How to get good headphone tone

Quad Cortex
1

I’ve had my QC for a couple of weeks now and generally absolutely love the thing. With a pair of Redsound Elis 8’s I get that true amp in a room feel and have been enjoying many of the captures and presets available on the Cortex Cloud.

Unfortunately with headphones it’s a bit of a different story… I’m using a pair of Beyerdynamic T5 (3rd gen) closed back headphones which are 32 ohms, and have also tried a pair of Sennheiser HD25’s which are 70ohms. The problem is that the tones I’m getting are all very flubby, loose and bordering on broken speaker ish. There’s no clarity or tightness although it does seem to be worse on some presets than others. I’ve tried eq’ing using recommended specs for those models, and it tends to kill the bass and just pushes the flubbiness into the background.

There’s no clipping according to the levels and turning the HP output down doesn’t help. I’m running volume at about 80% and have turned down HP to compensate. I’m sure there must be something I’m doing wrong, because if I listen to audio from my iPad through the QC (USB input) it sounds great.

Any tips or suggestions?

2

I have only use Senn HD600s and ATM MX50s and never had sound and or tone issues. Depending on how flat your headphones are, you might try EQ (low/hi cuts). Additionally, you can always review the various headphone EQ curves and apply the applicable EQ block etc.

3

Turns out I’m a bit of an idiot… all the presets I was using that sounded bad had a compressor first in the chain. For some reason this sounds great through the monitors but it was distorting like crazy through the cans. Turning off the compressor solved the problem, although I’m still not sure why it pushes the headphones so much more than the speakers.

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4

No idiots, just learning what works and what doesn’t work! :slight_smile:

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