The Harman target: what it is and what it isn't

The Harman target curve comes from a decade of controlled listening research led by Sean Olive and Todd Welti at Harman International. Listeners adjusted bass and treble on a headphone equalized to a neutral reference until it sounded best to them; the averaged result (roughly a neutral speaker response in a good room, plus a bass shelf) became the Harman over-ear (2018) and in-ear (2019) targets.

Its value is as an anchor: products near the target usually strike most people as tonally 'correct', and deviations from it describe a product's flavor in a consistent way ('4 dB extra mid-bass, slightly recessed presence region'). That is how targets are used on qfiAudio's graphs: a reference line to measure deviation against, not a finish line.

But the same research is explicit that preference is segmented. Harman's own studies found roughly a third of listeners prefer more bass than the target (skewing younger) and a smaller group prefers less bass and a leaner presentation (skewing older and trained). 'Closer to Harman' therefore does not mean 'better for you'. It means 'closer to the statistical center of preference'.

There are also open technical debates: the target was derived on 711-class rigs (so it does not transfer directly to 5128 measurements), and later work has proposed revised bass and treble weightings. Treat the target as an extremely useful reference with error bars, not gospel.