The question of finding a 'neutral/natural' sounding IEM* usually comes up in many forums in regular interval (*this probably applies to all headphone as well). While the question might seems very easy to answer, I often find it to be anything but simple. Reason? I just can't agree that 'neutral' and 'natural' being used interchangeably to describe the same kind of sound - well, at least not in the IEM world. So what do 'neutral' and 'natural' mean to me and why do such similar terms affect your path on finding the right sound? These all go back to the root of headphone design and the fundamental of what makes headphone so different from loud speaker that most of us are more familiar with.To understand this topic, you need to understand some essential differences between loud speaker and headphone. A reputable loud speaker manufacturer usually like to advertise their product for having a flat frequency response (FR). The important of having a flat FR is that it means the speaker won't add or subtract sound from the amplifier's signal. It will just sound as what it is intended to sound like. In the case of a non-flat FR, the speaker is said to 'color' the sound by increasing or decreasing the sound pressure level on certain region (i.e. extra bass or treble that is not supposed to be there). People who are into Hi-Fi usually like to avoid coloration as much as possible. After all, they want high fidelity, not high fiddle-ity. Here is where neutral meets natural: The speaker is said to be neutral (flat) sounding when there isn't any coloration (non-flat FR), which means it is also most truthful to the recording thus it is closest to what sounding natural. In the headphone world, however, neutral does not equal to natural. When you use speaker, the sound travels through the room, interacting with the wall, furnitures, your body, and your outer ears before reaching your eardrum. Every interaction during the process affects the final FR you hear, meaning it is not likely that the FR measured in your ear canal will be as flat as the FR of the speaker . If the FR is not longer flat, why do we called it natural sounding? That's because interaction is part of the natural process of how sound travels through space. When using headphone (especially IEM), many of those interaction do not take place. If headphone has a flat FR, you will probably hear a flat FR, which is not normally what you will hear when you are listening to speaker. To compensate, headphone manufacturers will tuned the FR of their headphone so it will better resemble the FR after the speaker's sound travels through the room. A common example will be the extra bass response most headphones have. lower bass note are often felt by the skin and heard by the ears at the same time, so the impression of hearing low bass note is a mixture of auditorial and tactile sensation. Since headphone transducer are much smaller (and move much less air), headphone user often 'not feeling' enough bass when the FR is flat. To compensate, headphone manufactures give their headphone an extra bass response so more air is moved and the user can better 'feel' the bass note as they would like when they are using speaker . This is why coloration is more favorable than being neutral (flat FR), thus coloration is what sounding more natural to the users, not flat, neutral FR.
So what kind of FR actually sounds more natural to an IEM user? There isn't a clear, straight answer I can give you. To add to the complex issue of what kind of tuning results in a more natural sound, we still have to consider the fact that each of us hears thing differently - we all have our very own FR curve due to aging and hearing damage accumulated over time. When you add the difference in musical taste to the big mix, there is impossible to tell what would sound most natural to you. However, there is one thing we can be sure of: Neutral and natural are not created equally in the IEM world.
Posts
4 comments:
"tentacle sensation" - really?
Or did you mean tactile?
Indeed.
Fabulous !!
If you have aged and have "funny" dips in your hearing, they will be there as much if you listen to speakers as if you listen to headphones. This is not something that can really be compensated without the compensation sounding unnatural since this is the way you hear sounds in the real world.
Room acoustics and all that is another thing. But frankly I would prefer headphones to leave these compensations out as well, letting the acoustics of the recording come through, whether they reflect the recording environment or post-processing, like reverbs or delays. This is the reason why the more reasonable audiophiles consider acoustic improvement of the room more important than the equipment they use to play the sound: they want to take the room acoustics away so that the acoustics of the source material can shine through. I do not want my headphones to add such distorting acoustics.
But there is one thing a headphone, especially a canalphone, should do to colour the sound: that is to take into account the way your head and particularly your pinnae modify the sound before it enters the ear canal. These actually exert a tremendous influence, and this is also something that is very individual. Each one of us has a brain that has learned the specific peaks and troughs caused in the FR becasue of our heads and pinnae, and these are the things that allow us to locate sounds in 3D space rather than just on a plane - i.e. they give us a sensation of a sound coming from above vs. below or from ahead vs. behind. Of course, people's ears do share some similarities, but no two people have the same exact ears - which leads to each person having slightly different dips and troughs in the FR of sounds reaching their ear canals. In other words, there is no one correct way to colour the sound of canalphones: some will be a better mach for you personally than others, better reflecting the way your pinnae and head affect the sounds you hear out there in the real world.
Post a Comment