$38 vs $2000 In-Ear Monitors - Part 1 of 3

all right um dave rat and today i'm going to take a look at in-ear monitors i've got a wide assortment here of professional and low-grade in-ear monitors ranging from 38 up to 2 000 let's get into it i've got a set up here that um i have two microphone measurement units from audix tm-2s and i can send paint noise i can send a pulse and i can send music we can look at them on smart and look at the spectrum analysis of them as well as we'll be able to look at the transfer function and the phase response and you'll be able to hear the actual in-ears themselves and the sonic differences between them so as my reference set i'm going to use the to start with i'm going to use the ultimate ear ue 18 plus they're armatures it's a um these are molded ears now a lot of these will be molded some of them will be generics that you know you can fit in anybody's ear the rest of them are ear impression where they're molded to my ear and stuff i've acquired for different bands i've worked for or as bands have gone through different ears over the years and so let's take a look these these ones have a two pin connector on them uh it's got a little housing around it to protect it from bending the air a lot of the older ones didn't have that housing so uh if you yanked on the ear guitar got caught it would tear that little those pins out so that's acts a little more adds a little more strength but then that puts that pressure on your ear the cable here is a four wire cable four wires splitting into two sets of two you'll notice on a lot of the high-end ears they've got um braided cables rather than like a solid a rigid cable and um you know it's it's interesting they do that for several reasons one is add flexibility and the other is to reduce some of the noise that transfers from the cable rubbing against your body or your clothes up into the ears because vibration on a sealed ear kind of transmitted a low end low end rumble into there and you can actually hear it all the in-ears will have a little slider on them it's actually under the tape on this one and a little slider so that when you put the ears in you can slide that up to the back of your head if you wear them behind which most people do or you slide it up to your chin and it kind of pins the ears down and holds them in place and also that's really helpful in minimizing the amount of sound transfer from the lower end of the cable up to your ears it'll stop at that junction point and yeah it can be a little annoying especially with quieter ears and stuff where you can every time you move you hear a little rustling sound now i've got these audix tm2 microphone test units for in-ears and i've got a rubber band to hold this thing in and line it up and there we go i've got i'm going to call up on here the u e pink which is my reference there it is so we're running a little hotter i've taken reference curves just to make sure i get it into the jigs correctly and we're not looking at something that's off because i spent some time you know lining everything up and getting nice um even readings here so i'm going to go ahead and recapture that as the new one and the gain is up to the hair from where it was before but we look good alright so there's our response as you can see it's fairly flat from all the way down at 20 hertz up to about 613 is a little dip and um up to about 1.5 k and then it a little rise and then it kind of tapers off as most of these will in the high frequencies all right let's go to the transfer function and the transfer function i can turn that on here and we should see something and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to find the delay time so the delay time um is the latency so what it takes some time for the sound to radiate from the driver to be reproduced or some lag in the driver very small but enough to be measured and then it travels down whatever tubes to combine the multiple armatures or whatever and then it travels down to the microphone through the air and the speed of sound so there's some latency there's some tiniest bit of time offset and in order to get a proper phase response we need to get that time set so this one's reading 0.35 milliseconds is the latency settings or the offset that's set there for time and we can see that our frequency response looks very similar to what we saw which should be normal the transfer function is basically a measurement for the transfer function measurement um i'm sending the signal be from this console this little console here to smart and it is using that as a reference and i'm also sending the signal from the measurement mic to smart and it compares the two and it basically says that this is the difference between what is sent and what is output which is different from the frequency response curve because that just looks at the output so the transfer function if you send something that's not flat and what comes out is not flat the transfer function just says well if what was sent is received then it is flat it's putting out it's doing what we told it to do so we don't necessarily need a flat signal for it um all right so let's look at the uh the phase the phase response starts off at um oh 42 degrees up and it slowly it's very very smooth all the way up to 3.3 k and then we can see it advancing in phase so if we subtract some time we can see probably what's happening here is there's a polarity reversed during the summation i don't know there's something going on in the crossover in there um there's probably a little crossover in there and um we're seeing the phase shift to the crossover region and the crossover is probably right around 5k um cool flat phase response frequency response relatively flat and surprisingly a lot of in-ears are not flat and i don't think they're intentionally even trying to be flat it seems like there's uh two trains of thought within here some like we'll try and get this as flat as possible some of them are like we're going to put some peaks in the high mid some intelligibility peaks maybe it came from the hearing aid world i do know that if you plug it in here into an ipod or your cell phone and it's got those presence peaks it sure sounds like there's presence peaks in there and it makes the music a little bit less challenging less enjoyable for me but for using them on stage yeah there's different trains of thought there okay so these are the ues and um let's go ahead and listen to some music so for that i'm going to put my headphones on and we'll bring this song up thank you jt o'neal for giving me this um music that i can play without getting uh copyright stung on youtube right now we are listening to the sound of the music coming out of the board going into the ue 18 plus and then into the measurement mic and out of the measurement mic into the recorder and in these headphones and i'm listening right from the recorder and you should you are too and you can hear it if i touch it boom boom okay now i'm going to press this and it'll switch us to the original signal [Music] all right as you can hear there's a pretty drastic difference you probably do want headphones for this video i should have said that sooner um but i'm sure you hear that on the phone but some of these um later ones we get into are going to be more subtle differences um pretty drastic difference on the top end uh it's now we are coming out of a speaker into a mic and then listening to it versus coming straight out but in a perfect world if everything was flat they should sound the same all right i'm going to take the ue and i'm going to move it over to the other measurement and we'll use it as a reference so now as we go into other ones we can compare and then what i'll do is if i find some other ones that uh we'll try and find the one that sounds the closest to the music how's that all right so uh let's get another set of ears so let's go let's go on the lower end of scale let's try something that um let's do the sennheiser these are ie4s at the monstrous price of 69 though they do kind of look like the headphones that come with your cell phone kind of thing and it's got kind of a rubbery cable that um isn't is it's not braided it's it's kind of sticky which may probably it seems more catchy and tangly than the higher end cables but let's go ahead and these are not molded this is a generic set so let's go ahead and look at the difference between this and the ues 1500 so 1500 versus 80 bucks so now uh what we're seeing here is we've got some extra low end coming out of it and then it starts to cross over and roll off in the 250 region there's kind of a smiley face upper mid or mid and then we've got this double peak i'm going to see more of those and this one's at 3.6 and around 6.13 about 6k 3 and 6k and then it rolls off so let's go ahead and look at music or listen to music [Music] i so so lucky when i'm with you [Music] baby cool all right well that's um that kind of you can hear that right sound in there um that's common in a lot of in-ears and uh you know it has you can hear the hollowed-out mid and you know there's a low cost in here compared to a very high cost in here cool let's move on to something else first we'll take out this sennheisers how about we do a kind of want to grab the shoes yeah here we go here's another um common in here these uh shure se 215 okay so um got the sure in there and uh let's go ahead and i'm gonna update this curve it's a little bit hotter all right there's a transfer function it looks fairly flat bounced around a little bit it doesn't have the um i can call up the you ultimate ears here and show you there's phase response so they're similar in the low end the shores actually got a flatter response but it's a single driver unit with no crossover so we don't have that phase offset there and again we're seeing this double peak this one's at 2.45 and 4.96 k so let's go ahead and put this on spectrum and there's our two peaks and it bellies out in the low so it's got that smiley face again taking the mid-range out and adding the double the double upper peak and then there's a little peak up there let's go ahead and listen to it so bringing up the music [Music] there we have the shore so this will be the sure on this side and over here [Music] do [Music] big [Music] okay um it's definitely brighter in there it's kind of you can hear those high-end um whistles there the ue is definitely darker sounding um you know some of that can be eq'd in i'm not going to get into eq'ing here because um that just opens a can of worms of variables let's um listen to some future sonics okay so now these are mg6 pro it's an older future sonics and it's uh um about that 1025 dollars and this is a different type of driver this is a 13 millimeter voice coil driver so it's around like a little speaker instead of an armature all right so now uh let's see what we're going to do let's go ahead and look at the transfer function and time this thing up insert it and it comes up a little bit okay so the phase response looks pretty flat um and bounces around a bit and then um sweeps up in the high end there let's oh and again on this one we're seeing a peak at um 1.73 3.45 k and another peak up in the 6.8 or 7 k and another one at 11.55 let's see what that sounds like and again we're dipping down so as you see in this very similar um response all right let's um listen to some music [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] do [Music] [Music] so there's the future sonic's single 13 millimeter driver it's got a vent in the back it opens it's got some more ambience to it too because it it has a port that opens up into the real world versus being totally sealed alright so that wraps up part one [Music] i'm going to continue with part two and we'll test some more [Music] hmm

Channel: Dave Rat

Views: 15,343

Rating: 4.9747367 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Rat, Pro Audio, Rat Sound., Mixing Tips, Pro Audio Mixing, Pro Sound, Live Sound, SoundTools, Rat Sound Systems, Audio Engineer, Sound Engineer

Id: bHU5N4HMwmk

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021