Stereo Enhancement Systems for headphones - What Shapes the Preference of a Listener?

Abstract: Headphones and loudspeakers sound notably different from each other and music is often mixed on loudspeakers. The headphone listener therefore doesn’t hear what the engineer intended. A fix for this problem is introducing crosstalk to headphone listening and several ways of introducing said crosstalk have been implemented in the past. This study aims to find out why some stereo enhancement systems are preferred over others and how this could be used in the future. Attributes were ranked and rated to find possible correlations between what the listener hears and what he pays attention to when hearing music processed by different algorithms. Results show that clarity is the most important attribute while mid-frequencies seem to be the least important.