What does HackerNews think of AutoEq?

I wonder why you're on your third pair of Marshall Mode EQs :)

I'm partly having a go at them because I have a pair lying around that broke in less than a year. I usually go through a pair in a year (a year and a half) as I'm not very careful with the way I take care of my heaphones/in-ears. However, having said that, I think the EQs have a pretty mediocre build quality. For example, with the way I handled them, the cover of one in ear piece, fell of after a couple of months, and 6-8 months in the jack connector wires got a bit too much wear and tear and no longer connect properly. Also their EQ toggle made the treble (for the Electronic/DnB/Metal music I listen to) a bit too harsh.

Personally for earbuds/earphones I'd recommend anything which is as flat as possible and then you can boost up your preferred range. Alternatively you can go with a pair that has a measured profile (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq), which you can use to normalizes the frequency response and tweak it after.

For example I went with the cheap AKG Type-C earbuds, which have very harsh mids towards treble (https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/samsung/akg-type-c), but because their sound profile is within the database linked above, I could use Wavelet on Android to compensate for it (and EasyEffects on the desktop) to have them be as neutral as possible, and then boost on top of that. For a ~$10'ish pair of earbuds I am quite impressed. I also had to chose them because I have a "modern" phone that decided that a Jack is so 20th century.

I use AutoEQ (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq) for my headphones. It works by "parsing frequency response measurements and producing equalization settings which correct the headphone to a neutral sound". They also have a huge database of already measured and equalized data, which is what I use.

Yes, but no, but yes.

AutoEq (https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/) does something like this so... yes?

But targets various HRTF curves which aren't neutral or flat, and they usually aim for a Harman target of sorts, so no...

But there are some neutral-sounding curves that seek to just emulate pinna gain, so they have a ~3KHz peak which is required to 'emulate' the natural resonance of your ear, which you don't get naturally when you jam a driver all the way into it.

There's no AutoEq preset for the AS06s. Here's a representative sample targeting the 2019 Harman in-ear target for the KZ AS10s for funsies though: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...

To clarify things, PipeWire is an audio daemon, completely unaffiliated with https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq which is a set of headphone impulse responses. It just so happens that the recommended way to apply these impulse responses on Linux is EasyEffects, which now depends on both PipeWire and GTK4. Nonetheless, PipeWire is not EasyEffects and not AutoEq, and "Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though" is untrue because EasyEffects is not PipeWire's official GUI, and doesn't even come up when I search `pipewire gui`.

I haven't tested EasyEffects. With that in mind, PipeWire is buggy AF for the time being, and I've been working over the past week to clean things up (fixed a few bugs in plasmashell and pipewire so far, but I'm still learning and there's a great deal of bugs I haven't diagnosed and explained to the maintainers, it will probably take weeks longer for me to work through everything, and I'd very much prefer the program was written to handle race conditions and edge cases properly, instead of leaving users to discover bugs and trace the root cause through the labyrinthine IPC-heavy event-driven codebase after the fact).