Nearfield Crosstalk Increases Listener Preferences for Headphone-Reproduced Stereophonic Imagery.

This paper presents the results of an investigation that combines the findings of two separate experiments in which listeners were presented with short excerpts of stereophonic popular music reproduced via headphones for perceptual evaluation. The evaluation required listeners to compare between stimuli treated using selected spatial post-processing algorithms and make ratings of overall preference and also ratings of an auditory attribute termed Ensemble Stage Width (ESW). The results of Experiment 1 were similar to previous studies that had evaluated loudspeaker crosstalk simulation intended for headphone-reproduced stereophonic music. The results suggested the design of a novel approach to the simulation of loudspeaker crosstalk (termed Nearfield Crosstalk Simulation) that subsequently was tested in Experiment 2. The surprising results indicate, perhaps for the first time, that headphone-reproduced music submitted to a form of crosstalk simulation may be preferred over the original unprocessed version. In addition to new results this report provides a more comprehensive treatment of data that previously was presented and published in two AES convention papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]