Summary and conclusion
Finally, if anyone is still wondering why I’m doing all this to myself, I’ll be happy to answer that, too. After more than 40 years of listening experience, working backstage and in front of the stage, semi-professional recordings of live and studio music, and countless concert visits across many genres, I certainly trust myself to be able to judge headsets and headphones subjectively. There are certainly many colleagues who can do this even better than I can, but unfortunately there are also many publications where hand and ear application replace experience and skill and most readers are then hardly able to separate one from the other. In the end, the only thing that really remains is the merciless measurement on which the subjective assessment is based. But we don’t want to compete with the relevant audio specialists, so I don’t presume that much.
By the way, I always listen first before I also measure at the end, so as not to block myself with any prejudices. And even the subjective judgment is never really error-free, because everyone hears differently in the end. Therefore, I will not use corrected curves, but orient myself to the Harman curve, in which also the peculiarities of the pinna (the sound is refracted at the relief edges of the auricle and thus, depending on its frequency components, also attenuated differently) and the concha, i.e. the depression, in which in my setup also the microphone is located. This means that we have to say goodbye to the linear measurement results on a flat plate without an ear, but I will include the Harman curve graphically later for orientation. In fact, I think that’s more honest.
Such comparative measurements will never be completely accurate anyway, because the microphone, surfaces including the silicone ear and thus also the tightness, the inner volume and the attenuation of individual frequency ranges can differ slightly. Nevertheless, your swarm intelligence is now once again in demand! Improvements and technique recommendations are of course still welcome, so feel free. At the end of the day, it can only get better (and probably more expensive, unfortunately). Or I’ll leave it like that for now, because there are still plenty of other construction sites.
But what I unfortunately also had to realize: the otherwise so frequent requests for headphone and headset tests have unfortunately decreased abruptly since the first publication of the test method, especially from the suppliers of gaming peripherals. Do they suddenly no longer trust themselves or do they lack faith in their own product? If another marketing beauty gets in front of my eyes and sampling is politely denied, then either the donation box is plundered like with the Razer Kunai or the community is searched for samples. And the store I trust still exists, after all. There is no need to provoke useless returns, because that is more than unfair to the retailers. I’m looking forward like a little kid to the next tests. Finally one more toy 🙂
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