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General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

I don't know for sure but I have one guess

A modest and smoothly declining total power frequency response from 1000 Hz up.

http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/138/

That article doesn't have it but I thought I remember reading that J Gordon Holt asserted with some conviction that because of the way typical recordings are made a smoothly declining frequency response in the room is what actually sounds natural.

JGH: "The rest of the reason is that—regardless of the way measurements are made—loudspeakers persist in not sounding the way their measured response would indicate that they should. Even when heard from a close seat, live instruments never have as much HF energy—harmonics, attacks—as does a loudspeaker whose high end measures flat at the listeni~ng seat."

I've rarely heard a whole bunch of "air" in live classical acoustic performances, unless there's breathy flute player. (I always wondered if this perception was just a little bit of low-amplitude crossover distortion.) (Also violins seem to have more frequency 'up' (i.e. in the direction of where microphones are often hung) than at listening position, so recordings sound tipped up sometimes.)

My guess is that there is a psychological balance of proportion which ought to be be maintained. Think about it like styling automobiles. You could measure each front, middle and rear section and put together some rules, but that doesn't really work. There are balances of the whole which work well but mixing pieces from the 'best' of good solutions doesn't work.

There's also an adaptation in color vision. We adapt to various ambient lighting 'temperature color' (that a camera & film wouldn't and would need adjustment) quite automatically and perceive scenes as natural, but still other colored lighting could easily look unnatural.

So I hypothesize that humans can adapt to certain broad frequency responses but only some subset of those are perceived to be 'natural' and 'musical'.


BTW, re-reading some of JGH's old writings show how much more perceptive, serious, and less uh, marketing-oriented and cliched, audio writing was then. Or maybe it was just him.



Edits: 08/17/14 08/17/14 08/17/14

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