Contribution
Suitability of Open-Ear Consumer Headphones for Augmented Acoustic Reality
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Augmented acoustic reality requires acoustically transparent headphones to make external sound sources audible. This can generally be achieved with a variety of devices such as open headphones or smart headphones with hear-through technology. Regardless of their design, headphones will always alter the sound of external sources depending on the source position, which can cause audible coloration and decreased localization accuracy. Headphones that minimize the influence on external sound fields were mostly available for scientific purposes in the past. More recently, consumer headphones which might have similar properties became more popular. We studied four selected commercially available headphones including different intra-concha speakers and a bone-conduction device regarding their transfer-function and transparency to external sound-fields, as well as possible detrimental effects of the latter with respect to localization and coloration. We discuss the extent to which listeners might adapt to headphone-induced changes of incoming sound, and provide generic headphone compensation filters for all tested models.