Sean Olive

Psychoacoustics researcher at Harman International, and the inventor named on olive-preference-model (US 8,311,232 B2), the regression model that predicts listener preference from anechoic curves. His AES 116th Convention papers 6113 and 6190 (2004) are the peer-reviewed half of that work and sit behind the audio-engineering-society paywall, so this wiki holds the patent instead.

The through-line of the work is the one iec-60268-5-replacement names from the standards side: geoff-hill documents a measurement regime that explicitly refuses to judge perception, and Olive spent a career testing how far the same measurements can predict what a listener will choose. The answer his own numbers give is about r = 0.70 across 70 loudspeakers, which is a long way from either "measurements tell you nothing" or "measurements settle it."