Meze headphones have a lot of bass

(And I need an excuse to play with the Web Audio API)

Well, what do you know? I made another post.

A while back I bought the Meze 99 classics, and regretted my purchase. Before I continue, let me share the standard audio disclaimers:

• Audio is subjective. People like different sound signatures, and while some headphones are objectively better than others, frequency response (how loud bass, treble, mids, etc are relative to each other) doesn't determine that unless something is really out of whack.
• I am not a professional by any means. I only own five pairs of headphones total (and daily drive Shure 840s if you're interested), and describe audio with terms like "thumpy" or "mushy in the top end".
• My taste in music is terrible. Have you seen the track of the day rotation? Sure, I partly listen to game soundtracks to cling to a rapidly fading childhood, but at least 50% of it is because I enjoy the music.

With that out of the way, I regret my purchase of the 99 Classics. A look at a frequency response graph would have probably told me that, but WOW they're bassy. I actually start getting a headache when I listen from them.

All this is to say I made a widget to apply an eq to your headphones so they very roughly mimic the frequency response of another pair. I think this would have been nice to have when I bought the headphones. It does get its own set of disclaimers, though.

• DON'T BASE YOUR HEADPHONE PURCHASES OFF OF THIS! PLEASE! It's a pretty poor eq, and even makes the Mezes sound bassier than they actually are. This is a small js project that should roughly work in theory, but based both on what I know and what I don't the implementation is pretty lacking. All this mimics is frequency response, and it doesn't even do a good job of it (it's a DIY fixed-band eq made by chaining bandpass and gain filters, and the gains are determined by rough averaging. I'm definitely no dsp expert). There's also a lot more that goes into how good a pair of headphones sounds than just that. It should be almost fine enough for a rough estimate of how bassy a pair of headphones is, or how much treble they have, but anything more fine-grained than that is completely useless. If you really want to hear the frequency response of another pair of headphones, check out the AutoEQ project. In fact, it's where I got all my measurements from. Even an accurate eq will sound a lot worse than the actual headphones, though.
• To repeat that again, EVEN A GOOD EQ WILL SOUND A LOT WORSE THAN THE ACTUAL HEADPHONES.
• Be especially wary if you're crossing boundaries between headphone type (eg. listening to a pair of closed back headphones from a pair of earbuds). With my limited knowledge, I assume that would make anything sound a lot worse than real life.
• Seriously, if you really want to test another pair of headphones, check if a retail location near you has them and will let you test them.

If you're still here, here's the tool. If you don't know what you're listening from, try searching for "buds" in the source list. Anything relatively cheap will probably have a v response graph similar to that. I'll leave this purposefully vague, though, because I'm not qualified to elaborate.

The volume is decreased by about half with a filter to prevent clipping, but increasing your volume is fine if it's too quiet.

What I'm trying to say is I made a random js project mainly to make it rather than for it to be accurate. It's hacked together and doesn't work on mobile apparently. Don't base decisions off of it please.