Does beyerdynamic have QC issues?

This version of Hotel California is what I usually tell people, it's mixed masterfully.

But what do I personally use? The Rain Formerly Known As Purple from the Risk of Rain 2 soundtrack has great bass and high pitched electric guitars, allowing me to check both ends of the frequency response spectrum whether there's something wrong.

This one is probably very controversial, but I use Perfect by Ed Sheeran to check male vocals. If he sounds too harsh here, then I know the headphones are too harsh for me to daily drive.

I usually just pick out a track from Porter Robinson's Nurture to check out female vocals. It's not actually a woman singing, but it's a male voice pitched high and I really like the album 😤. Same as before, if it sounds uncomfortable on this, I would not daily drive them. I pick whatever track I'm feeling at that moment, but I guess if you had to pick one, Unfold would be my choice.

So those are the 4 tracks I use to test things, mostly because I'm super comfortable with them and they cover all of what I listen to

Right now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel price wise and I'm pretty content. I'm using Moondrop Chus on my phone/Switch and KSC75 for my laptop and I'm content with this. Ideally once one of these break, I have the money to upgrade to something that replaces it, but for now I'm happy with the IEM/open back combo

And the part under that?

Downvoted because I didn't really give an opinion, so saying "in your opinion" doesn't make sense. I'm just telling you what he's done so far

I think he's said at some point that he's only done one collab per price bracket, and afaik it's mostly brand agnostic (with the exception of 7hz dioko/zero, which were done together)

Possibly. Off the top of my head, the collabs I can remember:

1. blessing 2 dusk: I think he still has the blessing 2 at 3* value on his ranking list

2. 7hz dioko: the 7hz timeless was at 3* value on the list, and I don't think he's updated it to include the LETSHUOER S12 yet (pretty common theme going forward)

3. truthear x crinacle zero: he made a video about this one, but it's not on the list. tbh I'm not sure what competes with this, but there's been a massive explosion of budget IEMs recently and none of them are on the list, so I'm really not sure what to compare it to

4. 7hz Salnotes Zero: he made a video about this one too, but it kinda blew up in popularity before he made a video on it, because it was the first post moondrop chu budget IEM that matched its tuning and had a removable cable. it's not on his list either, along with any of its competitors (wan'er, Quarks DSP, cadenza etc) and the only one on his list currently in this realm is the Moondrop Chu with a 3* value rating too.

I don't really know what else he's done, I guess something in the $200 range and something above $1k? But so far it seems like he's been pretty impartial about not letting his collabs influence his ratings, and I hope that kinda sticks with the revised list. It would definitely be suspicious if he rates all the budget IEMs as 2 star for example and just says "worser than the 7hz zero", but I think if he just compares them with each other and excludes the 7hz zero (as an example) then it's pretty legit

But it really doesn't matter what his opinions are on his own collabs because they're never presented in comparison to other stuff (ranking list). It's totally fine for him to make a video about his collabs and be like "omg guys collab wow!!" but he doesn't really say that "this is better than this other one or worse than this other one" in those videos, or put them on his ranking list

He doesn't really review his own collabs in the tier list though

iirc he's retesting them on the B&K standard instead of the GRAS one he's been using

EQing in a 1k-2k peak to make my KSC75 sound like a Grado 🤯

iirc the paywall appears (only on Crinacle's site, squig.link doesn't have it) when you try to EQ one pair of earbuds to another with autoEQ or if you're using another target that isn't the IEF or Harman target. You can autoEQ to the current target, or you can just manually insert stuff and it'll be fine... or use squig.link and EQ the blessing2 to blessing2 dusk

You can use online graph tools (the one on Crinacle's website, squig.link etc.). You insert the values in, and then there's an "export to wavelet" function at the bottom

you can try a custom EQ by going to oratory1990's wiki and looking up your headphone model. autoEQ uses his measurements and automatically creates an EQ tuned to harman's in-ear target, but oratory1990's measured all of them by hand and created his own EQs for them as well. there's the harman in-ear target and his custom target (which is similar to harman but with more mid bass and less upper-mids). IMO it's worth trying both of them out as well.

if you want, I can create a wavelet file for those that you can download on your phone and import into wavelet

that's fine, but they're still good tuned IEMs. I probably wouldn't enjoy some of them either, but I can see why so many people do

If your iPad doesn't handle it, you'd probably need a portable DAC amp combo. I've heard from some people that the Apple dongle (3.5mm to lightning converter) works well enough for the HD 600

I haven't tried the HD600, so this is just my thoughts on DACs and amplifiers after spending a lot of time on this forum.

> What are your personal opinions and preferences on amps?

For me I would only buy an amp if I NEEDED one. If I'm powering my headphones through my computer and it's not loud enough at maxed out settings for my personal use case, then I'd consider an amp.

> also what exactly is a dac?

A DAC is a digital-audio converter. Basically, it converts the digital signal of the audio, and then converts it into an analog signal, which your headphones can understand and produce audio with. You don't NEED a DAC by any means, but if you're experiencing issues with the source you're using (issues can be things like a hissing noise when there's no music playing), then you can use an external DAC to fix those issues.

> if I ever get an amp it will likely be a combo unit and as budget as possible because I did just spend all my money on a single headphone.

Sure, that's up to you. I want to say that you should try listening to the HD 600 first from your devices without an amp and see if it needs more juice to sound adequately loud, and if it does... you can order either a dedicated amp or a combo DAC + amp unit. (Disclaimer: from reading the HD 600's resistance and sensitivity, I think you'll most likely need an amp) People do say that an amp makes the sound better, but it's usually a very marginal improvement for a lot of money, so it might not be worth it unless you absolutely need it.

I wanna say that the 7hz zero, truthear zero and blessing 2 dusk are all excellent and top 1/2 in their respective price ranges

Use oratory1990's PDF. they both use data from the same database, but AutoEQ uses a formula to automate converting that data into the Harman OE target, while Oratory1990 listens to each headphones and does each EQ by hand.

I really like Spinfits, I use them on both my Chu and Aria

But I think crin's fine because he doesn't actually review or rank the collabs he's done. It's like a 50-50 thing, he does his collab thing on the side and he also rates/reviews other IEMs that he didn't collab on

There's Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (you might have seen a movie about a book of his, The Martian). I feel it toes the line between intense suspense and believable sci-fi really well. It's also worth reading The Martian as well if you haven't seen the movie

If it's the same equalizer I'm seeing on Google (bands for 60, 150, 400, 1000, 2400 and 15000 Hz), I think you just have to reduce the 2400 Hz band by around 2-3 dB to make the IEM less bright.

EDIT: If that's not good enough, I'm looking at AutoEQ's Shuoer S12 page and it has a fixed band EQ page. It doesn't have the same values to change that your Spotify EQ does, but maybe you can kinda start from there by changing the values that are almost similar?

I love how these look, they're cute

I just listen to the songs I like, there's no point listening to reference songs and testing them because I don't know what to test for lol. If the songs I like sound good, then I'm happy with it.

Also cheat song, but the 1994 Hell Freezes Over version of Hotel California sounds so nice on every pair of headphones. It's decent for testing because the first 2 minutes have a thumping bass beat and high note guitars, but it's just a song that will make you appreciate your headphones in general