listening fatigue

[tomchr]

Intermodulation distortion. A possible explanation is that IMD triggers the human fight/flight/freeze response.

Tom

 

[sumotan]

Room reflexions and echoes also contribute to listening fatigue. Some reflexions make the sound alive, though. Probably the frequency balance of the reflected sound amplitude and delay is also important.

I observed that there is no listening fatigue if you can talk to another person 1 or 2 meter apart, while you are listening to loud music. I experience this on a Dire Straits live concert, which was really loud but super clean, and we could chat to each other easily. I don't know what was their secret.

If the balance of the sound system is good, reflected sounds don't normally cause fatique. The culprit is mostly due to to much hard treble

 

[abraxalito]

Noise floor modulation, typically caused by ultrasonic interference intermodulating with the music signal.

 

[arivel]

Not sure what causes it, but I get less (or none at all) after I managed to lower distortion in my speaker system below 0.1% at any listening level. Absence of early reflections, smooth frequency response and a very short and diffuse room decay also helps I guess.

how did you get a distortion of 0.1%. ?

 

[63781]

With sufficient headroom.

 

[Hearinspace]

Hi everyone .
What causes listening fatigue other than poor EQ and power amp clipping? .

Needing to construct a composite that makes sense to you .

I used to spend long hours working with a CD playing in the background., and always through system components I had built myself.
When phone calls came in I would hit pause and answer the phone. Because the call was work related , once off the phone I would dive back into work without thinking of the paused CD. Often it would be a few hours before I had taken care of things and was enough at ease to remember music and hit the button again to resume playback. The important part of this experience for me was that I'd hit play without first thinking of what CD had been on , so there was no pre-loaded memory / anticipation of what should be coming out of the speaker next. I could clearly see in those first moments (milliseconds?) the mind scrambling to make sense of the first burst out of the speakers ("what the? Ahhh , clarinet !") , other times there was no having to interpret anything at all , just the clarinet.

I knew a career audio gear salesman who used to take new inventory home with him and listen to it in order to familiarize himself with its character for sales.
He mentioned to me one day how he had been reading the morning paper, having his coffee, with music playing on a component that he had for days found difficult to listen too (and thought he disliked) when all of a sudden it came together and "made sense".

Most music playback is of sound icons that only represent instruments or voices. Very little playback can actually be taken for real. The degree to which your mind has to tell itself a story, or work to ignore something in the sound determines how fatiguing it will be. The causes underlying that are many.

 

[fubar3]

Metalica

 

[mdpaudio]

High levels of odd order harmonic distortion, clipping, and phase anomalies are big contributors. Even order harmonics don’t seem to offend that much. Anything that we don’t normally encounter in nature causes brain strain and listener fatigue. We evolved in a natural world so our systems are designed to deal with things we encounter in nature. Things that are not part of that world cause strain and stress to our biological system. It’s amazing how loud you can comfortably listen to something if it is not clipped, compressed, or odd order distorted. Conversely, even a little of those things gets very annoying at very low levels and can cause headaches and nausea.