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RE: I think I found one of those articles

the two things that strike me in the article (and the linked article by Lynn Olson) that jump out at me are this thought referenced to Norman Crowhurst:

Research by Norman Crowhurst points out that feedback mostly reduces the level of the 2nd and 3rd harmonics, leaving the upper harmonics more or less alone, or sometimes at higher level than before feedback. It doesn't take very much level of a 5th, 7th, or 9th harmonic to make the sound "bitter", "dry", "clinical", "cold" "small" "dynamically limited" or "harsh". This is all part of the psychoacoustics of distortion and masking.

This is all in reference to feedback reducing distortion and has nothing to do with masking even though both 2nd and 3rd are mentioned.

Later on in the article he does get into masking but at that point the "masking" generator is a tubed circuit that generates only 2nd order distortion and the "tube noise" raises the noise floor to bury all of the existing harmonics higher than 2nd in the increased noise floor.

both of the points that I extracted from a precursory glance do not seem to support the idea that the third harmonic is benign and helps mask higher orders. He does call 2nd order "sonic gold" but in all of the examples the third is way down and not seemingly a factor in the "sonic flavor" I do like that they give both the measured objective and the sonic subjective results for a number of different music selections which allows the reader to get a better feel for the relationships at hand.

dave


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