Speakers vs headphone (Patreon)

I invested some further time to tweak both my overear and IEM target based on the sound I am hearing from speakers. For this purpose I had set up the KH80 again like shown before and did some futher listening sessions and measurements.

I learned that to approach a similar spectrum with headphones which you would get from speakers you simply cannot rely on measurements alone but you need careful listening to achieve something which resembles each other. Apparently the spectrum prodcued by speakers hitting your ears is more complex than what you can achieve from a headphone. With a headphone you have 2 closeby sound sources emiiting sound directly into your ear from a +/-90° angle, while with speakers you get a mix of frontal direct and all around diffuse sound coming from the room reflections etc. It's close to impossible to simulate this effect precisely with a headphone, thus matching the responses measured from speakers and from headphones will result in a fallse and completely wrong sounding spectrum.

Below you can see again the measurements I achieve with my own ears for the speakers in red and the headphone equalised to sound more or less the same in blue. I used a brand new microphone pair I still own, it's my last working pair. This pair measures slighly brighter than my previous pair, therefore there may be some differences visible compared to my old measurements:

I tried my best to make both appear as close as possible when listening to pink noise. With music the differences will be far less obvious. What's interesting is how both measurements depart from each other in the 3khz, 8khz and 12khz region. I am not sure why this happens, but trying to match them better always made both spectrums to sound too different.

I prepared a sound sample recording the sound of the speakers and putting on the equalised HD58X to show you how both would sound. I am starting with pure binaural pink noise at the very beginning switching to uncorrelated pink noise played over the speakers. You should hear how the spectrum changes when I adjust my position to reach the sweet spot of the stereo triangle more or less, then I put on the headphones and readjust them after a while, and back to the speakers, at the very end after playing the headphones again shortly I switch back to binaural pink noise for reference.

IMO my current result sounds pretty similar to the sound I am hearing from the speakers but trying to record this raises the question how to compensate my recordings to make them appear "neutral" again. If I compensate for the response of the headphone, which means flattening their measurement, I would also include all errors from their response like the mentioned dip around 16khz which would appear as peak from other headphones. If I compensate for the response of the speakers, I would get a different sound due to the differences in the 3, 8 and 12khz area. When listening to my recording of the speakers through the headphone it does not sound like the real thing, regardless how I compensate. I am still not sure if I can achieve a single global compensation which would work equally well for recording speakers and headphones or if I will need separate compensations depending on what I will be recording. In this sound sample I compesated differently for the speakers and headphones, and although the headphone sounds pretty much like itself, the speakers don't. Below you can see the final responses of both when compensated separately:

I need to fine tune this by ear which make take some approaches. As long as my sound samples do not sound like the real thing, it doesn't quite make sense to publish them. I will need to set up the speakers again, do further recordings and measurements and try to make my recordings appear more or less the same sounding like the speakers themselves. Unfortunately my wife doesn't support this anymore. For her it's waste of time to listen to pink noise the whole day, as she does not see any benefit from it. I am poorer now than I ever was before.

I am not sure how long I can maintain my "work". I am simply trying to achieve an as uncolored and honest sound from both headphones and inears which would hopefully also work for other's ears, but it's still uncertain how my sound settings will translate over to someone else.