Happy upcoming new year y’all!
I’ve gotten a copy of Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms by Floyd Toole, and have been educating myself a little on all the factors that go into loudspeaker measurement and design. Sean Olive has done great work as well. Is there a definitive book or resource on headphone design?
The whole field seems to be in its infancy, to this newbie. It seems that most headphones don’t use passive filtering or crossovers, so it’s all down to driver selection and physical design; I could be wrong! Looking at the wide range of performance and price, not always well correlated, I’m wondering what factors really go into headphone design, and why an essentially flat pair would need to be expensive. Is it down to development time and testing? It seems a well performing pair of speakers can be built for not much money. So why the wide variance in performance at every price?
Do we really want flat response, or is some other goal more desired? What effect does the shape of individual ears have? Is headphone design as mature a science as speaker design?
I’d appreciate any pointers to resources that will help me better understand the design and voicing of headphones.
Thanks,
Bob
I’ve gotten a copy of Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms by Floyd Toole, and have been educating myself a little on all the factors that go into loudspeaker measurement and design. Sean Olive has done great work as well. Is there a definitive book or resource on headphone design?
The whole field seems to be in its infancy, to this newbie. It seems that most headphones don’t use passive filtering or crossovers, so it’s all down to driver selection and physical design; I could be wrong! Looking at the wide range of performance and price, not always well correlated, I’m wondering what factors really go into headphone design, and why an essentially flat pair would need to be expensive. Is it down to development time and testing? It seems a well performing pair of speakers can be built for not much money. So why the wide variance in performance at every price?
Do we really want flat response, or is some other goal more desired? What effect does the shape of individual ears have? Is headphone design as mature a science as speaker design?
I’d appreciate any pointers to resources that will help me better understand the design and voicing of headphones.
Thanks,
Bob