Hello Fons, On 2026-07-05 01:24, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
Nice to hear from you ! Are you still active in the audio world these days ?
...
yes, I'm working on a new version of DRC right now, to be released in some distant future, as it will be an almost complete rewrite, with quite a different approach. I even created from scratch a complete model of temporal masking (pure tones only), using available literature data, to better evaluate the results.
Here be dragons. There are so much other variables involved when dealing with speakers that I suspect it will be near impossible to 'prove' anything...
Not only for speakers, just an example: no matter how you do it, in the end you have to listen through some transducer, either headphones or speakers. As changing the phase changes the waveform, and transducers are non linear, you incur the risk of hearing a different distortion behaviour instead of the phase itself, with the transducer acting for you as some sort of phase detector.
BTW, that our ear is phase sensitive is obvious, else it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Dirac delta and white noise. Where's the threshold of audibility is the real issue, which, to the limits of my knowledge, is still quite unclear. The phase changes introduced by any decent modern electronic device is going to be inaudible, expecially in the digital world, where it is simply zero, unless you decide to add it on purpose. When you exit the (signal, time, spectrum, mood of the day and whatever dependent) temporal masking window is almost surely going to be audible. In the middle, well, few data and a lot of guesswork.
Bye, -- Denis Sbragion
