Hi,
At 56 I comprehensively cannot hear anything above about 14kHz
unless its at earsplitting levels that would drive 20 year olds nuts.
If all posts about supertweeters mentioned the listeners age, you
would be well one the way to understanding the vagaries of such
nonsense people think they can hear, when they simply cannot.
rgds, sreten.
At 56 I comprehensively cannot hear anything above about 14kHz
unless its at earsplitting levels that would drive 20 year olds nuts.
If all posts about supertweeters mentioned the listeners age, you
would be well one the way to understanding the vagaries of such
nonsense people think they can hear, when they simply cannot.
rgds, sreten.
I acknowledge that fact. What I cannot get over is the fact that the sound is more 'open', realistic and delicate when the super tweeter is in use. It is very similar in effect to flicking my PS Audio DAC from 48 to 96 then to 192kHz. The latter has the most frequency range above 'human hearing' but it makes a difference. This effect has been explained in audio forums and journals many many times and it seems to be the internal ear hairs and the tiny bones picking it up, rather than the eardrum itself.
I did come across THIS explanation of the positive effects of super tweeters:
I think a very good case can be made for the use of super-tweeters from first hi-fi principles. Indeed, I have an argument for the use of super-tweeters that does not even require any listening, critical or otherwise.
If the first principal of hi-fi, the founding axiom as it were, is to reproduce as closely as possible the original acoustic event, and the original acoustic event contains frequency content that only a super-tweeter can reproduce, the use of a super-tweeter is necessarily entailed to reproduce those frequencies so as to recreate the original event as closely as possible. Otherwise, it just ain’t as hi-fi as it could be and is not the point of it all? (Actually, I am not sure it is. The purpose of domestic hi-fi, I think, ought to be enjoyment and education. But that’s another story.)
The Explanation
I can hear some of the more vociferous voices of hi-fi lunacy right now. The human ear, they say, particularly ears with hairs sticking out of them, can not hear frequencies high enough for a super-tweeter to make any difference. Moreover, the good Dr. Nyquist’s theory states that the maximum frequency that can be reproduced digitally with bog standard pulse code modulation is half the sampling frequency. For Redbook CD, that’s 22kHz, tops. What’s more, most CD players use a brick wall filter well below this theoretical maximum leaving, effectively, even less music for dogs and bats. And while, of course, SACD does go higher than 20kHz, a byproduct of Direct Stream Digital is ultra sonic noise that you will not want to hear unless you like Sonic Youth played at 78, which I do.
But there are also, I would like to add, a number of a posteriori or empirical arguments supporting the use of super-tweeters, aside from the fun of scaring bats, and the dogs and other vermin, none particularly welcome in the listening room. There is, for example, credible evidence that the human brain can sense sonic events of between 10uS to 20uS (equivalent to 100Hz to 50kHz. (Acuity of Laterising Transients Klump and Eady, 1956. See also Yost, 1971). In terms of a listening to a point source this is the same as a listener being able to detect a shift of 1 degree laterally. While this is for steady state sources, it has been reported that for random sources may even be better.
Furthermore, neuron firing in auditory nerves can be detected above 20kHz in healthy humans. This spatial detection is not just dependent on the relative amplitude of sounds, the ear can also detect astonishingly small differences in phase, good transient response over a wide band from the acoustic source will help with transients and with the original sound field being accurately reconstructed. If the same transient signal is fed to two speakers of headphones and one of the signals is made to lead in time the signal leading in time will sound louder and be dominant, this effect can be detected down to 2uS for detecting (Jeffress and Hafter, 1968). In real sound sources, i.e. those not manufactured with the help of a Robert Moog, but rather an Antonio Stradivari, audible beat tones can be generated from ultrasonic energy in the sources. Such beat tones do contribute to the timbre of the music and should, it would seem, be retained if you are to maintain the highest standards of fidelity.
Of course you may say if you record these sources you also record the beat products tones so the super-tweeters are not needed. But most recordings are multi tracked, rarely are all the instruments and vocals recorded at the same time, with over dubs more common than not, that such beat tones rarely if ever exist on the recording. However a wideband audio system is capable of reproducing these. Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing is, as with many things in audio, a matter of taste. And for those of who like to listen to very loud music at very high volumes, at high SPL air inter-modulates (above around 130dB) and to accurately reproducing such inter-modulations could also be an interesting reason for having a supertweeter. Cerwin Vega, who know more than most when it comes to busting ear drums, have done a lot of work on this for their coaxial drivers with ribbon tweeters.
The above empirical arguments I cribbed (to put it politely, plagiarism is probably closer to the truth) with the help of Southern Ontario based audio engineer who has spent a lifetime looking into these and other problems. This, our intrepid designer hastened to add was prefaced on the distinction that such super-tweeters did not begin only begin to work at 50kHz and go on from there. Obviously, then, the Golden Sound Super Tweeter, reviewed very well elsewhere I should add, a super-tweeter that only begins at 1GHz (!!!) need not apply.
I did come across THIS explanation of the positive effects of super tweeters:
I think a very good case can be made for the use of super-tweeters from first hi-fi principles. Indeed, I have an argument for the use of super-tweeters that does not even require any listening, critical or otherwise.
If the first principal of hi-fi, the founding axiom as it were, is to reproduce as closely as possible the original acoustic event, and the original acoustic event contains frequency content that only a super-tweeter can reproduce, the use of a super-tweeter is necessarily entailed to reproduce those frequencies so as to recreate the original event as closely as possible. Otherwise, it just ain’t as hi-fi as it could be and is not the point of it all? (Actually, I am not sure it is. The purpose of domestic hi-fi, I think, ought to be enjoyment and education. But that’s another story.)
The Explanation
I can hear some of the more vociferous voices of hi-fi lunacy right now. The human ear, they say, particularly ears with hairs sticking out of them, can not hear frequencies high enough for a super-tweeter to make any difference. Moreover, the good Dr. Nyquist’s theory states that the maximum frequency that can be reproduced digitally with bog standard pulse code modulation is half the sampling frequency. For Redbook CD, that’s 22kHz, tops. What’s more, most CD players use a brick wall filter well below this theoretical maximum leaving, effectively, even less music for dogs and bats. And while, of course, SACD does go higher than 20kHz, a byproduct of Direct Stream Digital is ultra sonic noise that you will not want to hear unless you like Sonic Youth played at 78, which I do.
But there are also, I would like to add, a number of a posteriori or empirical arguments supporting the use of super-tweeters, aside from the fun of scaring bats, and the dogs and other vermin, none particularly welcome in the listening room. There is, for example, credible evidence that the human brain can sense sonic events of between 10uS to 20uS (equivalent to 100Hz to 50kHz. (Acuity of Laterising Transients Klump and Eady, 1956. See also Yost, 1971). In terms of a listening to a point source this is the same as a listener being able to detect a shift of 1 degree laterally. While this is for steady state sources, it has been reported that for random sources may even be better.
Furthermore, neuron firing in auditory nerves can be detected above 20kHz in healthy humans. This spatial detection is not just dependent on the relative amplitude of sounds, the ear can also detect astonishingly small differences in phase, good transient response over a wide band from the acoustic source will help with transients and with the original sound field being accurately reconstructed. If the same transient signal is fed to two speakers of headphones and one of the signals is made to lead in time the signal leading in time will sound louder and be dominant, this effect can be detected down to 2uS for detecting (Jeffress and Hafter, 1968). In real sound sources, i.e. those not manufactured with the help of a Robert Moog, but rather an Antonio Stradivari, audible beat tones can be generated from ultrasonic energy in the sources. Such beat tones do contribute to the timbre of the music and should, it would seem, be retained if you are to maintain the highest standards of fidelity.
Of course you may say if you record these sources you also record the beat products tones so the super-tweeters are not needed. But most recordings are multi tracked, rarely are all the instruments and vocals recorded at the same time, with over dubs more common than not, that such beat tones rarely if ever exist on the recording. However a wideband audio system is capable of reproducing these. Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing is, as with many things in audio, a matter of taste. And for those of who like to listen to very loud music at very high volumes, at high SPL air inter-modulates (above around 130dB) and to accurately reproducing such inter-modulations could also be an interesting reason for having a supertweeter. Cerwin Vega, who know more than most when it comes to busting ear drums, have done a lot of work on this for their coaxial drivers with ribbon tweeters.
The above empirical arguments I cribbed (to put it politely, plagiarism is probably closer to the truth) with the help of Southern Ontario based audio engineer who has spent a lifetime looking into these and other problems. This, our intrepid designer hastened to add was prefaced on the distinction that such super-tweeters did not begin only begin to work at 50kHz and go on from there. Obviously, then, the Golden Sound Super Tweeter, reviewed very well elsewhere I should add, a super-tweeter that only begins at 1GHz (!!!) need not apply.
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