Artificial manikins can approximate a target population for headphone testing.

Evidence

Good reproducibility of audio across the targeted customers should be an important design goal for consumer and professional headphones. But how can such a design goal be validated during the design and testing? One approach is to measure the headphones on a variety of different-sized human ears and heads as done in this study. However, finding a group of humans who are always available for testing and are anatomically representative of the population is easier said than done. A more practical approach is to build several artificial manikins whose anthropomorphic features are representative of a target human population. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1750