WEBVTT

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we've already made some big investments into our testing lab a new building new

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talent and some crazy new equipment and we are finally ready to start talking

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about it see these two heads they're called hats or head and torso simulators

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they're for testing personal audio products and the ones in front of me

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cost a combined 80 000 us dollars which is why we

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definitely cannot afford to keep both of them what lies no please i'll do

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anything anything uh

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link down in the description below the keynote among you might notice that our

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hats happen to be missing the uh torso part but that's okay because that

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only really matters for speaker testing and we're gonna be focused on headphones

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and microphones for the time being also the torso is a plastic tub that adds

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twenty thousand dollars to the cost so

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i'll pass now understandably you might actually feel the same way about the has

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part couldn't we just use any plastic head the answer is

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no there is a method to the madness here this form of hearing simulator was first

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created in the 1980s to accommodate the testing of phones and hearing aids you

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see the thing about hearing devices is that depending on the conditions they

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can perform dramatically differently you can try this for yourself lift your

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headphones off your ear like this

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sounds pretty different right so these state-of-the-art hats models from

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just a couple of years ago both claim to better represent a headphones real world

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performance by simulating not just the shape of a human head so you get a good

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seal but also even the ear canal both of

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them are also equipped with high performance microphones allowing us to

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test the full range of human hearing with both of them costing about as much

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as an actual human head don't ask me how i know so why not just hire trusted

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listeners to evaluate headphones for us it's because listening is a subjective

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experience that can be influenced by your mood your biases and even your um

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state of mind man that means that any product review that relies solely on a

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human evaluator will be inherently unreliable now we could look at the spec

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sheet but a shocking number of audio manufacturers seem to be pretty much

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copy pasting the same performance numbers alongside vague posting nonsense

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like next level listening or we retain the emotion of the sound

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so i guess we can't trust them either what do if you've ever read or watched

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headphone reviews you might have seen something like this before it's called a

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frequency response graph and it's meant to help us visualize the sound signature

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of an audio device the left end of the x-axis represents the lowest bass sounds

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that humans can hear about 20 hertz and the right end represents the highest

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treble frequencies that humans can hear around 20 000 hertz with these we can

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chew through manufacturer claims like a hot head chews through butter some might

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claim to have a neutral sound for example but actually they have the base

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cranked up so high it would wake up your neighbors to measure these numbers

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though we need to start with the right gear let's get acquainted with our potential

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suitors here then bachelor number one is the b k 5128 type b and aside from

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having obviously better microphones it improves upon its 1981 predecessor in a

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few ways for the ear canal bnk averaged

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mri scans of 40 test subjects to give it

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a longer more human-like shape and

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instead of using purely soft rubber they added plastic components to the inner

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parts to represent the acoustic effect of the bonier inner ear

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now for bachelor number two sort of the hms 2.3 ln hec aka the super

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hms comes from head acoustics and by their own admission it is

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actually based on the b k 5128

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but simplified it has a shorter ear canal and is made of just rubber

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resulting in slightly looser tolerances for acoustic impedance both below 80

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hertz and above 12 kilohertz not ideal but the larger diaphragm of

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the super hms's microphone results in a lower noise floor which means slightly

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improved performance in certain other tests like distortion now there was a

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bachelor number three right here but our headphone test engineer has actually

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worked with that model before and thinks that it is crap so we didn't even bother

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renting one now at this point at least on paper it seems like the 5128 is the

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obvious choice but a lot of that is based on manufacturer claims which

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is not how our lab is supposed to work so we spent the last few weeks which

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cost us thousands of dollars in rentals by the way validating those claims and

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searching for potential flaws while looking fabulous of course wan

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hoodies now in stock lttstore.com as for why it took so long

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to test i'm really glad you asked we needed to run two sets of tests one

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comparing the heads to each other head to head you might say and the other

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comparing the heads to 25 of our own fleshy guinea pigs i mean excuse me

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employees that's for a human to machine comparison now the demographics of our

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company are not representative of the general public got a lot of default

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character creation screen dudes here but after some adjustments to our

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calculations to compensate we were ready to measure the base of eight different

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headphones on each of our human subjects

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why only bass okay we wanted to measure treble as well but

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because treble sound waves are very short a 15 kilohertz wave is actually

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less than an inch the microphone position needs to be very precise across

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all of the test subjects which we didn't have time to deal with during our

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short-term headlones bass waves on the other hand are very long a 20 hertz

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sound wave is 55 feet in length so microphone placement doesn't require the

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same level of precision across our human subjects to acquire comparable results

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and besides in our head-to-head testing data we found only small differences in

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the treble range between the two heads so we proceeded with our human testing

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which oh apparently i'm next let's go

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step one is our subject gets to place microphones into their ears like

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how i don't know how so the first step would

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be to sanitize your hands and also sanitize your ears that makes sense even

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in not covered times when you're talking like ear goop

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look at it go this is for the inside of your ears

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now we have to place the microphones this is the left ear okay here you do

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the left one then i'll do the right one okay it goes inside your ears like this

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it does not necessarily fit everyone for some it's a bit too small and it just

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keeps coming out something you might be familiar with this is cool there's a

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microphone right here they look right and then this little guy sits in your

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ear a little something like i guess it goes kind of like that

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okay and then this goes here okay so then put the headphones on the

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way you normally would okay then i'm going to play a noise

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our headphone test engineer just played pink noise through the headphones for me

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which you could think of kind of like pink noise is tuned more for human

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hearing so it doesn't sound so harsh to us now i take them off i put them back

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on yeah every time we put on our headphones we do it a little differently

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maybe the band is here or maybe it's more like here or maybe our kids are

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playing around with all the adjustments

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and that's the second pass okay and we do that five times with every subject

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yeah now these are open-backed headphones is it a problem that people are clicking their mouses and stuff

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again we're not in a controlled lab environment so that's expected they will

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not miss an opportunity to remind me that the current conditions are not

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perfect i know over 1 000 measurements later the resulting average looked like

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this so how does that match up to our heads

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the quick and dirty version is that with open back headphones we found a

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measurable but minor variance between the two units and between our human test

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subjects but both of these are within what we'd consider to be an acceptable range

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our engineer isn't ready for video appearances yet but he will be

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publishing a more detailed write-up on flow plane for those of you who want to

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dig a little bit deeper into why we consider that okay shifting gears to a

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popular closed back headphone we see a much different story look at this

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variance in humans at 40 hertz 14 decibels

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that means that some people would be perceiving more than twice as much bass

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compared to others completely changing the listening experience this is because

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closed back headphones rely on a proper seal to create their base comparing our

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heads however again they're pretty close

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but the 5128 measured slightly closer to

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our humans than the super hms so both heads get a pass here but the 5128 it

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gets a gold star we also tested some in-ears that are

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known to cause problems for hats in general and found that this issue was

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present in both of our models meaning that these had struggled to get a good

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seal on some larger iems two more passes

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but this time with unhappy stickers because it means no matter which way we

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go i'll eventually have to replace this darn thing really

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anyhoo i guess it kind of makes sense that our results have been so close

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given that both of these models are based on the same design and that both

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are considered industry standard testing equipment

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we do however have a winner

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the bnk 5128 some may disagree with our assessment

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some might not think it's worthwhile to get any head and torso simulator because

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the greater body of academic headphone research has been done on older

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simulators and is therefore less applicable to this new hardware but we

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feel that we can take the current knowledge base and adapt it to the newer

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models to get the best of both worlds the best research and the best tech to

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be clear the super hms is still an excellent product and a major

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improvement over its predecessor but the things that pushed us toward the bnk

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where it's ease of use improved durability and better reputation i'm

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happy with our choices but there's a big but here i want to make it

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clear that our results here are not the be-all and end-all of audio testing at

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all and the testing that we end up doing in the future with the bnk 5128 it's not

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going to be the be all and end all either for one thing this simulator by design

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represents the average person and no one

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person is average especially not you as an LTT viewer you're decidedly above

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average so what that means is that the response curves that we get from this

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head will not directly reflect what you hear in your ears

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it's just that by adding some objective knowledge to your toolkit you can become

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a more informed consumer who can find the best headphones for your needs

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faster also at our lab the goal is to never be satisfied with good enough

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we're gonna spare no expense i mean really if i'm not putting my money where

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my mouth is at this point come on guys but there is always going to be room for

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improvement we know that our tests weren't perfect here for many reasons

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and no one is more critical about our testing protocols than the very people

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that we've hired to create them but our lab is still under construction and achieving our goal of industry-leading

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testing is going to take some time there's also just much more that we'd

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love to test outside of just the frequency response of headphones like

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the microphones noise cancelling distortion testing even trying to find

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ways to apply response curve data to the human perceptual system so if there are

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tests you guys would like to see let us know in the comments because this

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is just the beginning the beginning of this message

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