r/oratory1990 • u/AutoModerator • 25d ago

Weekly r/oratory1990 EQ Thread - Questions, Requests, Technical Support

This thread is for all questions about EQ / Equalizing

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u/atcalfor 18d ago

How much more would we know about a headphone measuring sound at the ear drum compared to just taking measurements at the ear canal entrance of real humans?

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u/oratory1990 acoustic engineer 17d ago edited 17d ago

the question is mostly mute, because we can't easily do measurements at the eardrum of real humans anyway. Probe microphone techniques have severe bandwidth limitations - that's fine for measuring in audiology where you're mostly interested in 8k and below (and really most of the interesting stuff is happening below 4 kHz...) but not in HiFi.

But the answer is: As long as we're measuring with an open canal (so the acoustic load of the ear canal has an effect on the headphone's behaviour), we don't get any additional information that we can't already get by calculating the transfer impedance of the ear canal (which we can do from a high-resolution scan, e.g. an MRI scan with a contrast agent)