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Sadly, you have absolutely no idea what modern laboratory equipment can measure.

Your ear is really a poor transducer, though it has an incredible analyzer hooked up to it. Hell, even my dog can hear far better than any human I know. A tiny example of what an acoustic lab can do without effort, yet you couldn't possibly do: I was in a "live room," a room with highly reflective walls. In other words, it was an extremely bright room. The room was about 25 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 20 feet high. A short burst of sound is introduced into the room, and it echoes around for a long time. Then a piece of some material, say acouctical tile or a seat cushion about 10 x 10 inches in placed on one wall. The sound is repeated, and from measurements of the decay, it is possible to accurately measure the absorption coefficient of sound by the material as a function of frequency to very high accuracy. Yet it is far beyond the ability of human hearing to even be able to detect whether that piece of material is there or not in the test.

You can't hear sound at 10 Hz or 50 Khz, but lab equipment can. You cannot detect which signal is louder if they differ by 0.01 dB, but lab equipment easily can, You could not detect if a notch 5 Hz wide and 0.1 dB deep centered at 1000 Hz was cut out of a speaker's response, but that would be simple to measure in a lab. The list goes on and on.

The sensitivity of lab measuring equipment is so far beyond what your ears can hear that you might not even believe it if if you saw it demonstrated.

Joe


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