This isn't why, although I can see why you might think that. The reason is that for me, based on my ear canal, Harman IE2019 just doesn't work. It's also less about preference here and more about variation in anatomy and HRTF. So for example, most 'good' IEMs as far as target compliance goes sound shouty and unnatural to me. Also, it's worth checking out the paper on segmentation from Olive, Welti and Khonsaripour: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=20289 , as well as Design Criteria for Headphones: https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/227875122/1995_M_ller_et_al_AES_Journal_a.pdf
This is extremely important, and often gets missed in these discussions because we just look at deviations from the target and think "that's why you hear it this way". In reality, we shouldn't care as much about strict target compliance, or overly rely on that to explain reports.
In the segmentation paper Harman identified three main groups of preference:
So if you're male and under 50, you're very likely to fall into Class 1, and it's logical to presume this in the context of listener reports.Class 1: “Harman Target Lovers”
They make up the majority of listeners (64%) tested, and prefer neutral sounding headphones equalized to the Harman Target response curve. Membership includes an approximately equal balance of members across gender, age groups, and trained/untrained listeners. The exception is listeners over the age 50 who are more likely to be members of Class 3.
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.
Class 3: “Less Bass is Better”
The second largest class (21%) prefers headphones with 2-4 dB less bass than the Harman Target curve below 100 Hz. Membership is comprised entirely of untrained listeners, and predominantly female and older listeners (50+ years).
When you say you don't like the Harman in-ear target what do you mean exactly? Have you EQed an IEM as close as possible to the target to judge this? Or are you just going on your impressions of IEMs that look like they come close? Because the Truthear actually has a broadband excess over the Harman target all the way from 800 Hz to ~6 kHz:
And as we know from the literature, very low-Q variations like this are more audible, and this region is right where our ears are most sensitive as shown by the equal loudness contours. The predicted preference rating of the Truthear is not actually incredibly high at 81 (thanks to @Maiky76 's calculations and above graphs), confirming it's not in fact extremely highly matched to Harman despite the proclamations on here from casual glances at the FR.
The IEMs with the highest predicted preference rating on AutoEQ's rankings are the AKG N400 at 89 and the Moondrop Blessing 2 Dusk at 87 (which of course are just measures of adherence to the Harman target). I don't think you've reviewed the former (but maybe you've heard them?), but you have the latter, and very favourably:
The Dusk's average deviation from the Harman target is just 0.89 dB according to Oratory's calculations:
So it looks like you do in fact like the in-ear Harman target.
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