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In Reply to: RE: It sounds better for real when it obeys human hearing perceptual rules. posted by Stephen R on June 8, 2021 at 13:10:34:
I've seen testing where difference in components can be identified; where they deviate from their ideals but how that translates into how it sounds seems to be missing although there is some correlation to the quality of the result.
The less the parts behave as their ideals the less the circuit will perform as it should. We can describe this as distortion. Parts can be testing in a bridge circuit to sort out what is real and what is expectation bias. There's usually some way to sort out what is real and what isn't.
For example capacitors have different ESR (Extended Series Resistance) values based on construction including the dielectric used. A cap that has a lower ESR is going to act more like a cap than one that has a higher ESR. This should be particularly true at audio frequencies.
And so on. You don't want the passive components contributing to distortion if you can help it.
I think our test equipment is sensitive enough. Finding the will to use it properly is something else altogether! It does no good to know the distortion if you don't also know what the spectrum of harmonics looks like. That takes more work and a person has to cause their hand to move to get it done. Most don't.
Its also a good idea to keep an open mind about some of the old tropes like 'if it has high THD it will have high IMD too' which as it turns out is false. More has to do with the nature of the HD, whether generated by a quadratic non-linearity as opposed to cubic, that sort of thing.
There are some things we've known for a long time; Norman Crowhurst was writing about the distortion caused by feedback but it took until this century to sort out the implications.
I guess I'm saying that more has to do with what we know about how things work rather than the limitations of our test equipment. When you think you know everything that's when you're more likely to make dumb mistakes.
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Follow Ups
- Parts can make it sound better for real. - Ralph 06/8/2114:09:11 06/8/21 (1)
- RE: Parts can make it sound better for real. - Stephen R 14:25:32 06/8/21 (0)
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