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It’s hard for me to believe it’s been seven years since researchers from Harman International presented the landmark paper “The Relationship between Perception and Measurement of Headphone Sound Quality” at the 2012 Audio Engineering Society Convention in San Francisco -- the first paper in which the company presented what became known as the “Harman curve,” the target frequency response that average listeners would like best. When I first read that paper, I assumed it would quickly revolutionize the headphone business. As a headphone reviewer, I knew that the various headphones and earphones then on the market often exhibited wildly different sounds -- even among different models in a company’s line -- which indicated that knowledge was lacking or simply being ignored.

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Over the last year or so, I’ve had a chance to do something I don’t think any reviewer has done before: listen to and measure a whole bunch of headphone amps. I went into this process with a lot of curiosity and few preconceptions. I knew that from a theoretical standpoint, headphone amps can make a bigger difference in what you hear than speaker amps do. I wasn’t sure, though, how big that difference would be, or how much I’d care about it. But after a year of listening and technical explorations, I’ve come to some interesting conclusions.

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I think I saw the future of headphone technology at the recent 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Headphone Technology, held in San Francisco from August 27 to 29. My vision came during a presentation by Ramani Duraiswami, a professor at the University of Maryland and also president and founder of VisiSonics, a company dedicated to 3D audio reproduction, mostly for gaming applications. Duraiswami’s presentation didn’t awaken me to any concepts I hadn’t heard of before -- but it did give me the faith that the processing needed to make headphones sound as good and natural as a high-quality set of stereo (or surround) speakers is within our grasp.

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After writing in-depth about noise canceling for several years, I thought I knew most of what there was to know about it. But at this week’s 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Headphone Technology in San Francisco, I saw two presentations that changed my thinking about noise-canceling technology in headphones -- and proposed ways to improve the technology and our methods of evaluating it.

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Running measurements of speakers and headphones on a regular basis teaches you many things about audio that you’d probably never otherwise learn, but it has a side benefit I haven’t seen discussed: it lets you monitor your hearing. The tests, which involve tones played through the devices under test, typically start at the high frequencies and run down to the low frequencies, and as your hearing degrades with age, you see more and more numbers tick away on the display before you can start to hear the tones.

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It never fails. Write an article about noise-canceling headphones for a mainstream publication, as my colleague Geoff Morrison did for The New York Times, and you’ll hear from readers about a variety of “hacks” for doing noise-canceling with better fidelity and/or for less money and/or to eliminate the dreaded phenomenon of eardrum suck. The most common suggestion is to use earplugs in conjunction with standard passive headphones. Others suggest using high-quality earphones and putting noise-canceling (or passive) headphones over them.

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Rob Stivers 18 hours ago What is the Soundtrack to Your Life?
Love this article.  And couldn't agree more about there being no "correct" way to listen ...
Rob Stivers 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
@Geoffrey MorrisonMany will, but Delta doesn't. If you're an audiophile who travels, maybe you want to ...
Rob Stivers 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
@Geoffrey MorrisonActually, in most countries (215 of them) there's unlimited data at 256kbps.  I never actually ...
Geoffrey Morrison 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
@Rob StiversI had T-Mobile for years. Overall it's very good. In most countries it's also very ...
Geoffrey Morrison 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
@Rob StiversThis isn't the case with all airlines. Many will block streaming.
Rob Stivers 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
On that flight to Salt Lake, I streamed Qobuz at high-res on my Hiby R5 ...
Rob Stivers 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
Also...  I just flew to Salt Lake City and back on Delta.  Free wifi to ...
Rob Stivers 1 days ago Traveling as an Audiophile
By the way... T-Mobile users get free data while traveling internationally.  No problems streaming when ...
@oratory1990Yeah, I can hardly imagine it's an issue -- most people don't even turn their ...
@Doug SchneiderI fly quite a bit for work, and it was never an issue.  
Bluetooth can ...