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Author Topic: Focal Spirit Pro  (Read 6984 times)

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Solderdude

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Re: Focal Spirit Pro
« Reply #30 on: April 20, 2014, 09:34:04 PM »

Agreed on the 'natural ability to phase out reverberation and some close reflections'.

Speaker and headphone measurements have nothing in common and am still surprised some treat them similarly.
Speaker sound comes from the front and this is where the Pinnae come in for sound localisation.
Headphone sound comes from the sides (when we forget about certain Stax for a while) a completely different situation.
The Pinna doesn't affect the incoming sound waves that much, like it also wouldn't do when we were to place our speakers completely to the left and right of us and close by.

The air volume the Pinna takes up alters the amount of air trapped inside the cups though, and does so in a non-symmetrical way as well.
I 'suspect' this does alter the playing field for the driver (no proof and no real investigations on my part).
I am all for it to remove the ear canal in test rig, it only adds to the confusion and must be 'undone' with compensation anyway.
The Pinnae, however, do have some influence, certainly when measuring on-ear headphones.

Still, if the measurements and what we actually hear during a sweep have a high resemblance than the measurements aren't that bad.
If they differ either our ears are fooling us (yet again) or the measurements aren't as accurate as we hoped in an absolute sense.
In this particular case (checking using a sweep) I am inclined to believe the sweep somewhat more.

Calibration of a test rig is difficult to do unless you have a known reference.
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Use your ears to enjoy music, not as an analyser.

funkmeister

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Re: Focal Spirit Pro
« Reply #31 on: April 20, 2014, 10:28:06 PM »

I've been a longtime advocate of changing the method of headphone measurement away from the standard HATS with compensatory HRTF. It only matters for IEM measurement and for...

[wait for it]

...determining safe listening levels of audio equipment with frequency detail. That's it.

Taking the measurement should occur in a place that requires no deconvolution. The measurement methods employed on the super high end calibrated systems still don't do frequency dependant deresonation filtering... because such compensation algorithms haven't even been established, as far as I can tell. Why would they be on a device that isn't designed around such purposes?!

Dude, you correctly pointed out air volume as a design need on a measurement system. It needs to be tuned to portray the same kind of resistance/impedance on the driver. I do advocate for a system with that feature. The ear drum as a measurement location for our wants is too mathematically dirty, though.
« Last Edit: April 20, 2014, 10:34:44 PM by funkmeister »
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AstralStorm

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Re: Focal Spirit Pro
« Reply #32 on: April 28, 2014, 01:00:13 PM »

Personally, I'll be building a fully anatomic ear clone for my measurements (both pinna and ear canal, in silicone)- we'll see how that goes. Right now I have the outer ear done, making the ear canal is easy (I've done such pouch mold already), next I'll be making the cheek and back of the head, but it's still a lot of time - I'm too busy and the CIEM project is not proceeding as it should anyway.

For IEMs, it seems that the ear canal volume is everything, while the shape does not matter.
For headphones though... without the pinna you will get a "wrong" measurement, but same goes for a different pinna. I'm pretty sure now this is all due to directional properties of the outer ear, somewhat due to ear canal volume and total trapped air volume, and not the ear canal shape itself.
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