Hello dear collaegues,

Recently I purchased a Sennheiser HD201 headphone, and sometimes I want to listen to Foobar with these babies on. But, this is a relatively small-budget headphone, so its sound "characteristics" aren't like my normal speakers. To solve this, I tried altering the EQ settings, but I'm not very good at this.

My question is: is there anyone who has an EQ preset for this headphone, or can someone create one looking at the frequency respone chart of the HD201:


If there is no EQ applied, I would describe the sound of the HD201's as "little short on the bass", "little short on middle detail" and "good highs".

I ask you this because I have absolutely no clue how to properly setup an EQ in the correct way...so thanks in advance.

EQ's are, from left to right, Lows, which transition into the mids, which then transition to highs, theres not really any 'right' way to set up an EQ past playing around with it with that in mind(AFAIK)

seriously, what do you expect from a headphone as cheap as that?

Hmm I went to head-fi for some advice, and came back with this:

Which is a huge improvement.


Yes, I know it's cheap. What I wanted do do with the EQ is balance the sound; so give it some more bass and a better middle. I know I won't get anywhere near "audiophile" quality with the HD201, but the least I can do is squeeze the best out of it, not?

I once set up a series of tones using the eq screen as a guide and then played them continually over and over while adjusting the eq screen so that they all sounded the same volume. This enabled me to eq my cheap Sony's to sound pretty good!

Here is the tones playlist -> http://www.pixelhum.com/downloads/tones.fpl

Lower your volume right down before playing any of these through your headphones, they tend to play quite loud compared to music.

Hey, thanks!

Without an EQ I can hear subtle differences in volume...with the EQ the head-fi guy gave me, I really can't hear much (if any) difference, so I guess I'm settled then

Very interesting method to create an EQ btw, I would've never made that up

Hmm... Shouldn't those tones actually _sound_ like they have different volumes if they are played back correctly?

Thats amazing. One thing I found though is that it works best if you convert that playlist to flacs first (they compress to almost nothing) and run Replaygain on the FLACs first. I'm not really sure if thats the correct way to do this, since the RG scan gives them radically different gain values, but it seemed to give me a much more pleasing result once I loaded up a test track into the ABX tool.

Foobar's EQ is a somehow problematic component, as it's working in 1.0 db-steps... which is fine, if you have tiny, lazy-reacting pc-speakers. If you're using a somewhat better equipment (stereo-system) for playback, a 1.0 db-change is a massive thing. I wonder why there isn't an EQ that let's one move the sliders in whatever step-size one wants. Like 0.10 db or 0.25 db or why not 0.21 db. It's all about personal freedom really (and who is narrow-minded enough to care if one can hear the difference between 0.25 and 0.21 db ).

But honestly, at least 0.25 db-steps would be cool... because there is a difference that can be heard... compared to 1.0 db.

Tom.


Edit: Damn you typos!!!