Jim.....

Last week I had two audio test performed, performed by two different
persons, on my hearing. Do you think it would be advantageous for one to use
their audiogram plots to set the receive equalization in the K3? At age 75
(and spending years on a Nave aircraft carrier) of course my low frequency
range is 'normal' and then my high frequency, starting around 800 Hz starts
dropping drastically. I do have some doubts about these audio test because
if your hearing is 'good', they have no way of selling their over-expensive
hearing aids.

73,
Tom - W4BQF


Subject: Re: [Elecraft] SO2R thoughts

On 3/30/2014 10:38 PM, Stephen Bloom wrote:
> especially something like "fatigue" is pretty subjective

As a retired pro audio engineer and member of both the AES and the
Acoustical Society, I've had to understand issues like this. The study of
human perception and reaction to sound is called psychoacoustics, and the
Acoustical Society has many members studying this stuff at very high levels.

It is VERY well known that listening fatigue related to the listening system
correlates with two factors -- distortion and loudness.  Poor spectral
balance is a form of distortion, but the most obnoxious distortions are
non-linear distortion -- what we try to describe as harmonic distortion and
intermodulation distortion -- and distortions associated with A/D and D/A
conversions.

As Al Lorona has noted, the distortion produced in ANY system is strongly
related to signal levels, and how gains are set. Do it wrong and you can
make things sound nasty in a hurry; do it well and everything is mellow. if
you think your radio is fatiguing, you probably don't know about all that
great stuff that Al posted.  As to the digital distortions -- much of what
we hear occurs if we are listening too close to the the top or bottom of the
converters. Again, getting the gains set right avoids that.

I measured my first K3 (in the first year of production) and found excessive
distortion in the Line Outputs that resulted from wrong-headed design of the
output stage (it was done by a digital guy, who added resistors between the
output stage and the transformer because he incorrectly thought audio stages
were"600 ohms" -- they have not been for at least 50 years).  I communicated
that to Wayne, and it was quickly corrected.

73, Jim K9YC
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