Some interesting thoughts on digital and other forms of audio, hearing, perception, testing, sampling rates, recording techniques and more.

I enjoyed the read, perhaps others will too  http://www.stereophile.com/content/2011-richard-c-heyser-memorial-lecture-where-did-negative-frequencies-go - http://www.stereophile.com/content/2011-richard-c-heyser-memorial-lecture-where-did-negative-frequencies-go

Pity, I found your anecdote more in keeping with the spirit of the thread than the comment that caused you to remove it.

Glad some others are finding interest in that article at any rate.

I could be way out in left field here and completely missing what you are all talking about, that would not surprise me, nor would it be a first.

My remembrance of that section of his exposition was not that he was denying the validity of that illusion, nor of its importance as a method of evaluating the relative merits of reproduction equipment.

In fact, his Harry Potter quote, to me indicated quite the opposite.

What he seemed to me to be attempting, was to make the point that this is solely our mental construct, created from the information fed to and interpreted by, our senses or more particularly, our hearing.  Further, he is making the point that this construct is our only reality (in this particular case).

This understanding, to me, makes sense of the issue known as "listening fatigue" and also of another condition that I have personally observed which is almost the opposite.

I particularly observed listening fatigue with one setup where the speakers were spaced very wide apart on the long wall of an approximately 20' x 10' room, after a period of listening I noticed myself becoming tired and realised it was from the mental effort of drawing the speakers closer together to make sense of the sound stage.  Another issue of cognitive dissonance that I commonly have is when situated too close to multidriver speakers (I have only used single drivers for some years), where I find the sound confused and confusing until I move sufficiently far away to allow the different sources to coalesce.

I suspect the more common type of listening fatigue to be caused when there are too many dissonances arriving at the ear and subliminal adjustment to filter them out and maintain the musical construct becomes exhausting.

The corollary I have experienced, being when the representation of the musical event is so encompassing as to allow complete immersion in the music, with the result of feeling emotionally drained at the end of a piece and completely satiated, not wanting to listen to anything else immediately, but just to savour the afterglow of the recent event.  Much as one might at a live performance.

In order to achieve this state, it seems to me that there must be sufficiently little  in the reproduction process/chain,  to impinge on the subconscious and damage the illusion being created, thereby allowing one to relax into the music and for the emotions to fully engage with the content of the work.

I found his discussion intellectually stimulating and felt others might too, I shared the link for that reason, certainly not to make any particular point or to make any claim to authority on any particular issue raised or discussed therein.

True enough db and there a few interesting places that observation leads as well.

I will leave them for now though, what I wanted to comment on was the way that articles like this have so many things in them that come back when reading other articles that seem to expand or enlarge on particular issues.  

The particular example that prompted this post was from reading the series on tnt-audio on digitising records and particularly on p4 - http://www.tnt-audio.com/sorgenti/rip_it_4_e.html - http://www.tnt-audio.com/sorgenti/rip_it_4_e.html in the section discussing digital manipulation and the problems with doing so in 16 bit as opposed to using at least 32 bit float.  

I thought of the example he gave of the CD remaster job that he commissioned where there was audible difference from the master that he had not expected from the work that had supposedly been done.  

It occurred to me that this might have been a case of the issues to which Werner refers in his discussion, of increased quantisation errors and noise creation caused by mathematical inexactitude when processing in 16 bit depth.

All food for thought.