Interesting study on psychoacoustics

[ionomolo]

Human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle

Phase response is much more important than frequency response?

[Speedskater]

While the paper is outside of my range of interest and way over my head, the people who are into it all agree that the title is dumb.

[ionomolo]

Originally Posted by Speedskater

While the paper is outside of my range of interest and way over my head, the people who are into it all agree that the title is dumb.

Dude, the link has sound samples of how distorting a sound in different ways actually alters the sound. I don't question it may be way over your head, but are you sure that these people are "into it" ?

edit: well, they may actually be into selling cables that sound "wide" and "fast". inthis case I totally agree with your post.

[jcx]

sensationalist title - ho-hum content

Human Hearing

[ionomolo]

Originally Posted by jcx

sensationalist title - ho-hum content

Human Hearing

I'm sorry for reposting it then. But I still think the paper has a point. If the human ear is built/evolved upon assumptions about the sounds it's meant to hear, then it may resolve smaller differences between this limited basis of sounds than a totally unbiased analysis would give, owing to the extra information coming from the assumptions. While this does not prove odd audiophile claims (which by the way I mostly don't support) it's still an interesting read. That said, most of what's published on PRL/Nature/Science has a title that is three sizes larger than the contents, one just gets used to it.

But what made me really put the link are the sound samples on the website I linked to, as a sound sample with a wildly distorted amplitude (versus frequency) sounds much closer to the original than one with a wildly distorted phase (versus frequency), even though much more emphasis seems to be placed on amplitude than on phase in adverising and in many design books. It is also one of the few instances when I've got to hear actual samples of the effect of a distortion nstead of ambiguous qulitative descriptions. That I think is really something to take note of.