A Geek Goes Flying

Got a smokin’ deal on a pair of lightly used Sennheiser HD600 headphones. They may not be “bass canons” but there’s certainly a robust low end, especially with a custom EQ (the closest I could approximate to the Oratory1990 Sennheiser HD600 (octave band EQ) settings; the M1s only allows up to ± 6dB adjustment). Listening to Little Earthquakes (FLAC rip of the CD I bought like 30 years ago), Happy Phantom just kicks. Great soundstage, very intimate. If there’s a “veil” I don’t notice it. Setup: Shanling M1s DAP FAAEAL HD600 Balanced Cable 4.4mm Sennheiser HD600  I will say the M1s struggles a bit to drive the HD600s ( 97.7dB/mW, 300 Ω ), and really exposes lower quality source material. (I’d have expected Taylor Swift’s Midnights to sound a lot better, frankly, and, e.g., the first part of Tool’s Invincible sounds incredible, but the second, more dense, part, and the Shanling starts to really struggle.) I really want to pick up a Loxjie A40 with balanced output to see how m...

On a whim I added the Meze 99 Classics to my Amazon cart, ‘cause they were “only” like $200. Then they reset to $309 and I forgot about them, moved them to “save for later.” A quick peak at camelcamelcamel showed they basically never went on sale, so I’d either imagined it or I wasn’t fast enough. Until... Burning the midnight oil the next day or so, I saw the pop-up that the price had gone down - to $219. There’d been some recent discussion on r/headphones that intrigued me, so I grabbed a pair. A couple of hours later they were back up to $309 and I haven’t seen them drop lower since. (An alternative: The Meze 99 Neo , specific for drop.com, are apparently indistinguishable from the Classics aside from the colorway, and are currently $179, down from $199.) (As of this writing, they’re $219 again; it’s 1:53 a.m., maybe there’s a pattern here?) I don’t have any closed back headphones I listen to regularly. (I use the Ultrasone Pro 580i for video editing etc., but they’re a little too ...

As I am, alas, bereft of a balanced DAC/Amp for my Mac Pro battlestation , I have my faithful Philips SHP9600 (at $67 a steal ) set plugged into the headphone jack of my Loxjie A30 . Borrowing u/oratory1990’s 10-band (“octave”) EQ settings for the SHP9500 , and approximating the values using the Apple Music EQ. Close enough. Apple Music Equalizer The EQ settings are apparently stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Music.eq.plist and are stored as what looks like a blob: com.apple.Music.eq.plist in a text editor //TODO: Figure out how to edit those stored settings and tweak to be integer-perfect (rather than visually approximated), with prefsetter or similar.

The current gold standard seems to be the Harman Curve , and enthusiasts have gone to considerable effort to measure different headphones and create equalization curves to try to bring their “cans” more in line with that ideal . One huge repository of presets is found in the AutoEQ project . For instance, the Sennheiser PC38X headset I use at the office has multiple enthusiast-provided EQ settings: Sennheiser PC38X (velour earpads) [ oratory1990 ] (though oratory1990 disclaims : “The ‘Github-page’ ... is created and maintained by u/jaakkopasanen. It’s his thing, has very little to do with me, actually.”) Sennheiser PC38X [ oratory1990 ] Sennheiser PC38X [ Rtings ] On a Mac, the excellent application SoundSource not only allows a system-wide EQ, but it incorporates the AutoEQ database; if your headphones are in the database, a ready-to-go set of EQ parameters is a couple of clicks away. I haven’t been able to find where SoundSource stores these presets, nor does it appear there’s an...