On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:58:09 -0700, vlad wrote
(in article ):
On Sep 15, 6:30=A0pm, Audio Empire wrote:
Actually, there's no evidence presented to support that assertion.
You presented your private experience of experiencing "fatigue"
after listening of couple of CD's. I presented results of my own
analysis why CD takes more efforts from me to listen. So we are even,
so far - each of us presented his own opinion.
Logically speaking, if you're going to go down that path, the
record noise and
especially the "horrible distortion" of LP playback should cause
far more
listening fatigue than the clean purity of CD.
It is not obvious, it is just your strawman :-) It is possible,
that some forms of distortion are pleasing to the ear/brain ( is it
what they call 'euphonic'?) at the same time reduce flow of
information making it easier and more pleasant for the ear/brain to
process. May be, LP distortions fall into this category. Sorry, but I
have no scientific evidence for that :-). Just my guess. I personally,
prefer CD's.
You can't have it both ways.
Study after study, over many decades, have shown that various types
of
distortion are THE primary CAUSE of listening fatigue.
Care to provide reference or URL? My uninformed opinion is that
you took this from the thin air.
And even such studies exist, how did it happen that distortions
of
LP are exempt from results of these studies?
Who says that they are exempt in any way or form.
If you (and Mr.
Kruger) are going to go on record (no pun intended) by asserting
that the
clarity and freedom from distortion in CD is what causes listener
fatigue in
CD, due to the extra detail present in digital recordings, then you
are
flying in the face of countless scientific studies which have found
that just
the opposite should be true.
References, please. I strongly suspect that you are inventing
these studies :-) But of course it is just my private opinion.
Well, off the top of my head I know that Bell Labs did a number of tests
during the 1930's of these phenomenon, and Harry Olsen of RCA Labs did some
in the 1940's and seems to me that I recall that Benjamin Bauer of CBS Labs
did similar studies in the 1950s or 1960's. I've been in audio A LONG TIME
and have read thousands of articles on this and other subjects. But the
biggest ally for my assertion is common sense. If something sounds distorted,
or noisy in a way that bothers a listener (and this could be subliminal) he
or she is not going to listen to it for long. Of course, gross distortions
will get an immediate reaction and people will stop listening, but more
subtle forms of distortion may not drive the listener away immediately, but
could do so over a long listening session.
One Forum that I looked had a respondent go so far as to say:
"For me many factors contribute to listening fatigue. One of the main ones is
CD Red Book quality audio which has less low level information than all but
the worst analog recordings, if that. Meaning there is just less involvement
possible with the music, so the recording flaws stand out more. I was
semi-enthusiastic about SACD and DVD Audio for a while wrt to resolving the
low level resolution and brick wall cutoff problems with Red Book, but it
appears they are going by the wayside."
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi...ening-fatigue-
14.html
Not so sure that I buy that, but it is a thought.
Just a cursory search on Google found this description on Wikipedia:
"Listener fatigue occurs when the ear tunes out unwanted noises and focuses
on the wanted ones. When listening to music for example, the speakers may
give off an unwanted hissing noise that the person has to focus out, causing
"Listener Fatigue".
This is an extension of the quantifiable psychological perception of sound,
adding time-variance effects.
This subject is not well covered on the internet because most of these
research papers haven't been posted.
However, Howard Tremaine's "Audio Cyclopedia" discusses the subject and the
seminal work by Read and Welch, "From Tinfoil to Stereo" mentions listener
fatigue modeling done at Bell Laboratories in 1933. This battery of tests
tended to show that some types of distortion cause greater listening fatigue
than do others. For Instance, Harmonic distortion in amplifiers is more well
tolerated than it is in signal sources such as phonograph records and radio
reception, but that intermodulation distortion was poorly tolerated wherever
it occurred and very small measured amounts is clearly audible.
If you want to look for more and better cites, than I provided, be my guest,
but be advised that this information is thin on the ground.
My only real assertion here is that distortion on some level and of some
kinds cause listener fatigue. This is well known. CDs have LESS distortion
than analog sources and should therefore NOT cause listening fatigue. That it
does for some people is a fact, that I don't even pretend to understand. I
don't think anybody does.