The Influence of Listeners’ Experience, Age, and Culture on Headphone Sound Quality Preferences

Olive S, Welti T, McMullin E. The Influence of Listeners’ Experience, Age, and Culture on Headphone Sound Quality Preferences. In: AES Convention 137. Audio Engineering Society; 2014. Paper 9177. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=17500

@inproceedings{Olive2014_17500,
  author = {Olive, Sean and Welti, Todd and McMullin, Elisabeth},
  title = {{The Influence of Listeners’ Experience, Age, and Culture on Headphone Sound Quality Preferences}},
  booktitle = {AES Convention 137},
  note = {Paper 9177},
  year = {2014},
  month = oct,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=17500}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - The Influence of Listeners’ Experience, Age, and Culture on Headphone Sound Quality Preferences
AU  - Olive, Sean
AU  - Welti, Todd
AU  - McMullin, Elisabeth
T2  - AES Convention 137
M1  - Paper 9177
PY  - 2014
DA  - 2014/10/06
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=17500
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Double-blind headphone listening tests were conducted in four different countries (Canada, USA, China, and Germany) involving 238 listeners of different ages, gender, and listening experiences. Listeners gave comparative preference ratings for three popular headphones and a new reference headphone that were all virtually presented through a common replicator headphone equalized to match their measured frequency responses. In this way, biases related to headphone brand, price, visual appearance, and comfort were removed from listeners’ judgment of sound quality. On average, listeners preferred the reference headphone that was based on the in-room frequency response of an accurate loudspeaker in a reference listening room. This was generally true regardless of the listeners’ experience, age, gender, and culture. This new evidence suggests a headphone standard based on this new target response would satisfy the tastes of most listeners.
ER  -