An Audio engineer has found the Audioquest Nighthawk to be neutral

I apologise for not posting this in a NH discussion but it's not really just about the NH it's about a test for accuracy. I also want to get peoples thoughts on this and have it get buried in the dead NH discussion lol

So this i a post on headfi by an experienced engineer from the UK

"
1st of all, for accuracy, I compare headphones with the original recording, not with other headphones. I record the headphone with a binaural microphone and compare it with the original .wav file. Never trusted graphs and the "curves" involved with making them, and neither does Audioquest. HD800? Very unbalanced, thin and very light on bass if you compare it with the original recording. Boosted treble. Sensational treble clarity, but for mixing records, if you try to use HD800 as your sole monitoring source, you're going to naturally compensate for the lack of bass by adding some as well as backing off on the treble, so your mixes have a probability of turning out muddy. It seems on Head Fi a lot of bass-light headphones are considered "neutral". I myself love and own a lot of those headphones myself, but the fact is, even though a high end headphone removes bass bloat from a record to make it sound cleaner than the original recording, in reality you're missing missing information if you don't hear that bass bloat.



2nd, headphone listening is completely different from all forms of music listening because it's a side, directly-on-ear presentation as opposed to frontal presentation of everything else, and no one has really solved it. Someone on Head-Fi developed a nice HRTF algorithm to compensate for acoustics of number of headphones but in the end failed to accommodate the different sources.



Of course any experienced engineer will tell you A. Don't mix with headphones anyway and B. NEVER use only one monitoring source. Engineers always duck out of the studio and run mixes on other source than just the monitors in the studio, most common external source for decades has been car stereos, but recently computer speakers and others have also been added. Always, something you're familiar with.



With the Nighthawk, it seems Audioquest has paid attention to acoustics more than any other headphone I've heard. Imagery and placement in the room is very close to what I hear with speakers. Now the problem with that I've found is it plays havoc with some ears, and I think it may have something to do with ear canal depth. This may be why opinions are so polarized with this headphone more than any other I've encountered. Shallow ear canals may hear things muddy while a deeper ear canal may hear things clearly. I stumbled upon this while adjusting the microphones in the binaural mic i built"


He has said many times that the NH is the only headphone that has matched the original recording when using his binaural mic.


What are people thoughts on this?

 

My first thought is that he's on their payroll. Because Audioquest

Sorry that's not very constructive but with this company I can't help it..

 

First I wonder if he remains anonymous, this "experienced engineer." (wait, I found the headfi post.)

Second, I wonder how he "sees" what he describes: what, exactly, is he looking at? I'm sure one can't see the clarity of the treble in a wave form, and I wonder if one can see it in a spectrogram? But I am not an engineer at all.

Third, I wonder what the source is. Any link? Oh, wait: it's a head-fi post. (Location: Chicago, Manchester UK, New Jersey: Is this guy a bit all over the place? )

Fourth, I wouldn't touch Audioquest with a galvanically-isolated barge pole.

 

Don't know how valid these views are about the NH, but he makes a good point about bass-light cans being often seen as neutral, when they clearly aren't. Too little bass is (almost) as bad as too much when making judgments. I'd say a pair is ok for checking mixes as long as the bass is flat-ish in nature, doesn't muddy up other frequencies and that your familiar with the sig.

 

Meanwhile that doesn't apply to every other headphone.

AudioQuest.

 

I wouldn't take anyone who calls a Nighthawk neutral seriously. It's a good headphone up until the mids and then everything Thelma and Louise's it off a cliff. Measurements show this, subjective impressions show this, impossible to ignore.

Just goes to show that "experienced engineers" are just as clueless as the rest in the hobby. And to defend the hd800 a bit, it can sound exactly as this engineer described when improperly amped. Real world engineers use cheaper durable headphones, hobbiests like us here at sbaf go for perfect synergy between source/dac/amp/transducer.

If Nighthawk does it for you, then keep the nighthawk, but that doesn't mean it's the most neutral thing going, just one person's opinion.

 

@JoshMorr well said. I might add few of my own observations.
Nighthawk is one of the least neutral hp I have heard over 100$ mark vs real life sound sources and or great speaker setups.
HD800 bass leanness depends on recording, amping, mods and source quite a bit. Still modded, well amped and with good source HD800 is still maybe 2-3dB too lean in low-sub bass. The bass leanness doesn't distract me at all, but I'd wish that sub bass would be less compressed (more effortless) in HD800.
The compression and lifelessness of sounds doesn't seem to matter to professional recording engineers in the light of recent events.

 

I own the NH myself and I do love it but I love it for it's weirdness lol I have a hard time hearing it as neutral, I've always thought neutral sounded like the HD650 or PMX2 and had the NH as more of a bassy, fun headphone.

That said while I've mixed tracks before as a noob, and compared headphones to the spectrum analyser and found the NH to be accurate with that along with some other headphones it's not an accurate test. I have my doubts about it because I hear the NH as relaxed in the upper mids and a tad rough in the treble; similar to the Denon D7000 but technically better.

I don't know how good of an engineer he really is so I can't judge and but it's interesting having a long terms engineer mention this. It does make sense to compare to the original recording rather than other headphones in this aspect.

 

As am HD600 owner, I'd say closer to speakers. It certainly made my previous AudiaTechnica seem bass-light. But, even amongst some experienced headphone folk, bass is according to taste, and a purely subjective thing. Some people just want the sledgehammer thing.

And I've heard speakers that seemed to be aimed a tknocking walls down too.

OK, so we don't know. Unless you know better, and have some online familiarity with him and his posts, he is just another guy on the internet, who may or may not do a great job of producing balanced sounds at the mixing desk.

As a purely random post from a random guy [not personal] I'd tend to put this is the same file as my neighbour is a musician, and he says...

Hey, a lot of these professionals are even deafer than I am. noise-induced hearing loss. If I EQ music to my taste, it will probably sound screechy to others. Noise/age damage: HF loss. That's me. And probably a lot of guys a lot younger than me who spend their days in front of loud monitors.

So yes, musicians and sound engineers need certain ear skills to do their jobs, but they also inevitably suffer. This guy might well have perfect hearing, how would I know! But when engineers/musicians/stagecrew/etc offer their experienced view on audio, it is worth remembering that they might well have far from perfect hearing. Probably more like mine than yours.

 

Having seen some more post it seems he records the sound players from his bin-aural mic, records it then compares the recording it to the original recording then compares them via spectrum analyser then he can see how much it matches.

 

Matching, I can, to some extent, imagine. It is saying things like clarity in the treble that bothers me. Actually, for my education, I'd like to know if that is a realistic interpretation? Speaking as someone who would like to understand this stuff better than I do, I'd have thought the waterfall graphs might have given a clearer indication?

Any passing engineer?

 

This seems like what @Hands and I do with the binaural mics, except instead of using proper software he uses a spectrum analyzer. Would be interesting to see what the NH measures like, but the IF graphs are a good indication that it isn't neutral.
Could be that his binaural mic is shit. He should at least compare it against a calibrated measurement mic and if possible make a FR correction file.

Lol, there are far better imaging cans than the NH.

The FR is indeed highly dependend on the insertion depth of the microphone, but that doesn't mean different ear canal lengths will change the sound for headphones. For in-ears it does. You always hear with the same ear canals and once the sound is at the opening there's only one way to go.
From my own measurements I do think that a different outer ear shape affects the frequency response, particularly around 6kHz.

I highly doubt this. With my own binaural microphones the HD600 was very close. My modded HD800 is even closer. The stock HD800 is terrible.
Speakers, even if they measure the same with an omni mic, are all over the place because the room and their off-axis responses influence the results so much. The head has a much more complex transfer function than an omni mic.
You hear a lot of the upper energy much louder from the side of your head, so in an undamped room you can get more energy from the sidewall reflections than from the actual speaker drivers. This is highly FR-dependent and means crappy imaging. This is one reason why I'm not a fan of speakers with wide dispersion at all frequencies.

 

Wow. When I heard them when they debuted at a CanJam, I thought they were trying to compete in the $15 segment.

 

If the Nighthawk/Nightowl were kept at the blowout price of $300-400, I think they are actually very competitive in that bracket (with the newer pads). At current prices, it's a bit of a harder pill to swallow. I don't think they're bad at all, but just overpriced.

 

He probably only makes MacBook EDM in his bedroom for playback on shitty nightclub PAs.

Edit: Yep, I'm right. He's a vegan DJ who loves the GS-X 2. His ultimative opinions can go die in an uninsured
nightclub fire.

 

That actually happened. Probably around the same time that Nighthawk would have been considered 'reference'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoanut_Grove_fire

 

My like is for the effort of finding that obscure reference that can totally surprise you like a non-sequitur...

 

GS-X MK2 and Nighthawk make sense to me. It's like a blind person marrying a deaf person and having a beautiful life together.

 

I was under the impression the Audio Zenith PMx2 was the most neutral headphone...

 

The term neutral is based on personal preference. Natural timbre can't really be argued when it's A/B'd with the actual acoustic instrument in the same listening environment recorded with "neutral" (lol) gear.