Blind listening shows listeners consistently prefer flat, smooth anechoic frequency response

Evidence

These findings were thought-provoking. The loudspeaker industry was large and worldwide, and these data showed little evidence of standards guiding it. That people found all these loudspeakers attractive enough to purchase underlined the importance of blind listening if the objective is to evaluate sound quality. The influences of non-auditory factors like brand, marketing claims, size, appearance, price, etc. are obviously significant. There was little evidence of the “we all hear differently” school of thought, but implications that over time we can adapt to find pleasure from significantly flawed loudspeakers. Most importantly, the results showed that there was a clear relationship between what was measured and what was heard, and that something approximating flat and smooth, technical accuracy, was the subjectively preferred target anechoic on-axis frequency response. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 77

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the ‘we all hear differently’ claim that later chapters dismantle with preference studies; supports the measured-to-heard mapping thesis of the whole book.
• QUESTION: How did the adaptation-to-flawed-loudspeakers finding get quantified later? Worth chasing the habituation mechanism in later chapters.