Monday, July 1, 2013

Harman Researchers Make Important Headway in Understanding Headphone Response

Todd Welti, Sean Olive and Elisabeth McMullin are shown above with their custom binaural mannequin, "Sidney" wearing a pair of AKG K1000's. No fit or leakage issues with these headphones.
Tyll Hertsens, Chief Editor at Innerfidelity recently visited our research labs in Northridge, and wrote a nice story in his blog about our headphone research and visit to Harman. You can read the entire story here.

In his story, Tyll summarizes three of our recent AES papers on headphones, the first one of which I already wrote about in this blog. I hope to write summaries of the other two papers in the upcoming weeks when I can find some free time.

6 comments:

  1. Is the 3er headphone papper aveilable at AES

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    Replies
    1. The paper will be available after the conference in late August in the AES E-library:
      http://www.aes.org/e-lib/#advanced

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    2. Valentin
      The 3rd paper can be downloaded here:
      http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=16874

      Delete
  2. William SommerwerckJuly 19, 2013 at 10:56 AM

    Do the K1000s still "honk like geese" the way they did 20 years ago?

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  3. Hi,

    is the new AKG K 712 a result of these listening tests? :-)

    If you're somewhat familiar with the frequency plots, it's fairly obvious that #2 is the K 701/702 which, according to your way of interpreting the graphs has a frequency response that is tilted upwards towards the treble range.

    Of course, with all the HRTF and "free field/diffuse field" issues, what constitutes "flat" in a headphone is a little up to debate...).

    The K712 appears to have more bass and to address the "2 khz peak" that seems to offend some people (Headroom's frequency graphs: http://goo.gl/QkTqz3 - these are obviously "filtered" in a different way).

    I don't really perceive the K702 as "bass light" but rather as "just right" (quite similar to the old K 240 DF). The K 240 M and S on the other hand have too much bass for my taste.

    But then, I haven't done any blind listening tests with headphones yet...

    Keep up your very interesting work and keep posting about it!

    Kind regards,
    Stephan

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    Replies
    1. Stephan
      Thanks for your comments.

      I don't know if the K702 are a result of these tests. We only do the research -- not the product development.

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