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RE: It sounds better for real when it obeys human hearing perceptual rules.

Understanding those rules and then applying engineering to meet them is paramount to getting something to sound better. The more you pay attention to the rules the better it will sound.

You wind up with something that measures according to those rules and sounds better at the same time.

That is not the same as saying it will measure well according to the traditional regime, which tends to ignore human perceptual rules.

The best example of that is the distortion signature that any amplifier has. Super low THD won't help you if there is nothing to mask the presence of the higher ordered distortion content that is present. You need the lower orders (2nd, 3rd and 4th) in sufficient quantity to mask the higher orders.

Tube amplifiers are pretty good at this which is why they usually sound smoother than solid state amps despite having greater amounts of higher ordered harmonic content. Quite literally this is why tubes are still around.

You can get class D amps to do this and traditional solid state amps as well, if they have enough gain bandwidth product to support the amount of feedback needed to insure consistent distortion measurements at all frequencies, not just 100Hz.

If you get the distortion signature right, the amp will sound smooth, detailed and neutral; it will be transparent and 'sound better'. If the lower orders are not there the amp will have a brightness and harshness since the ear assigns tonality to all forms of distortion and that is how it perceives the higher orders.

If these facts are ignored in the design- if it is only built to look good on paper (the spec sheet) then how good it 'sounds' will be a crap shoot. Some people will think such a design is 'neutral' but since it is ignoring human hearing perceptual rules this is really expectation bias more than anything else.



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