Cultural and age biases in sound preference are minimal, except for hearing degradation

Evidence

Sean Olive has conducted numerous headphone sound quality evaluations with listeners from Europe, Canada, Japan and China and has yet to find evidence of strong cultural bias. See Olive et al. (2014) and Chapter 15. Similar results have been found for loudspeakers and car audio. The same is true with respect to age, except, as shown in Figure 10.7, older listeners tend to exhibit greater variation in their opinions because of degraded hearing. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1170

Categorization

• SHARE: For a sound engineer friend: cross-continental blind tests show no cultural spectral preference, only age-related variation from hearing loss — a strong rebuttal to region-specific EQ magic.