I just have to say something a bit as an aside..
This was ground breaking research by Sean Olive published back in 2004 with the goal of predicting listener preference using anechoic chamber speaker measurements.
To be "polite" the research did not list actual speaker names/models.
Try as I might though, i could not like this speaker. Again, tonality was right but there is this grunginess and lack of clarity to everything it played. I tried to take the resonances out to fix it but at the end, it was not conclusive, nor did it make much of a difference. I even pulled my wife over to listen and she said there was some small difference with EQ but not enough for her to care
Just have to say a few things on science first..
If it's one thing science does to shoot itself in the foot on top of already being esoteric for the majority of people, it is when you have things like -not- publishing the precise models or SKU's of the devices being tested in this research. Science already gets enough flack from a large number of lay people(especially in the US these days) for being unapproachable (constant paywalls literally to articles also don't help, on top of the massive paywall to get an education to properly be able to decipher some data).
I'm speaking off the cuff, but it seems to me, there needs to be a legislative push to have precise details of all scientific testing done that is published. As for the private sphere, there needs to be an eradication of CRO's (contract research organizations, instead of academic researchers like in universities and such),
where contracts are drawn up that allow for the company to review results of research before it's published, and then withhold publishing if it's deemed not beneficial. This kind of nonsense should be kept out of any enterprise concerning scientific understanding.
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As for the Harman target itself for example (since we know this is what the aproximation of a typical recording/mixing studios have as properties as a room setup), I just don't know, at first I thought it was great, but depending on many other things like genre or mood, it seems to fluctuate (or just based on my preference for that day or time). The OE/IN targets are sometimes very good depending on headphones (IEM's are a complete wash even with the new IE targets, for some reason, then again, there is much to do with canal resonances, occlusions and shit like that I'm not to familiar with to properly comment).
I can't think of a single activity I didn't prefer more or less depending on the period of time. Take food or drink for example. You find something you like; some days it's lifeless in terms of pleasure, while other days it tastes like the best thing ever. This is no bash against Sean's research (the only bash is the non publishing of specific models, this was just a stupid omission based on some political correctness obviously).
It's also not just me, I have four other folks in the same boat (one guy being exclusively headphones only). Some days it's great, other days it's just okay (this is a mix of headphones speakers, and IEM's, with one fellow sporting Genelec 8340's, which I felt the EQ was great with, and now saying that I realize betrays a majority of the tone of my post obviously). RME had it right with their DAC, dedicated Bass/Treble knobs for a quick change in your sound (along with EQ as it's now famously known for supporting on-device, etc..). Companies need to start offering things of this nature, I don't need an endless wave of pure DACs with quad decimal points of distortion free listening as my speakers hover in the whole number percentages for example.
But yeah, idk, it just seems for speakers, room setup is just a fucking nightmare (not a problem to me since I don't do much speaker listening to begin with, nor am I too anal about sound as long as distortion/noise, and such can be minimized to inaudible levels across the volume range). So with that, I'm just not sure how any preference target could hold that much value beyond generalities.
Toole's paper on AES shows there's much disagree with when considering a notion of "typical room response".