Hello — Mike here from Ultimate Ears again. As promised, I wanted to follow up with part 2 of the educational article: What’s the best way to test and compare in-ear monitors? Just like last week, this segment comes via the UE University but is posted in its entirety here.
Last week we talked about comparing in-ear models based on isolating individual frequencies through tone generators. That makes sense as a starting point but I doubt you spend the majority of your time listening to pure tones. The important take-home lesson was to familiarize yourself with the relative pitches of each frequency and to hear how various in-ears handle them without any additional frequency interference.
So now’s a good time to talk about why we used a tone generator rather than simply listening to individual notes on a piano or a guitar. The computer generated sine wave that creates the tone is pure. There are no harmonics. There is no color. No amplitude or time-profile of the resonance frequencies. Basically, there’s nothing musical about it at all. And that’s precisely the point. No timbre.
All instruments play the same basic notes but a note from an instrument is never just simply a note. It’s the reflection and personality of the instrument. A guitar string may vibrate at the same frequency as a violin string but the overtones are different. The sound will amplify differently in the larger guitar body or maybe it will reflect differently off of the tone wood in the violin. Regardless of the why (although this is one of the most fascinating aspects of sound) what’s important to keep in mind is that while A440 has the same frequency across all instruments that play it, the total sound profile is different for every instrument. So to fully enjoy the nuances of your favorite piano piece, you need to be 100% confident that your monitors can seamlessly handle multiple competing frequencies at once.
Now’s a good time for another listening test. Pick out a complex piece of music but one that only features 1 instrument. I’d recommend any classical piano prelude or étude. If you’re not so familiar with the genre, I’d recommend anything by Chopin or Debussy. You want a piece with space and breadth between the notes. Audition your monitors with this piece and pay close attention to everything that you learned while listening to the pure tones. What do you notice? How does the sound decay? How does the space sound? How do the individual notes and the chords feel? Now listen to the same piece with a different pair of headphones / in-ears? What differences did you hear? OK. Now listen to the same piece but with a different bitrate or codec. Can you hear the file limitations?
Even if you never listen to piano pieces, this exercise will teach you amazing things about your in-ear monitors or headphones. Since the piano is one of the only instruments that covers nearly the entire audible spectrum, you’ll be listening to hear where your monitors shine or where they may have holes. How did they perform in the lowest registers? And the highest? Was your listening experience musical or analytical. And since you’ll be focusing on just one instrument, you won’t get distracted by the mix. Which is what we’ll cover next week.
This is part 2 in a 4 part series dedicated to objectively testing and comparing monitors.
Edited by Mike Dias - 12/2/13 at 10:49am