Can We Make HD 800S Sound GOD-TIER in 5 Minutes?

(Cameron Oatley)
So today, we're doing something a little bit different. Currently, Resolve is wearing a pair of Sennheiser HD800S, so are myself and Griffin. 

(Griffin Silver)
Oh, I'm not wearing that headphone.

(Cameron Oatley)
What? Wait, you're not even listening to the headphones whilst you're doing this?

(Griffin Silver)
 No.

(Cameron Oatley)
Okay, well, I'm wearing a pair of HD800s, Resolve is as well, now. Griffin's choosing a bit of a different approach, it seems, and that's going to be interesting, because today we're doing a bit of a challenge. Griffin and I are both going to create an EQ profile for the HD800s, which we're going to send to Andrew, and he's going to pick which one he likes best. The general rules for this challenge are: we each have 5 minutes to actually make the profile, and we're not allowed to use any kind of advanced tools, so no automatic EQ. We're not allowed to use anything that'll show us how a measurement of the headphone itself is being manipulated in real time. All we're allowed to use is the basic stuff that would be accessible to anyone. So a normal EQ tool, which you can see the curve that your EQ is applying, but just not how it's actually affecting the frequency response of the headphone. We can't measure the headphone that we've got ourselves. All we have access to is a single measurement that Resolve has taken of the pair that he is using. So we're just sticking to the basics of what if I was a user who found a headphone frequency response measurement online and wanted to try and make the headphone sound a bit better. I'm personally going to be using Roon for this because I really like their EQ UI. It's really clean, really easy to use.

(Cameron Oatley)
 I'm also going to be using this, which is the Zähl EQ1. This is an analog EQ device and I'll talk more about that in a sec. Griffin, what are you going to be using?

(Griffin Silver)
I'm just going to be looking at the image of the raw and DF compensated headphone measurement, and I'm going to be using Roos EQ tools, but I'm not going to be using it to affect anything. It's just going to be affecting a flat line so you can see the effect of the filters. But that's it. So we'll see how it works out. All right, gentlemen, get ready in 5, 4, 3, 2, one.

(Andrew Park)
 Mute your microphone.

(Andrew Park)
 The timer has begun. All right. In the meantime.

(Andrew P)
 I am going to listen to the HD800S and just get a baseline sense of how it sounds. It's not like it's a headphone that I'm not familiar with. Listened to this headphone many times. But let me just go through my test tracks, get a sense of how this sounds by default. No EQ on right now. And we'll listen to some music.

(Griffin Silver)
Okay, my microphone is muted. Okay, so what I'm going to do here is actually... I'm going to offer Andrew 2 presets. I'm going to just give him Oratory's preset, and then I'll give him my kind of simple preset. All right, so let's get started on my preset. I have Rue open here. I think I have the EQ filters tab here. With just 5 peak filters. I'm not going to try to restrain myself to 5. If I need more, I can always do that. But okay, so the first thing I know about Andrew is that he hates 6 kHz and that even a headphone with a resonator specifically tuned to kill this frequency still has too much for him. And then another thing I know about Andrew is that he absolutely hates low mids. I could probably save myself some time by just going really wide with that and kind of going gentle. That looks good. He'll probably want a little bit more base. Okay, I don't know if he has any problems with this headphone's upper treble, actually. I feel like anytime I've heard him complain about it, it's been the 6 kHz peak. It does have a little bit extra up there I think for most people, I'm just trying to think of the on-head results I've seen with this headphone. I'm just gonna do like a kind of generic safe little treble cut there I'm just trying to think of like how this will apply to the to the headphones response Okay. I mean, I think that looks okay. I might not want to cut as much high end, like the upper treble.

(Cameron Oatley)
Okay, here we go. So I'm going to be using the track City of Sound as my test track, and that's because I'm going to be kind of doing this a little bit by ear. I'm not just going to be going based off... what information I can get out of Room EQ Wizard or anything. We do have the measurement of the headphone here, but I'm going to be doing things a little bit by ear with the Zale EQ1, and that's because I find that being able to just do things continuously in real time is really, really nice. It makes things so much easier to dial in than just putting a value in and then changing it and hoping for the best. So, first thing we're going to need to do is sort out the bass, because as you can see on this graph here, it starts rolling off reasonably fast, around 75-ish Hz. So, what I'll do is make sure bypass is off. put one EQ bend on, change this from a peak to a shelf filter, set this to about 75 Hz, and it looks like we're going to need to go up by maybe even 3 or 4 dB. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, so the next thing that we're going to want to do after that is sort out some of this mid-bass stuff, I think, and that's because it's got a bit of a hump there. Ideally, we would like this to be a little bit flatter, and I think that, generally speaking, Resolve prefers lower mid-bass. It's something which he has complained about before, so I'd almost be tempted to kind of overcorrect that slightly, perhaps? So, let's add another EQ band. I'm going to set it to a Q of, let's start with about 1. I'm going to go down by, looks like 2 or 3 dB. I actually don't think we need to go quite that much. Now that we've taken that down a bit, I think we can adjust the sub-bass a bit. Because without that extra mid-bass, you almost don't need quite as much sub-bass. So let's do this. That's sounding nice. Okay, I'm not entirely sure how much bass Andrew actually likes, so I don't really know how far to go here. I could push the bass up more, but I don't want to go overboard. So I'm actually just going to leave that as it is and we're running out of time anyway. Let's go to the mids.

(Andrew Park)
This is my my default test track (Change the World by Eric Clapton)— my usual sort of disqualifier when there's high frequency issues. And for the most part, the H800S is pretty good, but there are some issues in the treble. For me, at least, there's a kind of shrillness going on at around... between 6 and 8 kHz, on my head at least. And that's something where I'm curious if they're going to identify that and notch that out. So we'll see. We'll see what they come up with.

(Griffin Silver)
Really the one thing I'm not sure about is the upper treble adjustment. I don't know if he's gonna Because Andrew likes like hi-fi man's and like playing arts and stuff like that. Oh, I don't know. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go for cutting it. I'm just gonna lick my wounds if if I get it wrong. So what I'm kind of between right now is wondering if I need to put in an ear gain adjustment because I think with this amount of cut here it might highlight the 2K/3K area a little bit too much. I don't know if I'm going to leave this, actually. It might be safer, but I feel like what Andrew really likes in his headphones, despite what he says, is actually the technicalities and the details. So I feel like this might be a little bit too blurred for him. I don't know. It does cut a lot of low mid, though. Man, I wish I had, like, a lifeline or something. But I think this is probably where I'm going to leave it. So I have Oratory's preset right here. So I think this is where I'm going to leave it. So I guess we'll just wait.

(Cameron Oatley)
As we get through the mids and towards the treble area, there's a big scoop around 3kHz, so we're going to want to sort that out. So, put this on, set it to about 3kHz, and then I'm just going to listen as I play with it a bit. See, I could go a little bit higher. But I also know that Resolve does not like excess 3kHz. So I'm a little tempted to just kind of undershoot that a bit maybe. And I'm just going to try and take most of that treble down with a single filter. So that looks like it's centered around 8, 9kHz. Let's do about 10 or so. Set this to a peak filter. And we'll go down a couple dB. And I'm just going to tweak these as I listen, see where we end up. Yeah, that's much better. Okay, so let's get this into Roon and then we can start fine-tuning stuff. Okay, so I've put all these bands into Rune, because I have actually measured this and confirmed that the markings on it are very accurate to what you're actually getting, so that's really nice. And this is what we ended up with. It's a little bit more subtle than I kind of had anticipated, actually. But maybe that's a good thing, because the HD800S isn't really a headphone where you need to do tons. And this is, I think, mostly the right stuff. I'm... The 2 things I'm a little nervous about is, one, do I go more on the bass? And 2, do I maybe add something to try and get that peak at 6 or 7k down? Because that's something which Andrew's complained about. I'm not sure but uh okay actually no uh we're out of time so I'm gonna have to go with this and we'll see where we end up 

(Andrew Park)
all right time is up all right gentlemen it is time we're done 

(Griffin Silver)
I spent so much of that time hemming and hawing over like one filter that probably doesn't matter 

(Cameron Oatley)
Hello, sorry, I did not see the ping. God, 5 minutes was not a lot of time.

(Griffin Silver)
 Okay, so a little bit of a curveball. I've included a third EQ profile, of which I'm not going to tell you the provenance. I want you to judge between all 3 of them.

(Andrew Park)
Okay, sounds good. Okay, so now to test these EQ profiles. And as you can see, I'm wearing the HD100S again. And I'm wearing it without my hat because real audiophiles shave their heads for better coupling integrity. That's what's going on here. All right, so what Profile 1 does is it kind of tightens up and emphasizes the bass a little bit more, and then it brings the overall focus a little bit more closer, a little bit more in front of me, but also improves the timbre a bit. So things sound more natural. It doesn't sound quite as disjointed or hollow as the default sound profile does. And then the treble also sounds a little bit more in line. But this is a very subtle EQ profile, very minimal difference. I like it. All right.

(Griffin Silver)
 So Cameron, do you want to talk about what you were thinking with your EQ profile?

(Cameron Oatley)
The main thing that I wasn't really sure about with Andrew was the kind of ear gain region, because I know that he doesn't like an excess 3 kHz, and he's also complained about that sort of 4 and 5 kHz region a fair bit, so even though it probably should be boosted more, I didn't want to go too hard. uh one thing i did do specifically for andrew though was uh making sure to tackle that 150 Hz region just because then i find that you don't really need to boost andrew hates low mids Yeah, he hates low mids, but then also I found that you don't need to boost the sub bass up quite as much to be balanced. So at that point I just kind of tweaked with the 3 kHz region in particular and the upper treble stuff kind of by ear until it sounded right. I just didn't want to overshoot the 3 kHz bit too much because I know that that's not something which he's going to like.

(Andrew Park)
Let's move on to profile number 2. All right. So this sound profile number 2 here is a lot more exaggerated, right? So this emphasizes the bass quite a bit. It also does the same thing where it kind of pulls things forward and puts it more in front of me. And this is one where it kind of emphasizes the upper mid-range almost a little bit much. Like it almost pulls things a little bit too forward in that range where you can hear kind of the upper edges of certain electric guitar tones coming through. Whether or not that's a bad thing is sort of up to the individual person. But in contrast to the original sound of the HD800S, that's a noticeable change there. And then the treble... This sounds like it's been reduced in ways that maybe aren't exactly how I would do it. So this reduction in the treble is mostly decent for me because that's one of the things that I would have wanted with this headphone— a little bit less treble, particularly in that sort of low treble, mid treble band. I think this has maybe gone a little bit too much, such that now it's causing the treble to come across a little bit more what I would describe as 'clenched.' So there's not enough treble smoothness for the overall reduction to take place here without sounding a bit clenched and a bit on the glary side. Not much, but overall I would choose this sound over the default sound signature that this has. But I feel this is maybe not, still not quite how I would, this is not perfect for me. Let's move on to profile number 3. Alright, so this is interesting. Profile 3 and Profile 1 sound a lot more similar to one another. I actually, and I think Profile 3 is doing similar things. It is emphasizing the bass a little bit in a way that I like. it is pulling things forward a little bit it is fixing some of the timbral issues to do with the ear gain balance overall and it is making the treble sound a little bit smoother to me 

(Cameron Oatley)
Yeah, so I'm just swapping between them in Rune, and yours is definitely quite a bit more of a drastic change than my one was. The biggest change is just in the bass, though. Yours went quite a bit heavier there than mine did, and that's also the bit which I'm really not sure what Andrew really prefers there, so...

(Griffin Silver)
Yeah i just know he's not a massive bass person so like like 3 decibels isn't a ton when you think about the fact that there is roll off but because of how i've contoured the low mid so much it might read as a lot more than i was hoping for actually now that you mention it which might not be great. So yeah, your approach might actually be better here. Okay, Andrew is ready.

(Andrew Park)
 Okay, so this was interesting. Profile 1 was very subtle. The changes were minimal. Profile 2 was very drastic and very substantial. And Profile 3 was very close to Profile 1, but sounded different. Because it was done differently. And it was a lot quieter. So I had to do a little bit of futzing with the volume level to try and... compare the 2 to see which one I actually preferred. Because the first listen, I was like, 'I prefer profile one.' But then I was like, 'No, that's just because it's louder.' And I think that's a common problem that happens when people are toggling EQ profiles on and off or getting into EQ is that there's a volume difference and then they subjectively prefer the thing that's louder. But that's not a fair comparison. So how do we want to rank these? Should I give points to base, mids, and treble, and then X-Factor? Yeah, go for it. For overall sense of bass, I like number 3 the best, followed by number 2, then followed by number one. For the midrange, I preferred number 3, the best again, followed by number one and then number 2. And then for the treble. I preferred profile number one, followed by number 3, followed by number 2. My overall X factor score here, which is sort of the vibe-based one, is that I kind of had a stronger vibe towards Profile Number One. Just because I felt that it did the best at keeping the headphone sound signature, the default sound signature character intact a little bit. And it's because it was a more subtle profile. It retained a little bit of the flair that this headphone naturally has. And for certain types of recordings, I found that worked really well. So it was maybe not quite as versatile as Profile No. 3, but for, like, I was listening to Tingvall Trio's beat and some of the jazz recordings that I like, there was that sort of X factor to it. So overall, my win here is profile number 3, followed by profile number one, followed by profile number 2. The other thing with this is that I preferred all 3 profiles over the default sound signature of this headphone. Profile 2 was kind of weird because I noticed what it did was it was being more dramatic with the adjustments. And I felt that some of them worked, but then some of them also didn't. And that caused it to be a little bit more problematic for me, at least. What I liked about Profile 1 a lot was that it was a very subtle change, which meant that it sort of did keep some of the original character of the headphone intact. And Profile 3, I felt it did the same thing. It was just a little bit more in the spots that, for me, like in the bass, for example, I liked the way that that was handled a bit better.

(Andrew Park)
 I'm going to take a guess here at who did which one. And I have no idea. This is a pure guess. I'm going to guess that profile number 3 was done by Cameron. And I'm going to guess that profile number one was done by Griffin. And profile number 2, I have no idea, but I wonder if that's like, I'm just thinking in my head, like that may have been a profile that I have made. I had made like years ago to match a target or somebody had made to match a target. But I could be totally mistaken on that. So I need you guys to reveal to me now. What was the truth here?

(Griffin Silver)
 So EQ profile number one was made by Cameron. EQ profile number 3 was made by me.

(Andrew Park)
 Okay.

(Griffin Silver)
 And EQ profile number 2 was made by friend of the program, friend of everyone, Mr. Oratory1990.

(Andrew Park)
 Ah, so was profile number 2 going towards Harman? Was it a Harman target?

(Griffin Silver)
 It was Harman 2018 as measured on the GRAS-45CA or KEMAR, whatever he uses with the KB5000 anthropometric pinna.

(Andrew Park)
So you'll find out about this afterwards, but my commentary was that it sounded a bit too clenched and too forward in the upper mids, a little bit too on the, like, glary side for electric guitars. Oh, you know what? I should have. I should have guessed that number 3 was Griffin because Griffin loves this narrative that I hate low mids. It's not true. And this one has a stronger cut in the low mids.

(Cameron Oatley)
 So when we were talking, we did actually say that and did both make decisions catering to that.

(Cameron Oatley)
 And whilst we were chatting, we kind of assumed that you were going to prefer the bass on my one and then the treble on Griffin's because it was a little bit more of a drastic adjustment. But then turns out it's the opposite and you preferred the treble on mine. and the base on griffins, so maybe you do just hate low mids. 

(Griffin Silver)
Andrew does yeah, and he also loves asmr treble, so, the judicious cuts and the treble I made were probably 2 hands.

(Andrew Park)
 I also gave X factor to profile number one because I felt, yeah, some of that, you know, the asmr qualities for the hd100s.So, it just goes to show that, uh, we don't actually know each other well enough to be able to— 

(Cameron Oatley)
Well, I think, to be honest, you said that you found all 3 of these, but in particular, mine and Griffin's profiles to be quite substantially better than the original stock sounds. And I think that, that's... largely just due to making what I call sensibly universal decisions, but we did both make decisions specifically catered towards stuff that we thought about you, like the 3kHz region. Both of us decided not to bump that up too much because we know that you don't like XS3K.

(Griffin Silver)
And that's the thing that it sounds like killed the oratory preset for you.

(Andrew Park)
Yeah, so there's a substantial elevation to the upper mids generally on the oratory one. And that's what was coming across as a little bit sort of on the glaring side for me. But okay, so what's the takeaway here? So Griffin wins. That's the outcome.

(Griffin Silver)
By a very small margin, it sounds like. Again, it sounds like it was mostly down to the slight differences in mids and bass, whereas... I think if Cameron had maybe done a little bit closer, he probably would have taken it overall because you preferred the treble and the kind of subjective qualia of it all.

(Andrew Park)
 I did.

(Cameron Oatley)
Yeah for and especially for certain types of recordings right where that came through i i think realistically this is just a good example of how in 5 minutes you can make quite a big improvement to the sound of your headphones and so Why shouldn't you?

(Andrew Park)
Yeah, even using the Harman Target as the guideline there, even that improved it over the default sound signature that this headphone has, I found. I mean, you know, preferences are going to vary, and we know that this scored well in the Harman Research. for certain people but um it's it's worth trying right if you don't want to go that crazy fine-grained and have that many filters that we found to get this to match the harmon target much more subtle filters like what um cameron and griffin were able to put together uh can make a massive difference and it can be the kind of different it can be all the difference in the world for any headphone um so highly recommend doing it griffin what what was the frequency band or what was the one filter that you were agonizing over 

(Griffin Silver)
A 3K adjustment, which I decided not to put in.

(Andrew Park)
Good move. So that does it for this video. All of these EQ profiles for the HD100S will be up on the forum at forum . headphones . com. We might even do a post up on... the audio files with these EQ profiles. So you guys can try this for yourself if you have an HD100S. And hopefully we'll be able to do this again with other headphones. And if you have your own EQ profiles for the HD100S or other headphones, or you'd like to see this done with other headphones, let us know on the forum, also linked in the description.

(Cameron Oatley)
 Well, that was pretty good fun. I think we all enjoyed that. And if you'd like to see more of these videos, then let us know what particular model of headphones you'd like to see us do next and who you'd like to judge the next one as well. If you'd like to buy any kind of headphones, including the HD100S or something else, consider buying through headphones. com, not only because it makes everything we do on this channel possible, but also because you get a 365-day return policy and excellent customer service. In the meantime, I'm Golden Sound. That was Listener. That was Resolve. And we will see you next time.