Identifying the dominating perceptual differences in headphone reproduction

Abstract

The perceptual differences between the sound reproductions of headphones were investigated in a pair-wise comparison study. Two musical excerpts were reproduced over 21 headphones positioned on a mannequin and recorded. The recordings were then processed and reproduced over one set of headphones to listeners, who were asked to evaluate their perceived degree of dissimilarity. The two musical excerpts were used in separate experiments. The processing of the recordings consisted of compensating for the influences of the playback headphones worn by the listeners as well as for the mannequin's ear canals. A multidimensional scaling analysis revealed two dominating perceptual dimensions used by the listeners to differentiate the reproductions of the headphones. These dimensions were similar for the two musical excerpts. Objective metrics are proposed to describe them, leading to correlations ranging from 0.89 to 0.97 between the dimensions and metrics. The first perceptual dimension was associated with the relative strength of bass, while the second dimension was related to the relative strength of the lower midrange.

Perception and preference of reverberation in small listening rooms for multi-loudspeaker reproduction

“…To objectively verify this hypothesis, a physical metric for the perceived bass content was included in the analysis. Recently, Volk et al proposed a series of perceptually-based metrics, the BassPunch, 53 BassStrength, 54 and DeepBass, 55 aiming to assess the perceptual properties of broadband signals at low frequencies. 56 As shown in Fig.…”