[alcyst]

This website has plenty of discussion on good sound vs enjoyable sound, with this forum being a bit more oriented to "good" sound. Before someone gets into discussing immaculate recordings of appalling acoustics and vice versa....
 
...the current version of the New Scientist website has an article titled "Reverb: Why we dig messy sound" 29 December 2014 by Trevor Cox, Magazine issue 3000. 
Subscription needed: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22430001.000-reverb-why-we-dig-messy-sound.html?page=1#.VKZ6SiusWGM
 
My tuppence is, that once you get into pyscho-acoustics things do get messy, I recall reading that if 100dB will make you deaf (15mins), 100dB of sound you don't like will make you deaf quicker, the stress adds a negative. 
 
Some of the interesting quotes from the article are:
- "perhaps room reflections enable two-way communication between musicians and audiences, helping us to feel more part of the process even as passive listeners."
- "A long reverberation time...allows musicians to fill...a large space."
- "Another key word might be intimacy. Leaving loudness to one side, the emotional impact of music is known to increase the more listeners perceive themselves to be "surrounded" by it "
 
The author's conclusion is
 
"Linda-Ruth Salter, who has co-written a book on architecture and acoustic environments,Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? " 'Dry' sounds are unnatural," she says. "Every sonic event occurs in a place, and those spatial enclosures modify the sound, including producing reverberation. That starts me wondering whether our liking for reverb is innate at all. Could it be a preference we've just learned because we rarely experience music without it?"

 

[Pirakaphile]

I wouldn't say reverb is messy, I'd say it's realistic! I do really enjoy jazz recorded live in bars and such, since you can just feel what it was like to be there. The sciencey side if said story seems to sound solid to me. Alliteration at its finest

 

[wink]

Scientiific mumbo jumbo at it's best.

 

[alcyst]

  Scientiific mumbo jumbo at it's best.

You are harsh. A wikipedia page on psychoacoustics puts it nicely; "Hearing is not a purely mechanical phenomenon of wave propagation, but is also a sensory and perceptual event". A small example might be that people who spend time comparing systems have a list of test tracks, which they have no music emotion about, but can hear all the detail. You choose stuff you don't care about so you don't get distracted when test listening.
 
There is plenty of reading out there;
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Psychoacoustics.

 

[icebear]

... "Linda-Ruth Salter, who has co-written a book on architecture and acoustic environments,Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? " 'Dry' sounds are unnatural," she says. "Every sonic event occurs in a place, and those spatial enclosures modify the sound, including producing reverberation. That starts me wondering whether our liking for reverb is innate at all. Could it be a preference we've just learned because we rarely experience music without it?"

That "learning" might have happened over a couple of years (hundreds of thousands that is)

.
Evolution of the hearing process, the "tools" and "processing" have been crucial to our survival.
There might be a deeper reason for a preference of a sound signal that enables us to locate the source

.