[SilverEars]

I want to share an experience I had regarding perception of hearing imbalance.

So, I've been listening imbalanced monitors for long time, and recently switch to a different one.

The imbalanced monitors had the right side lounder than the left, and when I tried out the new monitors, it felt imbalanced, left side seemed perceptually louder.

And then it took a bit of time, about a week for my ear to adjust to the new monitors to normalize my hearing perception.

So, in conclusion, such a scenario can occur. My ears or brain adjusting to imbalanced sound listened to a long time, and it takes a bit of duration to normalize. Odd that auditory system can be stuck to perceptual imbalance for so long(in this case). Hmmmm.

 

[ev13wt]

Its so bad, that a "typical" consumer today will hear midfi highly processed sound with boomy thumping 80Hz bass as "good sound".

 

[castleofargh]

yup, case n°99999999999999999999999 of why it's misguided to think of ourselves as a reference to judge sound. now the 50 cent question, did you make measurements to check if the new speakers placed that way are now reasonably balanced? ^_^
stories like this are what make the famous " I don't need to prove anything, I know what I heard", so desperately ironic.

 

[SilverEars]

What I've been recognizing lately in regards to auditory system adjusting to sound.

Some observations:

When people do headphone comparisons, two contrasting sounding headphones can throw off the comparison a bit as the ears may have adjusted to one type of signature(such as headhones with lots of highend sparkle or bright, or cold sounding, or analytical). And if the new headphones to compared are a bit recessed on those frequencies(at the parts where the peaks are generally noticed and ears adjusted to such peaky sound), they will sound noticibly worse, but in actuality, there will be a greater perceived differences in sound signatures(due to the contrast) that the new(or the 2nd headphone) May sound a lot worse compared to the first.

This is where the brain burn-in comes in. For some headphones it takes a bit of time for the auditory system to get used to the sound, and in time the headphones can sound better after a duration. After a bit of duration due to the ears adjusting.

It's a bit more complex than this actually, the recordings can vary in how quality is perceived as well. Certain tracks are just better recorded over others, and sometimes tracks have dependency in how quality output is perceived as well. So, there is track dependency as well.

But the point is, when doing a quick switch back and forth of two very different signature headphones, perception of the differences will be more significant due to the contrasting sound signatures(and also ears being used a signature listened for a long time).

Also realized cold sounding seems to mean sound is more pronounced or a bit brighter, and has similarities to analytical. Warm meaning, more bass presence, and highs are cutoff a bit to "smooth"en(this term is also often used) the sound abit as it's called. More like a down inclined(bass is up and going down toward the highs).

 

[ev13wt]

You would enoy Floyd Tooles book immensely I'd think: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reprod...p/B008VSMXNK/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=

Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms (Audio Engineering Society Presents) 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
by Floyd Toole

 

[ev13wt]

At best, audio reproduction is a close enough reproduction so our audio memory and phantasy can fully pretend to be there.

It all is based on the fact that you can identify a known voice via a very, very bad audio reproduction chain. You brain knows the "Gestalt" of the sound and will interpolate. Without sound experience, "make believe" scenes are hard to understand. A small child cannot hear a violin and interpolate to "hear" the "venue" or such things.

We can get closer with headphones than with speakers, certainly.

 

[bigshot]

The question is, with the new speakers set to detent, were you hearing accurate balance and you had been patterned on imbalanced, or was your first set of speakers balanced, but you became adjusted to imbalanced after listening for a while. I would tend to think the latter is the case because I can't see being accustomed to imbalanced as something that would last very long.

My speaker system has a 1dB difference between left and right because of the room. Detent is not always correct.

 

[SilverEars]

I was actually referring to headphones, specifically in ear monitors.

 

[castleofargh]

ahah, I thought it was about speakers ^_^.