[TaylorAlexander]

It does however look great for helping me characterize differences in my 3D printed headphone designs. My old resin-printed design has incredibly good bass, and when I changed things up for FDM printing I lost all that low end. I need to try adjusting my design and quantifying the results, as I love the sound of my resin-printed design but would prefer to move to FDM designs as they are much easier to print and make.

[TaylorAlexander]

Here's an image comparing my old headphone design with good bass in blue, and the new easier to make design with bad bass in red:

https://twitter.com/TLAlexander/status/1569181219446980608

The 50mm headphone drivers were globally out of stock for a year so it is safe to assume the new drivers are from a different manufacturing batch. But my hope is that the problem lies in my headphone design, and the new and old drivers are roughly the same. I don't know anything about headphone design and seemingly got lucky with the old design, so if I need to adjust my new design that's not a big deal. But if the new drivers aren't performing like the old ones, I may not be able to fix things. So next step will be to swap drivers from the old and new headphones and see if the problem follows the drivers or the headphone design.

Images of the old design as well as the link to the onshape files on this git repo:

https://github.com/tlalexander/reboot-headphones

[snvzz]

Measurements (particularly, FR and distortion) aren't there or are hard to find.

It'd be most interesting to see them.

[TaylorAlexander]

Yes I always wanted to do them. For the original set I just compared them to my friend's expensive headphones. It was only today that I did any kind of frequency response testing. But since I don't have a calibrated microphone, it is more useful for doing relative comparison between my headphone designs than it is for providing absolute numbers.

What I wanted to do was build a little headphone test dummy head. But for my relative tests I just shoved my podcast mic, Audio Technica AT2005USB up to the center of the driver on one side of the headphone. Do look at my linked tweet for those FR curves.

However this little adventure has encouraged me to consider building the little head dummy. I have some nice little capsule mics I was playing with that would work nicely, and I have a datasheet for those that probably includes a curve.

This hobby work of mine goes slowly, but I appreciate your suggestion. I will try to tune up my FDM 50mm headphone design so that it sounds at least as good as my original resin printed design, and then look at building a better characterization rig.