Well... my takeaway from it was more that conventions around THD and intermodulation distortion did not line up with subjective reports …
And that, IMHO, is the problem. Not that THD and IMD did not line up with subjective reports but that the audiophile community developed false “
conventions around” them, largely (or entirely) driven by marketing and, this isn’t just the case with THD and IMD but with numerous things!
You can NEVER correlate or line up subjective reports to established thresholds EVER no matter how you slice and dice it up
I’m not sure I agree with this. It’s certainly true of some thresholds but not necessarily of all thresholds, given certain conditions. Of course though, the point of thresholds is that they represent the limits of human hearing, they don’t represent what we should expect to achieve in our sitting room, when listening to music (rather than test signals) and with say 40+ year old ears. The problem with many subjective reports in the audiophile world is that they often exceed the thresholds, not uncommonly by one or more orders of magnitude!
I'm guessing we've all read the same papers at some point(although I might be talking about us 3 and 2 other guys in the thread when I say all), and indeed what should concern us is limited to what is audible, and if it bothers us or not. Which is where we all agree, even above audible levels, THD is rarely of any help for subjective predictions.
The bolded part is the problem IMHO, depending on who exactly is this “
us”, then “
what is audible” can have a significantly different meaning. It’s not that “audible” itself has a different meaning but that “what can be audible” does, because the “us” for me isn’t necessarily other consumers but can be other music/sound engineers (and other musicians). And, this isn’t due to some golden eared, superhuman hearing ability of engineers but because we’re routinely editing and processing recordings (with EQ, compression and other tools) which raises the levels in some places by 40dB or more, thereby sometimes converting the inaudible into the audible. So, when “us” engineers state that something “can be audible” we don’t mean that if you have great hearing/listening skills and TOTL equipment you’ll hear it, but that conditions may arise where the required processing/mixing/mastering can, in some portion/s of a particular recording, result in a large enough boost of artefacts, distortions or noise to render them audible.
Of course, none of the above is applicable to the “us” as consumers, we’re never (for example) boosting portions of our recordings by 40dB or more and/or repeatedly running them through a conversion process and thereby audibly revealing artefacts/distortions caused by say jitter or converters. Unfortunately though, for nearly half a century, audiophile marketers have been trawling the pro audio world for discussions, descriptions and terms that they can misrepresent as applicable to the audiophile community and it’s now packed with them!
G