When the July 2015 issue of the AES Journal called for contributions to the Society’s first conference dedicated to headphone technology it was predicted that more than 300 million pairs of headphones would be sold that year. The conference was held in August 2016 and was soon followed by a conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality. These conferences demonstrate the breadth of the science and technology that are blurring the lines between headphones, immersive audio, assistive listening and mobile computing; while at the same time pointing to the challenges that face the community in making the resulting experiences seamless. The signing into law of the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017 will create new opportunities as the market for headphones continues to grow. In 2017 more than 350 million pairs were sold. In short, headphones and the technology associated with them are as popular as ever and the AES will remain at the forefront of this exciting field.
Audio Topic
Headphones
- Principles of Headphone Design—A Tutorial Review
- Refinements in the Electroacoustic Testing of Headphones
- Sean Olive’s AES headphone paper collection (2015)
- A Statistical Model that Predicts Listeners’ Preference Ratings of In-Ear Headphones: Part 1—Listening Test Results and Acoustic Measurements
- A Statistical Model that Predicts Listeners’ Preference Ratings of In-Ear Headphones: Part 2—Development and Validation of the Model
- A Self-Calibrating Earphone
- Headphone Response: Target Equalization Trade-offs and Limitations
- Perceptual Assessment of Headphone Distortion
- Headphone Technology: Personalization, Perception, Preference
- A High Resolution and Full-Spherical Head-Related Transfer Function Database for Different Head-Above-Torso Orientations
- Database Matching of Sparsely Measured Head-Related Transfer Functions
Conference Proceedings
Standards
- IEC 60268‐7 – Sound System Equipment. Part 7: Headphones
- ANSI/ASA S3.7‐2016 – Earphone Measurement and Calibration
- IEC 60318‐4 – Occluded Ear Simulator
- ANSI/ASA S3.25‐2009 – Occluded Ear Simulator
Presentations
Books
- Loudspeaker and Headphone Handbook – Edited by John Borwick
- Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multichannel Audio – Edited by Agnieszka Roginska and Paul Geluso
Website
Curator
Patrick Hegarty
Patrick was chairman of the 2016 AES International Conference on Headphone Technology together with Sean Olive. He studied Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before moving to Salford to study Audio Technology. He spent 10 years working at Bang & Olufsen where he was part of a team that developed a listening test system for automotive audio using binaural technology. He currently works as an R&D Engineer at Dynaudio.
AES Technical Committee Loudspeakers and Headphones
- Chair: Juha Backman
The committee works to ensure that the AES membership has the opportunity to learn of relevant new transducer technology as it develops, with an emphasis on sound field generation from loudspeakers and headphones.