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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: The “Implied Sound” in Audio.
Post Subject: An other dichotomy of audiophysiologyPosted by el`Ol on: 7/26/2008
 drdna wrote:


1. The listener with a preference for euphony.  This person's brain deals poorly with audio "blind spots"/subtractive error and cannot fill in the gap as well.  Conversely, this listener's brain may be better able to process additive error.  Consequently, this listener is more willing to accept distortions and colorations in audio, so long as more of the original signal is also transmitted intact along with any added distortions.

2. The listener with a preference for dry, analytical sound.  This person's brain is very good with subtractive error or not very good with additive error.  They cannot process colorations well, but can fill in the missing gaps in musical signals well.  Thus, they prefer audio with more subtractive error: audio which has minimal added distortions, even if this means more of the original signal is truncated as well.



At the University of Heidelberg they found an other aspect that distinguishes two kinds of listeners. They called them the fundamental listeners and the overtone listeners. It refers to perception of rising vs. falling tone intervals. They established a test that also found its way into the aditional CD of a German hifi magazine. It consisted of a number of artificially created sounds where the fundamental was not present. Instead they consisted of a formant lying at higher overtones. In every sound example (consisting of two following tones) if the virtual fundamental was rising the formant was falling vice versa. The result was that if a fundamential listener percept the interval as rising the overtone listener percept it as falling vice versa. The hifi magazine did an online evaluation to determine the hifi equipment the two kind of listers prefered.

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