Between the Ears: the art and science of measuring headphones
Page 2  In an important Audio Engineering Society paper of 1984,
Floyd Toole—better known today for his work on the interactions
of loudspeakers and listening rooms—brought the boom down on the
use of this type of artificial ear, certainly for meaningful
measurements of headphones intended for high-quality
applications. He wrote: "Perhaps for no reason other than they
existed, high fidelity headphones have for years been evaluated
using couplers and artificial ears intended for use as transfer
standards in audiometry. In these devices there is no attempt to
simulate anything but the most rudimentary acoustical functions
of the external ear. Neither were they designed to be used with
the myriad configurations of high-fidelity devices. As a
consequence of this, and the understandable commercial
motivation to produce flat frequency responses, countless
headphones have been designed using the wrong devices and the
wrong performance objective" (footnote