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Re:ears

>To add fuel about sounds and feels of sound, I read somewhere a great
>history for those who think that beyond 20 Khz (at best) there is no
>reason to possibly ear anything.

I think it's actually Mr. Neve who talks about this. I think the deal is
that you can't hear a continuous tone over 20KHz (lower if you've abused
your ears like me....)  but you can discern transients that have higher
frequencies. I think Neve would demonstrate this by switching a 15KHz sine
wave and a 15KHz square wave. All the frequencies that make it a square
wave are above the human range of hearing, so it should sound the same as
the sine wave, but supposedly it doesn't.


>felt something uncomfortable in the high end without being able to
>pinpoint what. In the end after testing of the unit. The people of
>(either Neve or SSL) discovered that the unit had on a few inputs, some
>bad soldering things that created a frequency peak at ... 56 KHz!

If there is a big peak at 56KHz, it would very likely be having an affect
on frequencies below 20KHz, which might be what the guy was hearing. The
"skirt" of the filter....


>We are certainly (I mean i am) talking highly trained ears, but that
>says a bit long on what we really know about the possiblity sounds can
>affect us. I mean this guy is paid to work with his ears. Where he
>would  say "that doen't work" we just would say "I don't like too much
>that sound. And probably only would we note that in a rather unconscious
>way, so it just would be a discomfort feeling... See what I mean?
>The funny story is that is was digital signals... You know this things
>that don't run higher than 22050 kHz (or 48 if you sample @96kHz...).

well, that's another thing with poor quality digital gear. If the audio
input is not filtered right  and you put higher frequencies into it, they
will alias into the audio. Basically they mirror around the 1/2sample rate
frequency. It's sort of a cool affect, but a terrible thing to do to music.
If the aliasing frequencies are low in the first place, the result will be
subtle and give you that uncomfortable feeling.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                   | Looper's Delight
kflint@annihilist.com       | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html
http://www.annihilist.com/  | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com