Explaining supertweeters?

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#3
From the article.... " the question of whether the existence of such “inaudible” high-frequency components may affect the acoustic perception of audible sounds remains unanswered"

Well no it has been answered.. of course it does. Out of band content from a driver can and does impact the overall sound of a system, we see this in the overlap region between drivers inside the audible range, if a driver has significant response peaks from cone breakup for example they will be audible if not handled correctly. But also consider that there are always harmonics being produced above and below a primary tone so even if that tone is beyond the limits of human hearing, if the output level is high enough the lower harmonics can still be audible.

So maybe the real question here is are supertweeters necessary to achieve this? IDK... there are plenty of regular tweeters that can go to and beyond the limits of human hearing so maybe not.
 
#4
I still don't understand, however, how the HFCs referred to in the paper can be recorded and reproduced in the typical consumer audio chain. If audio engineers and playback media aren't specifically trying to retain those frequencies, how do they make it from the concert hall to my listening room, even if I have a transducer capable of reproducing them?
 
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#5
It is a question that puzzled me as well. I only can tell that super teeeter can do “magic” to the overall listening experience. If it is worth the effort it is up to you naturally.
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#6
I have wondered this for a long time. I have had the belief that higher tones matter for listening even if they are higher than that supposed hearing limit checked with test tones.
Really I once configure a quick speaker configuration with a horn that did not have any response above 12K. It really sounded bad to me and fixing the above 12K range really mattered.
 
#9
Baffless said:
If you use non oversampled DAC without steep filter or some material where spectrum goes well above 20khz than it could make diference..
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I'm not sure that would make a difference in a musical sense for most material. There can be noise passed by this poorly implemented DAC, but anyone who recorded the music would have limited the music input to below nyquist so in the case of redbook, nothing about about 22KHz.

Sheldon
 
#10
Zuman said:
I still don't understand, however, how the HFCs referred to in the paper can be recorded and reproduced in the typical consumer audio chain. If audio engineers and playback media aren't specifically trying to retain those frequencies, how do they make it from the concert hall to my listening room, even if I have a transducer capable of reproducing them?
Click to expand...
If the initial recording is done in the analog realm with no HF limit imposed then everything gets recorded even that which is inaudible, for example some old recordings have unintended LF content that nobody knew was there until subwoofers became a thing. If after that the recording is band limited then the harmonics belonging to those ultrasonic sounds are still present and that is all that is needed for the brain to infer that it hears the primary tone. Production engineers have been using this characteristic of human hearing for some time now, bass processors fool us into thinking we hear sub bass content by adding LF harmonics for example, so the same thing can be done with HF content if somebody in the production chain deems it necessary.
 
#12
They're only heard as byproducts of intermodulation distortion with sounds in the audible region occuring within the transducer. Alone, they're inaudible. Since any audible range IMD products that might occur within the instrument will already have been captured by the microphone, there's no need to introduce a further source of distortion.

There's a good paper on this by Kaoru Ashihara and Shogo Kiryu called "Audibility of Components Above 22 kHz in a Harmonic Complex Tone".
 
#14
Presbycusis. Here's an authoritative test which wisely uses warble tones (no need to fret about absolute calibration); only the brave will take the test:

https://hearingtest.online/

Test also works just fine with speakers (esp good ones) and you can even do separate ears with an ear plug. Don't blame me if you're real depressed after testing your hearing, I'm just the messenger.

1. psychologists generally believe if you can't sense something, it has no effect on you, believing otherwise is kind of like believing in conspiracy theories; but having said that, the way a listener is queried about what they are hearing can influence what they report

2. it is recognized today that a lot of seemingly good published research is false, in many or all fields of study.

3. especially at home, very challenging to change one thing (like a tweeter or tweeter passband) and have only one thing change for the listener; for example, let's say you've added super-tweeter sounds, it is possible that something in your room or in your ear canal is vibrating sympathetically or otherwise changing the sound or dispersion index or..... maybe the power of the super-tweeter is screwing up your hearing even though you can't hear it and maybe sone people will say they prefer the new screwed-up sound
 
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