On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 03:37 -0700, Mike Hanson wrote: > DrNic Wrote: > > I would love to see the spectral map of hearing for the audiophile set > > (and for the techs too) and then lets comment on how good the real > > "final stage" is in their systems... ! :) > Unfortunately, it's not just frequency response that counts here. > There's also the sensitivy to the temporal (i.e. timing) elements of > the music. Also, a system with a flat frequency response that can't > handle dynamics will still sound awful.
I haven't see solid statistics to back it up, but I expect most audiophiles do not have flat ears. From what I can pick up of the demographics, audiophiles are men with money to spend on audio toys. That means they are over 30 and often part of the baby boomer generation. My kid and her friends are very happy with MP3s on iPods. Most of us boomers have two problems with their ears. First, they are old, and hearing gets worse as you get old (can't hear that lion hiding), and second, most of us listened to too much rock and roll in our foolish youth, so tinnitus is a fact of life. But, being 5dB down above 15kHz is not going to prevent appreciation of good reproduction. There just isn't that much up there. And more importantly, as Mike said, it is not all frequency response. Timing and more specifically phase is critical to hearing. Phase is how humans tell where the lion is. It was a critical evolutionary adaption. And now it is how we tell real space from a boombox. The entire "high end" section of audiophiles is based on engineering measurements not being sufficient. Necessary, sure. But not the whole picture. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
