• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

The Etymotic Target (R.I.P. Harman)

OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
If anything, Harman loses money by funding said research and having the findings published for anyone to emulate. A competitor could further this research or furthur implement these findings into various products would certainly increase their own product appeal and increase revenue.
Do you truly believe Harman is losing money from their research? Having the findings published doesn't really mean anything as anyone can guess a target response from a headphones raw frequency response. There would be much less value in a headphone like the AKG K371 without the Harman target as "proof" of its greatness. Any competitor adhering to the Harman target is free advertisement for Harman. For example, someone who knows of the Dan Clark Stealth might end up buying Revel speakers simply because Amir called them the best headphones in the world and that the Harman target's supposed purpose is to replicate the perception of flat speakers in a treated room. Companies like Dan Clark are basically saying Harman is great as well. And can you blame them? Is adhering to the Harman target enough to be praised as the world's best headphones?
 

aac

Active Member
Joined
May 17, 2020
Messages
217
Likes
163
I never got what people mean by "well-treated room".
Which kind of "Well treated"?
 

NTK

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Aug 11, 2019
Messages
2,660
Likes
5,820
Location
US East
I never got what people mean by "well-treated room".
Which kind of "Well treated"?
The Harman reference listening room. This is the room where the measurements of a pair of M2 using the GRAS fixture took place.

https://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/05/harman-international-reference.html
https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14873

[Edit] Here is a picture Tyll Hertsens took when he went to Harman to run similar measurements with his own HATS.
https://web.archive.org/web/2016081...sults-head-acoustics-hats-measurements-harman

MeasuringHeadAcoustics_Measurements_Photo_Main.jpg
 
Last edited:

Fregly

Senior Member
Joined
Dec 12, 2018
Messages
336
Likes
264
Etymotic could be making headphones that adhere to their target curve, but I'm assuming they recognize that this won't necessarily translate to a peak free response for the user. Not that they care about measurements much anymore. The Evo is nowhere near as good as ER4SR or ER2SE and they took all the useful information off of their website. The genius of Etymotic's design is the deep insertion which basically negates all peaks. I am pretty sure shallow insertion IEMs still suffer from peak variation.
Yes expensive and inferior. Yet, a smart business decision: go where the market wants.
 

Jimbob54

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Oct 25, 2019
Messages
11,066
Likes
14,700
I never got what people mean by "well-treated room".
Which kind of "Well treated"?

Regularly bathed in asses milk and rubbed all over in butter.
 
OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
Yes expensive and inferior. Yet, a smart business decision: go where the market wants.
Too many people screaming about the limitations of a single BA driver
 

Jimbob54

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Oct 25, 2019
Messages
11,066
Likes
14,700
Do you truly believe Harman is losing money from their research? Having the findings published doesn't really mean anything as anyone can guess a target response from a headphones raw frequency response. There would be much less value in a headphone like the AKG K371 without the Harman target as "proof" of its greatness. Any competitor adhering to the Harman target is free advertisement for Harman. For example, someone who knows of the Dan Clark Stealth might end up buying Revel speakers simply because Amir called them the best headphones in the world and that the Harman target's supposed purpose is to replicate the perception of flat speakers in a treated room. Companies like Dan Clark are basically saying Harman is great as well. And can you blame them? Is adhering to the Harman target enough to be praised as the world's best headphones?

They make money on it. Until @Sean Olive puts his conference bar tabs through expenses:eek:
 

jae

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 2, 2019
Messages
1,208
Likes
1,508
Do you truly believe Harman is losing money from their research? Having the findings published doesn't really mean anything as anyone can guess a target response from a headphones raw frequency response. There would be much less value in a headphone like the AKG K371 without the Harman target as "proof" of its greatness. Any competitor adhering to the Harman target is free advertisement for Harman. For example, someone who knows of the Dan Clark Stealth might end up buying Revel speakers simply because Amir called them the best headphones in the world and that the Harman target's supposed purpose is to replicate the perception of flat speakers in a treated room. Companies like Dan Clark are basically saying Harman is great as well. And can you blame them? Is adhering to the Harman target enough to be praised as the world's best headphones?

Harman almost certainly gains more than they lose otherwise there would be no incentive to publish it. The major benefit Harman gets from its own research is the notoriety of being major industry leaders/contributors. The study is advertising for themselves to other businesses, professionals, educators, engineers and so on, not end consumers. Of course they could use their own findings in their own products, but we can clearly see this is not really a significant portion of their business. I jokingly said that Harman is losing money from their research (when it comes to consumers) because if one wants to use adherence and other figures from these reviews as a basis for a purchase decision, there are a lot better headphones with and without EQ and it's not Harman selling them.

I don't think users that are specifically searching for the Harman target in a headphone represents any significant amount of people that would represent any sort of appreciable market share in the headphone industry. Audiophile headphones are a very small market and audiophiles obsessive enough to care about a specific response and make a purchase decision based on that are even smaller. The thought of frequency response as a magnitude or figure on a graph does not cross 99.99%+ of headphone users' minds, they only care if it sounds good or if they can enjoy their music on them. If there is some sort of data that shows 60%+ of random people like a certain response, that is insanely useful information to any manufacturer whether or not a typical user even knows what any of it means.
 

restorer-john

Grand Contributor
Joined
Mar 1, 2018
Messages
12,586
Likes
38,285
Location
Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
The major benefit Harman gets from its own research is the notoriety of being major industry leaders/contributors. The study is advertising for themselves to other businesses, professionals, educators, engineers and so on, not end consumers.

End consumers are not getting a better, more accurate product from all this. They never were. The curve was/is designed to find out what people "liked" and let's face, what people "like" and what's actually uncoloured accuracy are completely different things.

The so-called "harman" curve is no different to a 1970s loudness button on a receiver or amplifier. Sounds big, fat and fun at low levels, but absolutely horrid at anything approaching medium levels. There's a reason loudness contours fell out of fashion, and so will this slavish adherence to an arbitrary brand's key selling point of difference.
 

ctrl

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 24, 2020
Messages
1,616
Likes
6,088
Location
.de, DE, DEU
Quote from the video:
"Sadly they took this page of their website, because people were too stupid to understand what was happening... "
Here is website in the web archive.
Such people certainly exist, but perhaps there are other reasons why this site is no longer online.

For example, because of statements like this:
"The accuracy score is perhaps the single most important tool for earphone design...
Consumer Reports reported that it was possible to predict listeners' loudspeaker ratings within 8% from a calculation based on one-third-octave frequency response measurements converted to loudness in sones. The average error in loudness from a perfect system, subtracted from 100%, gives the accuracy score. Etymotic Research extended this 21-band calculation to a 25-band calculation and routinely uses the 25-band accuracy score in all earphone designs."

So all of Etymotic's IE headphone designs are based on the Consumer Reports accuracy score. They have transferred this type of rating from speakers to headphones.

Let's see how reliably the accuracy score predicts the rating of speakers.
An obvious model for comparison purposes is that used by Consumers Union (CU) in the loudspeaker evaluations published in their magazine Consumer Reports over the past 30 years. It is based on 1/3-octave measurements of sound power that, after manipulation, yield an accuracy score out of 100, indicating how far the tested loudspeakers deviate from their notion of an ideal performance. Apparently, no formalized subjective evaluations are involved.
From Sound Reproduction, Toole

So, the only difference seems to be that Etymotic uses 25 frequency bands instead of 21 to evaluate headphone quality, I guess in terms of deviation from the specially created target curve by Etymotic (this is my guess, no details provided by Etymotic) - much like Harman, only without listening preference tests.

Now how was that with the accurate score for speakers:
Using the collection of anechoic measurements described in Figure 18.6, Olive (2004a, 2004b) undertook an evaluation of 13 loudspeakers that had recently been reviewed by CU. It began with a fully balanced, double-blind listening test (every loudspeaker was auditioned against all others the same number of times) by a group of selected and trained listeners.
From Sound Reproduction, Toole

1631308772346.png


I think this could be a reason to change the website to no longer be associated with the accuracy score.



The buyer should buy a headphone that will sound good to them. If they have to EQ the headphone they bought to make it sound good to them, I consider it broken for them because they could get a headphone that measures how they want.

If the headphones really sound like crap, then I would agree with you.
In all other cases, we should look more in detail at how such a target curve comes about to which a headphone should be optimized.

Target curves on Etymotic Research graphs indicate 100% accuracy: The open ear diffuse-field response of the KEMAR® manikin modified to compensate for the high frequency boost added to high-quality recordings. This modification (approximately 5 dB at 10 kHz) is necessary to avoid earphones sounding too bright on commercial recordings.

Wow! That sounds like exact science and @Sharur also presented us with Etymotic's target curve as a problem clearly solved by Etymotic twenty years ago.

1631309810609.png



What do the individual measurements of the HRTF look like? Do they have to be heavily averaged to get a target curve?
Individual HRTF for different angles, look like this:

1631310598208.png


If a diffuse field target curve was created from such individual HRTF, i.e. twenty years ago, then it should be clear that, due to the complexity, this very probably did not solve the problem of headphone target curves - the same applies to manikin with artificial average ears.

The differences in ear canal length and volume alone make it clear that a target curve will never provide optimal reproduction for all, only an approximation.
1631312026471.png

In contrast, individual HRTFs also do not appear to provide optimal results and may not be superior to artificial target curves, as this recent study "A Perceptual Evaluation of Individual and Non-Individual HRTFs" shows, that comes to the following conclusions:
1631312653777.png

1631312684142.png


To understand the meaning of the statements, one must realize that the KU100 is "only" a diffuse field equalized recording head, without an upper body. All this suggests that twenty years ago Etymotic has not solved everything and of course probably Harman's target curve today neither.

1631312842895.png
 
Last edited:
OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
Wow! That sounds like exact science and @Sharur also presented us with Etymotic's target curve as a problem clearly solved by Etymotic twenty years ago.
It's not exact. Two same speakers in different treated rooms won't sound identical, but it's really close.
 
OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
I honestly have no clue how someone at a comfortably loud level and good seal will dial up the bass on ER2SE or ER4SR by 10 dB
 

Pretorious

Active Member
Joined
Nov 20, 2020
Messages
108
Likes
156
Location
Illinois
If adherence to the Harman Target is pro-corporate, mindless following, then how is adherence to the Etymotic curve any different?

Do we have, anywhere in the community, an independently verified curve? One that was double-blind tested and is evidenced-based?

Otherwise, this trumpeting is ignoring the actual result of audio scientists and legitimate scientific methodology. Can it be improved upon? Always. But because it is corporate financed does not delegitimize the results; at least, any independent study has not disclaimed them.
 
OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
If adherence to the Harman Target is pro-corporate, mindless following, then how is adherence to the Etymotic curve any different?

Do we have, anywhere in the community, an independently verified curve? One that was double-blind tested and is evidenced-based?

Otherwise, this trumpeting is ignoring the actual result of audio scientists and legitimate scientific methodology. Can it be improved upon? Always. But because it is corporate financed does not delegitimize the results; at least, any independent study has not disclaimed them.
The issue is that the Harman target does not reproduce the sound of flat speakers in a treated room at the eardrum. Only the alleged perceived tonal balance according to a test with some people that funnily enough includes no one in this thread.
 
OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
To be honest, I think the President of the United States is a greater authority figure than Harman so I'm going to go with him :)
1631324060564.png
 

whazzup

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Feb 19, 2020
Messages
575
Likes
486
Only the alleged perceived tonal balance according to a test with some people that funnily enough includes no one in this thread.

Cool, so someone in this thread was involved in tests that resulted in the Etymotic curve?
 

JJB70

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Aug 17, 2018
Messages
2,905
Likes
6,148
Location
Singapore
If adherence to the Harman Target is pro-corporate, mindless following, then how is adherence to the Etymotic curve any different?

Do we have, anywhere in the community, an independently verified curve? One that was double-blind tested and is evidenced-based?

Otherwise, this trumpeting is ignoring the actual result of audio scientists and legitimate scientific methodology. Can it be improved upon? Always. But because it is corporate financed does not delegitimize the results; at least, any independent study has not disclaimed them.

I am not sure anyone here is advocating mindless adherence to the Etymotic curve, indeed the tone of the thread is that different people have different preferences and that there is no "one size fits all" FR. I don't think anyone is denying that things can be developed and improved either.
I can only speak for myself, but if people hate the ER4SR then I really have no issue with that. Even as a huge enthusiast of Etymotic I recognize that the deep insertion fit is not for everyone, and if people prefer Harman, or Beats bass canons or Grado highs then who am I to tell anyone else what they should like or that they are wrong?
Something lost in the whole FR discussion is that it is entirely possible to enjoy different tuning and even if you like a particular FR it doesn't mean it has exclusivity. There are different music genres and different use cases. My Austrian Audio Hi-X55 probably isn't for everyone but it is brilliant (in my opinion) for tracking. I still enjoy my DT1990 and Audioquest Nighthawk.
If Etymotic was to further evolve their tuning I would see how I liked it. Their tuning has evolved over the years and they offer their SR and XR models in an explicit recognition that different people have different preferences.
But it would be a poorer world without choice and much poorer if the mechanism to do so was statistical analysis of preference and trying to claim any manufacturer not with the program is unscientific.
In a way it makes me think of food. Companies like McDonald's, Mondeleze, Nestle etc. Such companies apply serious research and analysis of preference but how many people would point to something like a McBurger as the way all burgers should be made or that adding less salt or sugar is bad because so many prefer food high in salt or sugar?
 
OP
Sharur

Sharur

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2021
Messages
476
Likes
213
Sure, so someone in this thread came up / designed / invented / had direct involvement in the Etymotic curve?
I mean, the curve is just Diffuse field with small-room compensation
 
Top Bottom