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Re: Shedding some more light...

Do you have any spectra of how these things do when reacting with something other then a sine wave? Trust me it would be very different! That's where we usually get into trouble with the graphs.

GE did well-documented research back in the 60s that demonstrated the human response to even and odd ordered harmonics and it is that to which I refer.

Of course, musical instruments have odd ordered harmonics. Most sounds in nature do- what GE found was that responding to that for loudness cues is much more efficient then responding to the entire sound.

You might try a simple test- play a 400Hz sine wave at 0db, then distort the hell out of it and play it back at -20db and see which sounds louder- This experiment is a real eye opener. Even though the meter is telling you that the undistorted signal has more energy, your ears want to tell you something else as they use different rules.

What seems to be needed to really see what is going on is a test that allows one to measure the harmonics generated with an input waveform that is in constant and complex change. So far no such a test has been devised so the results we get do not always reflect what we hear. The industry has spent way too much time measuring things of no importance ...

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