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

At the recent 137th convention of the Audio Engineering Society we presented our latest research paper entitled, "The Influence of Listeners' Experience, Age and Culture on Headphone Sound Quality Preferences."

The paper describes some double-blind  headphone listening tests 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 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 calibrated in a reference listening room. This was generally true regardless of the listener’s 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. 

The paper is available for download from the AES e-library. You can also find a PDF of our presentation here or view the presentation on YouTube.

Interview in Professional Sound: The Lack of Meaningful Loudspeaker & Headphone Specs

Last October,  I was in Toronto giving a presentation to the local AES section on the perception and measurement of headphones. After the talk, I sat down with Mike Raine from  Professional Sound for an interview. Some of what we discussed is summarized in this article called Sound Advice.

The theme of article is a recurring one that I've discussed before in this blog (see "The Science and Marketing of Sound Quality" and "What Loudspeaker Specifications are Relevant to Sound Quality?").  The bottom line is that the loudspeaker and headphone industry has utterly failed to provide consumers meaningful product specifications that indicate how truly good (or bad) the products sound. Read on to find out why.