Top all-time · #12691
Sean Olive
Personal blog · seanolive.blogspot.comhardwarescience
Sean Olive's personal blog at seanolive.blogspot.com covers hardware and science. Since 2011, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Sean Olive's blog on headphone and speaker listening-test research, including Harman studies on frequency response and preference. Commenters cite its findings as evidence in audio debates.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about the science of sound recording and reproduction
What Hacker News says?
> This is a very wrong assumption. The citation provided further down in the article is [1]. Dr. Olive is thorough in attempting to remove sources of bias and conducts a set of fully double blind listening tests in order to come to the conclusion: "The results provide evidence that trained listeners preferred the headphones perceived to have the most neutral, spectral balance". > A good test for intermodulation dist…
Comment linking /2013/04/the-relationship-between-perception-and.html
on “No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price”Submitted The dishonesty of sighted listening tests as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Human beings don't listen to linear sine sweeps. We listen to music. ... This is irrelevant. They're measuring frequency response, not trying to map the entire world of psychoacoustics. Log sin wave sweeps are a perfectly adequate way of measuring a transducer. > Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device res…
Comment linking /
on “No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price”Submitted Audio's Circle of Confusion (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's a detailed, well-written review, but like most mainstream headphone reviews it makes me cringe a little. Though masked somewhat by self-deprecating remarks, there's audiophile "woo" peaking out from behind the corner (e.g. the comment about lossless compression). More importantly, it's missing the most important part of a headphone review: a measurement of the frequency response curve! It's fairly well known th…
Comment linking /2017/02/twirt-337-predicting-headphone-sound_17.html
on “AirPods Max: An Audiophile Review”> It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room. Is it, though? Blogspam posts about it waffle over the exact definition, but Olive's original post [0] gives the methodology, "A panel of 10 trained listeners rated each headphone based on overall preferred sound quality, perceived spectral balance, and com…
Comment linking /2013/04/the-relationship-between-perception-and.html
on “Video encoding requires using your eyes”I would be interested in what the source for this statement was. According to recent research done specifically on high school aged students listening preferences conducted at Harman International the opposite is true: http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2010/06/some-new-evidence-that... "When all 12 trials were tabulated across all listeners, the high school students preferred the lossless CD format over the MP3 version…
Comment linking /2010/06/some-new-evidence-that-generation-y.html
on “Spotify bitrategate: 320kbps premium quality not there yet”