Speaker
Description
Open-ear clip-on earbuds, a growing consumer product category, place a transducer against the pinna without occluding the ear canal, preserving natural ambient awareness and improving wearing comfort over traditional headphones. Their low-occlusion design would make them attractive for research applications requiring simultaneous acoustic interaction with the real environment, such as spatial hearing or augmented listening. Yet consumer products are ill-suited for controlled experiments: their inaccessible DSP signal chains prevent full control over the audio chain, their frequency responses deviate substantially from established headphone target curves, and the absence of an acoustic seal fundamentally limits low-frequency output.This paper presents a research platform addressing these limitations. A wired 3D-printed dual-transducer open-ear clip-on earbud prototype was developed through finite element simulations and empirical design. The dual-transducer configuration provides substantially greater headroom for bass extension via equalization. Target frequency responses are achieved using an extension of the established virtual headphone equalization method, adapted to account for elevated harmonic distortion inherent to small drivers at low frequencies. The equalized response to a flat target was validated as robust to earbud repositioning.