General Asylum

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

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

Re: Shedding some more light...

Posted by Ralph on June 20, 2005 at 22:24:13:
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 ...