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I think this is worth repeating, as there sometimes seems to be an attitude that something's wrong with the listener if the various PEQ filters that move things closer to the Harman curve aren't liked.
To quote from the public preso:
”Harman curve Lovers”: This group, which constitutes 64% of listeners, includes mostly a broad spectrum of people, although they’re generally under age 50. They prefer headphones tuned close to the Harman curve.
“More Bass Is Better”: This next group, which makes up 15% of listeners, prefers headphones with 3 to 6dB more bass than Harman curve below 300Hz, and 1dB more output above 1kHz. This group is predominantly male and younger — the listeners JBL is targeting with its headphones.
“Less Bass Is Better”: This group, 21% of listeners, prefers 2 to 3dB less bass than the Harman curve and 1dB more output above 1kHz. This group is disproportionately female and older than 50.”
So in a nutshell, 36% of the listeners, overall, don't prefer the Harman curve, which is a sizable chunk.
Weirdly, (or perhaps because of) given I play bass, I fall in the "Less Bass is Better" camp.
So the question then becomes:
If you're in one of the outlier groups, what EQ target should you normalize to?
I agree on the first point and there are very clear examples throughout the various threads of exactly that articulation.
On the point around alternative targets- I rather like Oratory1990's approach on some but not all of his EQ papers where he indicates which of the filters can be varied and what attribute they aim at. This presumably is in line with how the Harman HP curve was created by allowing the listeners a degree of tweaking on, eg , the levels of bass.