and others support a few targets by default (right below the chart) like Harman targets, IEF Neutral, Diffuse Field, etc. Select your headphones, your target of choice, press the AutoEQ button, and the tool will generate EQ parameters. Afterwards you can even tweak the generated EQ params and see the resulting frequency response curve (typical use-case is if you want more bass for example). This works really well. But if you want to use your own custom target, it looks like you need to use the actual AutoEq tool written in Python... I've never done this though. Actually the graph tools have an "Upload Target" button in the "Equalizer" tab which looks like it can be used for custom targets.

Edit: apparently you can also select another headphones' frequency response as a target. Nice!