Have you tried matching a stereo to your hearing?


Have you ever had a hearing test done to determine your actual hearing curve? It is my understanding that the average human hearing range is essentially an arc that tails off at high and low frequencies, but isn't necessarily a smooth line. It might be possible to tune a system to compensate for dips or peaks in ones personal hearing. It might sound terrible to everyone else, but perfect for you.

Has anyone ever tried or thought about this concept? I wonder how similar the hearing curve is for people that commonly enjoy a particular system above all else.
mceljo

Showing 4 responses by mceljo

I suspect a problem with doing it, assuming an sensitive enough EQ was available, would be the recorded media would likely be mixed based on the sound engineers hearing so every recording would be different.

On a more macro scale, could the speakers be adjusted left vs. right for people with hearing problems in one ear? There is at least one forum member that has very different left and right channel speakers with this very issue.
I would say yes. I'm thinking an Audyssey type project where instead of trying to match a set response the user would have an interface to input their personal hearing curve. I'm not sure where the hearing curve would come from, however. It might take a special set of test tones to determine the curve.
As a point of clarification, I'm not suggesting large scale adjustments, it might be within the range of what my receiver does when run in direct vs. stereo where there is obviously some internal processing going on. It seems that everyone is thinking about a much more significant change than I intended. Many claim improvements with the change of a cable, so it shouldn't take a significant adjustment in an EQ to make a nice difference.
Al - I wouldn't have come up with the Fletcher-Munson Effect specifically, and I'm not sure that it's exactly what I was thinking. Let me propose an option (4) and see if it is different from the option (1) you describe.

(1) adjusting the system so that the audible frequency response curve matches that of a particular listener. There isn't an audio system that produces a perfectly smooth frequency response, especially when room accoustics are introduced. Ideally, one could adjust the nearly infinite EQ to allow the complete system to have a response that would match the hearing response curve for the listener. The goal would be to eliminate "loud" or "soft" areas in the two curves compounding.

This is similar to what the room optimization software doesn't now to match a system to a particular room, this would just be the next step requiring specific user input. Essentially, the user would provide the "goal" for the system to match rather than whatever baseline Audyssey or other company used.