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by astrange
474 days ago
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> 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. |
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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...