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Psychoacoustics is about correlating what we hear with what we measure

And then using that relationship to design products that fit better with the way we hear in a more scientific, engineering based approach.

starting back in the 1940s (at least if not before) some engineers were looking into the relationship between what most people find the best sounding (whatever that means but hopefully means more like a real instrument in real space) and the measurements of the gear that is generating that more pleasing sound.

Starting with Shorter from the BBC and later Hiraga people have tried to generate corrlations between distortion and listener impact. More sophisticated recent efforts to come up with a quantitative assessment of sound quality can be found in the Thesis of Cheever and the papers from Geddes. Their equations can (in theory at least) be used to evaluate if a design will likely be favorable to listeners or unfavorable sonically.

Keith Howard also looked empirically at what adding different distortion patterns to a digital file would have on the sound quality. Unsurprisingly, he found that no added distortion sounded the best but that a monotonic pattern (exponentially decreasing amplitude of harmonics as the harmonic order increases) was the least offensive and that all odd harmonic (typcial of most push/pull circuits...by design) patterns were the most offensive.

For speakers, work has been done by O'Toole and Geddes and many others where things like driver break up, cabinet resonance, dispersion directivity, dynamic compression etc. are probably more important than harmonic distortion, which is mostly low order anyway in a speaker.

When you take these things into account, and yes it is statistical rather than absolute, you can begin to design products that might in an absolute objectivist sense fall short but will satisfy more people more of the time.

One must never forget that with humans there will always be exceptions that will leave room for dissent and alternative preference for something other than the most psychoacoustically correct designs.

However, for the most part, psychoacoustically correct designs largely do not exist except for trial and error where the designer hit upon some principles leading to a good sound. Only Vladimir Lamm, to the best of my knowledge, claims to use a hearing model to optimize his product designs. Apparently, adherence to the model, rather than listening tests are the key to his products sounds. Based on what I have heard from Lamm products his model must be pretty good.

I don't see it at all as someone trying to "Jam" linearity down anyone's throat. In fact, it is often the case that the less linear "objective" measuring piece of gear is in fact the one that does best psychoacoustically. Read Cheever, he does a good job exposing this.


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