The only ''definitive'' answer in this Subjective world is...

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@gpauk Excellent analogy. The brain is so complex with a staggering number of connections it's probable that it'll never be fathomed
Didn't they also say human will never fly?

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Several years (decades?) ago my wife and I did a blind study of the audibility of nonlinearity - the root cause of both THD and IMD. What we found was that there was no correlation between either THD or IMD as far as audibility goes. In other words some THD at 20% was inaudible while some THD at .1% was highly audible. So yes audible nonlinearities do exist, but neither THD or IMD can identify them.

Thank you, all very interesting.

It would also be interesting to know if you have any thoughts about the limits of human distortion perception.

Here in the forum there was recently a Hi-Res 24/96 listening test of some non-inverting unity gain op-amp buffers. It turned out that a few people appeared to be able to discriminate differences between the op-amps at least to some degree.

It seems that hearing very low levels of distortion is more a function of brain processing than ear functioning. For example, I am retired, have hearing loss, can't hear much HF anymore, yet I was able to sort the op-amps to some extent in correlation with their measured distortion.

Another very interesting result had to do with ABX testing. A few people reported they could not hear any difference between the files, and that they scored below average in ABX testing using Foobar2000.

However, it turns out Foobar incorrectly reports statistical scores of how well people do. If someone gets 50% of the trials correct, Foobar says there is a 50% chance they are guessing, and if they get 0% correct there is 100% chance they are guessing. But that is wrong, guessing should result in 50% correct, and 0% correct should be as difficult as 100% correct.

Anyway, in this case the few listeners reported low scores and high chances of guessing, and they believed they could hear no differences. The interesting thing is that their low scores appear to indicate that part of their brains were reacting to distortion that was present and biasing them to choose non-randomly and inversely to what they were trying to do.

Also, although I could sort the files by distortion levels fairly well, I also showed the reverse correlation effect when trying ABX testing.

Although this was an informal test involving a small sample of self-selected participants, the results suggest that there may be some merit to claims that very low levels of distortion are audible to at least some people, and that ABX testing may not be the most reliable way to test for that ability.

At least for me, it would be very interesting to see more formal research in this area to try to better pin down what is and what is not possible, and how to best perform testing.

While it may be of little interest to most people what only a few people may hear, there is some suggestion that the ability to hear low level distortion may be latent in more people than we know, and that training and practice may help a great deal to develop what may turn out to be more of a skill than a natural talent.
 
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While it may be of little interest to most people what only a few people may hear, there is some suggestion that the ability to hear low level distortion may be latent in more people than we know, and that training and practice may help a great deal to develop what may turn out to be more of a skill than a natural talent.

Surely, in many ways, learning to hear distortion is a *bad* thing - you are better served by not hearing it; it serves no useful purpose...
 
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It may serve a useful purpose if one seeks to become a mastering engineer, or if one wishes to design amplifiers for sale to others.

Perhaps for the engineer, but unless the others you sell to have been trained to hear it - perhaps not so useful. Or, only relevant if your market is exclusively that very small proportion of people that have learned to hear it.

But - a more useful process might be to learn how to unlearn hearing those minute distortions...
 
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