In search of the "perfect" sound (Patreon)

I have spent a week of intense sound tweaking by trying to optimise my headphone target and achieving a final usable result creating an EQ for the Sennheiser HD800S which you can find here and another completely new EQ for the HD58X. I also spent extra time trying to fine tune my settings for the UBoom X to achieve an even more faithful sound especially for the studio mode which I would like to demonstrate in this video, but I also tweaked indoor and indoor+ to make all modes sound as natural and and enjoyable but at the same time similar to each other as possible.

As a consequence from all this I also had to create a new compensation for my recordings completely from scratch as recently I had started using new microphones and my previous attempts were just readjusted over time bit by bit based on a very old state. As my headphone target is quite different now and sounds much closer to the speakers, my recordings didn't sound quite correct anymore. Therefore it took me some further days to achieve a compensation which should be much better and much more natural sounding than all my previous ones. Now I can be sure that my binaural recordings sound true and are as uncolored as possible given you listen over a properly tuned neutral headphone. My current compensation has additional correction for my left and right ear separately which also improves the imaging a lot. I had to spend endless hours listening and comparing my recordings of the KH80 to the speakers themselves as it was impossible to achieve faithful results by just trying to match some measurements. It was more or less like tuning an additional headphone but instead of tuning the headphone itself I was tuning the recording to close the entire circle and make the recording of a neutral speaker pair sound just like the neutral speakers if listened over a neutral headphone which again should sound approximately like the neutral speakers. By just flattening the recording it still didn't sound alike and I had to seek for nuances to match 2 different spectrums as close as possible. This takes long and I needed to manually sculpt various areas of the captured spectrum to make it sound correct. Although I can never be 100% sure that I am really correct now, I simply think that my current state of understanding and being able to capture and reproduce sound faithfully and correctly by a speaker or a headphone is much more complete and I start hearing more and more how off all headphones sound despite some bold "True Sound" claims by B&W and many others. Thankfully the ear is able to adjust immediately to a provided sound and accept this after some time and without having a constant correct sounding reference it is close to impossible to tell if the sound you are actually hearing is any close to what was really captured. In my case I can proudly state now that what I capture with my ears is also reproduced correctly by a headphone corrected with my EQ.

More EQs will be coming and I would like to release a new headphone EQ every month just like I had promised long time ago. But as the effort is really high to optimize a single headphone through constant listening I would rather like to concentrate on releasing an own headphone if my quality demands can be fulfilled. The more I am able to fine tune for nuances the better the final sound will be just like demonstrated here with the Uboom X. Although the differences may appear subtle at first, in the end it is just these nuances what makes a "good" sound stand out from bad sound and finding and optimizing for these nuances is where really the effort should be put in and not releasing new products every year just to make money out of nothing.

I thank everyone for their longtime support as without you my search for the perfect sound would have never been possible. I am still struggling every day but at least I can do what I really love doing and I hope my work can also improve your love and passion for music and sound!

God bless you all!