somewhere between the red and green dotted response when you feel Harman is too bassy.
Somewhere between the black line and the upper grey area for bassheads.
View attachment 161137
Firstly, it should be noted that this is for IEMs. Did you add those red and green curves? If so, you should make that clear. The evidence from Harman's blind tests I've seen does not support preferences for such low bass shelves on IEMs. The lowest preferred bass boost was around 5 dB from
this study using a bass control method of adjustment (which matches with the lower bound of the grey area above):
I suspect the OP was talking about over-ear headphones though, and Harman's paper
Segmentation of Listeners Based on Their Preferred Headphone Sound Quality Profiles, for which they describe this group of listeners:
Class 2: “More Bass is Better”
This is the smallest class (15%) of listeners who prefer headphones with 3-6 dB more bass than the Target curve below 300 Hz. Members in this group are predominantly male, and include 30% of the trained listeners in our sample.
The over-ear Harman target bass shelf is around 6 dB, so a class 2 listener would prefer a 9-12 dB bass shelf. However, these classes were determined through cluster analysis of preference ratings given to a set of headphones, so are partly dependent on the frequency responses of this set. As most headphones (at least at the time of the study) either had boosted (mid/upper) bass, or lacked bass (most open-backs), I'm not surprised they found 3 classes of preference (the other being the large majority of Harman target lovers of course):
I believe the bass control method of adjustment is more representative of true preference as it does not rely on a predefined selection of headphone bass shelves, instead the listener is free to choose any bass level they like, and
when this was done for over-ear headphones, the spread in bass preference was smaller, with even the 'heavy bass lovers' only choosing on average around 1 dB more bass than those who preferred the Harman target:
So OP, as Oratory1990 usually uses a low-shelf bass filter on his EQs precisely for easy bass adjustment to taste (AutoEQ uses peak filters which makes this more tricky), I would advise using
his profiles to EQ to the Harman target, then increasing the gain of the bass filter in increments of 1 dB until you get to your preferred level.
