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Originally Posted by ppl
This link has some interesting thoughts on Distortion along with some wav. Files you can Down Load and listen to on your own Rig. These are musical excerpts containing specific amounts of added distortion.
http://www.gedlee.com/distortion_perception.htm |
The presentations are very interesting. For those that didn't RTFA, they define a new metric (the AES presentation) which uses weighting dependent on the masking of the human ear. Unlike the THD/IMD measures, this is a measure of the perceptability of a distortion. With further experiments the metric can be tuned to better represent human perception of nonlinearities.
However, I am willing to bet that if this metric was adopted by the audio community as a THD/IMD replacement, it will still be rejected by the subjectivists just like any other piece of science and rationality that has shown that their 99.999999999999999999% pure silver wiring doesn't make a damn bit of difference.
On the other hand, the proposed metric has a significant shortcoming in that it assumes the nonlinearities are frequency independent, which, as they point out, does not hold in the case of speakers. As speakers are the most distorting mechanism in the audio chain (other than potentially the recording, but that we do not have control of), they are the ones most needing something like this. But we already know that ESL and plasma are the best drivers. My secret daydream is that Dr. Hill will follow up his original creation with full range drivers, and without the helium tank
BTW, what happened to Sycraft, did he run off or what?