Testing And Evaluation Methods, Continued

For listening, we used a system equipped with an E-MU 1820 professional sound card. We chose this unit not only for its quality, but also because it has a headphone jack with a hardware adjustment, so it is capable of providing a high level with no faults in the signal. This card also has a sophisticated virtual mixing board with inserts for numerous parametric equalization filters. We use this during listening to correct the response - in general, as a function of the response curves we record - in order to see how the earphones perform if we apply suitable corrections.

Finally, we also used a small Creative MP3 player to check how the phones behave with a lightweight device, in terms of the volume level that can be achieved without distortion, and any potential problems.

The E-MU 1820 sound card's PatchMix DSP Mixer mixing board with six parametric equalization bands on the wave output, to torture-test our earphones...

Configuration

Audio Playback

Measurement