Individualized equalization of supraaural headphones

Abstract

The main difficulty with individualized headphone equalization is the fact that the acoustic coupling between the headphones and the ears results in pronounced valleys in the system's frequency response, and the frequency at which these valleys occur depends on the positioning of the headphone. It is necessary, therefore, when designing the reverse filter to equalize the headphone, extreme care with the inversion of these valleys, which can result in frequency spikes causing quite uncomfortable audible artifacts. Recently, an automatic methodology has been proposed to avoid the presence of these frequency peaks based on a frequency mask to be applied in the regularization of the reverse filter. The objective of this project is to implement and evaluate the individualized headphone equalization system based on the automatic extraction of the regularization parameters.