arnyk wrote: > That would have to be a joke, because you can't be serious. Friendly > advice - add an appropriate emoticon. > > > > That's appears to be yet another audiophile myth. > > Hearing: An Introduction to Psychological and Physiological Acoustics > > 5th Edition (2003) > > Stanley A. Gelfand > > Chapter 3 > > " > Temporal summation deals with the relationship between > stimulus duration and intensity when the time frame is less > than about 1 s (see Chap. 9). It is most easily understood by > example. Suppose a subjects threshold for a tone that lasts > 200 ms happens to be 18 dB. Will the threshold remain at 18 > dB when the same tone is presented for only 20 ms? It is found > that when the 20-ms tone is used the threshold changes to > 28 dB. (A similar trade-off is needed to maintain the stimulus > at a constant loudness. This illustrates the general psychoacoustic > observation that when a signal is shortened by a factor of > 10 (e.g., from 200 to 20 ms), the signal level must be increased by > as much as 10 dB to offset the decade decrease in duration. This > relationship is understandably called a time-intensity trade. > " > > IOW, if sound is 10 times shorter, it is up to twice as hard to hear. > *This means that the leading edges of transients are masked due their > short duration*. When you get down to transients measured in > microseconds, the masking is quite significant.
Hi Arny! Sorry about the joke, I was trying to cope with Wombat who's a bit of a jester in his own right :cool: (got it). I'm still ingesting your psychoacoustic stuff, not arguing with it in the slightest. Has anyone put forward any evolutionary reason for this behaviour of our hearing system, which isn't very obvious to me at least. Accepting that mammalian ears have been around quite a while, although obvious certain species (bats, for example are very specifically adapted) have diverged, I would guess that the basic mechanism has had plenty of time for natural selection to do its bit, although evolutionary biology is not my strong suit. I'm curious as to what advantage the phenomenon you describe could bestow... Dave :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Golden Earring's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=66646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914
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