[LegionMammal978]

Yeah, audio response curves have always been a bit confusing to me. Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure? (E.g., will listeners 50 years from now find a different curve 'better', the same way that instrument tuning has changed over centuries?) And how much of it is responding to current practices in recording and mixing?

Of course, you won't get a sound as if you're in the same room (without a very fancy setup), so you'll generally want some sort of transformation to get an acceptable output. And artists often want to aim for a certain effect on top of that. But with how things currently are, many of the decisions going into the final sound are very opaque.

[astrange]

> Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure?

It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room.

There are many reasons objective headphone measurements aren't actually objective for you though. The biggest one is that they're taken in a silent room, so a single CPU fan or anything near you makes it invalid. Noise cancelling can mean a lot in practice.

The other reasons are that different people have different ear shapes, some people wear glasses so the headphones can't get a seal, your amp isn't electrically compatible with the headphone, your music is badly mastered so you prefer a headphone badly tuned the opposite way, etc.

[LegionMammal978]

> It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room.

Is it, though? Blogspam posts about it waffle over the exact definition, but Olive's original post [0] gives the methodology, "A panel of 10 trained listeners rated each headphone based on overall preferred sound quality, perceived spectral balance, and comfort," and a later Harman post seems to cite the original methodology without comment [1].

Unless the subjective part was just to select between different headphones that had been calibrated to simulate neutral speakers? The posts don't make it entirely clear where the curves originally came from.

[0] https://seanolive.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-relationship-betw...

[1] https://pro.harman.com/insights/akg/defining-the-standard-th...

[HPsquared]

The thing that gets me about audio is people obviously have different ears. Some are more sensitive to high frequencies, etc. It's even age-dependent. It's like salt preference on food.