Dr. Sean Olive Calls Out Reviewers for Misusing the Harman Target Curve

[alanca3]

Dr. Sean Olive addresses the use of the HARMAN curve as a reference in headphone reviews. Haven’t seen this updated article posted before, forgive me if this is old news.

Link to article

An excerpt from the article here:

“A lot of people took this model and started spitting out scores on the internet, and people would go through and… pick the highest score, not knowing that anything within seven of a rating is statistically tied,” he explained.

“You can’t reliably say, ‘I prefer this one over that one,’ and it discounts the fact that there’s different segments or classes of taste.”


So, what are your thoughts?

 

[Josh83]

Is a video of Olive’s talk online somewhere? I’d prefer that to another site’s summary.

 

[sq225917]

It makes sense, average the preference of two people with wildly different taste and you get a middle value that neither of them like.

The Harman curve is just the average of all measured preferences, it doesn't follow that even one person preferred that curve. By it's very nature it's just a composite picture.

Personally, i find the harman curve sucked out in the upper mids by a couple of db, that doesn't mean that my preference is wrong, it is just a preference score after all.

There's no right here, we all have differing hearing response curves.

 

[danadam]

Is a video of Olive’s talk online somewhere? I’d prefer that to another site’s summary.

22:37 - A lot of people took this model ...