Harman and Dr. Sean Olive are reshaping headphone sound (2025) • Hacker News Board

Re: Harman and Dr. Sean Olive are reshaping headphone sound (2025)

#11

Post by Cthulhu_ » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 12:08 PM UTC

pnut wrote: post #10

chihuahua wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that audiophools reject blind A-B tests should tell you everything you need to know.

Anyone who has ever mixed music seriously knows the effect of psychoacoustics - your brain is such a proficient signal to noise optimiser, that differences in audio quality are perceptible only for the first few minutes of hearing a given sound source. This is why mix engineers have multiple sets of speakers, so they can periodically reset their perception. Additionally, it is well documented that the top scoring spe…

Great insight; I was going to theorize something about objective vs subjective experiences, in that you can't trust a human to make an objective observation about e.g. sound quality. Best thing you can do with human listening tests is gather data and make it about statistics.

But it's never about just what's objectively or even statistically best. Certain modern music is optimized for being played and recognisable on crappy phone speakers or low quality bluetooth ones. And then there's the loudness wars, where the music was objectively of lower quality (due to clipping etc), but sold better due to psychological effects. or whatever it was about.

Re: Harman and Dr. Sean Olive are reshaping headphone sound (2025)

#12

Post by jononor » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

ktallett wrote: post #2

Is there a limit to how good a sound people can appreciate? Like the guy who has his own electric supply, can he really hear the difference or is he tricking himself mentally into believing there is a difference?

There are no limits to what you can imagine yourself hearing... And appreciation is a extremely complex subjective feeling, one could argue most of that is way beyond audio and acoustics, and even beyond psychacoustics into plain psychology. When talking about the sensation, it is hard to differentiate between "really hear" versus "tricking oneself" - for most intents and purposes this is one and the same..

On the other hand, one can conduct blind tests that show that many phenomena cannot be reliably differentiated by a listener. Different listeners also have different levels of ability to discriminate sounds and sound quality. So when testing audio equipment using listening tests, one needs to consider the panel of listeners that one uses. Typically there are trained panels of listeners (who have received basic training and shown statistically an ok ability to discriminate) and "consumer" panels which are just random people off the street. The two groups will give very different ratings -especially for "medium" sound quality equipment.

For info on the former, see any decent book on psychoacoustics. And for the latter see for example Sensory Evaluation of Sound (Nick Zacharov et al).

Re: Harman and Dr. Sean Olive are reshaping headphone sound (2025)

#13

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

bux93 wrote: post #3

ktallett wrote: post #2

Is there a limit to how good a sound people can appreciate? Like the guy who has his own electric supply, can he really hear the difference or is he tricking himself mentally into believing there is a difference?

Well, the dB scale was once created on the basis that 1dB was thought to be the "just noticeable difference". Off the top of my head, I think trained listeners can actually notice differences of 0.3 dB, though this sort of thing is going to be frequency dependent too. The eq-adjustments you'll find online often have adjustments ranging from 1 to 6dB in different frequencies. That's enough to notice. Comparing setting…

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