Here’s Dr. Olive’s talk at CanJam NYC 2024:
He goes over a lot, but IMO the key bit is confirming that the in-room baseline measured with 19 speakers is nearly identical to the DFHRTF, confirming what @Mad_Economist has been saying for some time now about using this across rigs for compatibility.
There’s some preliminary work on new IE testing, although the sample size is still quite low, and the curve we had intended to test wasn’t included - neither was Crinacle’s IEF, which we hope to get included as this work progresses.
And for those who are unfamiliar, we don’t actually have a singular target curve, rather we use the DFHRTF baseline to calibrate the measurements and show that relative to preference boundaries lifted from the Harman research. Here is what we use:
Over-ear (5128 DFHRTF baseline):
In-ear (population average DFHRTF baseline):
For us, when it comes to IEMs we sent over a guess as to what the largest group might prefer when faced with a population average DFHRTF baseline, but it was the version with 2015 filters instead of 2018 filters by accident. That should be updated in future research, but here’s the difference so folks can see:
Dotted (2018) is our best guess at the moment for what would be preferred but this could change
As you can imagine, these would fit within the bounds, but it’s likely that people would still rate these differently.
We’ll be doing a live stream with Dr. Olive on this topic this weekend: