[jude]

Sean Olive visiting Head-Fi HQ (September 2018).​

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UPDATE 2018-10-25 0243 EDT: The Audio Grounds Chat took place, and the audio recording of the conversation can be heard here: https://tinyurl.com/alma-audio-grounds-001

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ALMA International (International Association of Loudspeaker Manufacturing & Acoustics) is starting a new program called Audio Grounds Chat. Audio Grounds Chats will be bi-monthly informal, unscripted 30-minute conversations for and about the audio industry. The first Audio Grounds Chat is taking place today, Wednesday, October 24, 2018, at 12:00 Pacific Time, where I'll be talking to Sean Olive, Acoustic Research Fellow for Harman International.

While Dr. Olive has authored / co-authored over 48 research papers, many Head-Fi'ers know him most of all for his headphone and IEM target response research, which I feel has been (and continues to be) some of the most important research in the field. Sean is also a past President of AES (Audio Engineering Society).

While the idea is to keep it unscripted, unplanned, we'll likely be talking about headphone target responses, headphone measurements, and his team's most recent research that he presented at the AES convention last week.

This will be a web conference via Webex, and attendance is free, but you must register to attend (which you'll find on the left side of the linked page). Space is limited.

I hope you'll be able to join Dr. Olive and me in ALMA International's first Audio Grounds Chat on Wednesday, October 24, 2018, at 12 PM Pacific Time!

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UPDATE 2018-10-25 0243 EDT: The Audio Grounds Chat took place, and the audio recording of the conversation can be heard here: https://tinyurl.com/alma-audio-grounds-001

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[canthearyou]

That's cool!

 

[castleofargh]

any chance to watch this later? or is it another of those strange "be there or forever miss it" internet events?

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Don't see a chance of me being registered in time, request submitted just now...?

 

[jude]

It seems there were some technical difficulties. They may have to reschedule this. If that's the case, I'm sorry, everyone.

The moment I find out what's going on, I'll post it here.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

It was rescheduled right?

 

[jude]

It was rescheduled right?

Again, sorry about all that. They had some technical difficulties, so we have to reschedule it. ALMA, Sean, and I will work out our schedules to find another date/time that will work.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Any news?

 

[jude]

@Joe Bloggs, sorry for not responding sooner. The rescheduled chat takes place today at 12 PM Pacific Time.

 

[leeperry]

The more it goes the more I think Mr Tesla, Ampere & Watt oughta be happy to be dead otherwise they would have Jude asking them nasty questions in front of a camera and expecting super long detailed replies

Next on the list I suggest Mr David Griesinger

http://www.davidgriesinger.com/

We are currently working on an app for headphone equalization that uses an equal-loudness method. The app is getting pretty useful. I have been able to use it with several headphones and get them close enough to my own hearing to have excellent results reproducing my binaural recordings. These include my favorite Sennheiser 250-2 noise cancelling headphones, the Sennheiser 600s, AKG 701s, and a pair of insert headphones that came free with a Sony ICD SX1000 micro recorder. After eq they sound similar, but not identical. Binaural recordings heard through the circumaural phones sounded pleasant, but lacked the sense of presence and reality that were achieved with the on-ear phones and the insert phones. Circumaural phones, as are currently preferred for binaural playback have too many resonances inside the cup and concha to be equalized with a 1/3 octave approach, and too much variablilty each time you put them on to be equalized mathematically.

 

[jude]

...Next on the list I suggest Mr David Griesinger

http://www.davidgriesinger.com/

I've watched his videos on YouTube, and read material on his website. We were actually talking about him a bit at the last Southeastern Michigan Meet.

Mr. Griesinger seems like an intelligent, interesting, eccentric gentlemen, and it might be fun to see someone chat with him.

 

[leeperry]

I've had a few emails with him regarding Logic 7 downmix matrix(which he invented) for headphones use, he certainly knows a whole lot of genuinely interesting things....and lucky me, they usually don't go over my head so the better

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Thanks for the heads-up!

 

[jude]

The Audio Grounds Chat took place, and the audio recording of the conversation can be heard here: https://tinyurl.com/alma-audio-grounds-001

Since the video of this chat wasn't included in this recording, please see the following notes:

• (Below) The current Harman AE/OE (Around-The-Ear / On-Ear) Target:
  
  
  
• (Below) The Harman IE (in-ear) Target:
  
  
  
• At around 24:22, I was holding up (and referring to) the miniDSP EARS, pictured below:
  
  
  
  
  
• At around 25:21, the specification I was referring to (regarding the width of the "head") is in ITU-T P.58. If the head is too narrow or too wide (and I feel the miniDSP EARS is too narrow), then you won't get realistic headphone caliper pressure.
  
  
• At around 25:47, I'm referring to the fact that the miniDSP EARS contains no ear simulators. For more on that, read the text underneath the measurements in this post (link).
  
  
• At around 26:06, that question (about whether or not his team would be using the miniDSP at their lab) was tongue-in-cheek (which our facial expressions made much more obvious on video).

 

[castleofargh]

what I like most about the various Harman papers, is how much aligns with what many people have been feeling for decades. they're not declaring a lot of really extraordinary stuff. mostly they're "just" putting in the effort to properly test stuff(for which I'm oh so grateful).
starting with how DF compensations relate poorly to our own impressions of a headphone. we all learned to interpret them because they've been a standard for so long, but almost anybody I talked to over the years(who had some actual interest and a little understanding of the matter), disliked that choice of a target curve. even when we happened to have fairly different personal opinions on what constitutes flat or preferred response(same thing, but different, but the same?).
and again with the differences between IEMs and headphones. I've seen for years a trend for people who favored more bass on IEMs. and talks about 6 to 10dB boosts compared to raw flat have been around for as long as I remember. what changed mostly is that we used to consider flat low end on a full size headphone to be flat. I always favored a few dB of boost in low end on my EQ(or more when the headphone rolls off, duh), but I've always thought that I was just a little bass head myself. never did I imagine that most people also preferred a little boost on full size headphones. at least not from ready audiophile forums. so to me, out of all the work presented by Harman this was the biggest surprise.
for IEMs and the desire for even more low end, I "came up" with the hypothesis that it could have to do with the physical shaking of a headphone providing tactile bass feeling on the head. but as that idea was fully influenced by what I've read from Floyd Toole, it was basically him thinking for me inside my head ^_^. so I'm not surprised to hear Sean Olive mention that idea. it's just nice to have that moment of

what I'm most interested in, would be to try and characterize the general preferences when the signal coming to our ears with from headphones and IEMs, is a replica of speaker sound(with HRTF and all the gang). to really separate variations caused by the playback medium, from variations caused by albums mastered for speakers then played back on headphones or IEMs. with the obvious endgame of getting better than basic crossfeed solutions to mitigate the change. or maybe alert mastering engineers on a potential target for headphone mastering. anything making our experience more pleasing if not more faithful to the record's intent.