> That's referred to as "listener fatigue" right? The
>subconscious reaction to listening to the "sawtooth" of a 44K
>sampled sine wave.
I think it has more to do with the changing styles of audio
production. Today's music production is much more compressed
(dynamic range) than previous. Classical music, jazz and other
acoustical stuff should have very minimal dynamic compression.
Over-compress and you get huge listener fatigue and a pumping
characteristic.
Another, even more sinister aspect is that few CDs today are
mastered by a mastering engineer in a bonified mastering
facility. Recording engineers don't make good mastering
engineers, nor do recording/mixdown studios make good mastering
studios. They make up for it with thousands of dollars worth of
"plug-ins" which trash the music instead of enhance the music.
The photographic equivelent to this is over-saturation.
The sawtooth aspect of the sampled sine wave contributing to
listener fatigue is actually an urban legend. The A-D
converters utilize over-sampling and anti-aliasing filters which
keeps the captured waveform relatively accurate to the original.
You get time-smear, but that manafests itself in spacial
placement of sounds. During playback the D-A converters
actually do a good job of smoothing the waveform. Essentially
it's due to lack of high-frequency response. A low-pass filter
takes out any stair-steps. Elcheepo CD plays tend to have very
poor low-pass filters and also pass on sampling tone in the
audio.
Another problem that MOST cd players have is that the left and
right audio channels are ONE sample out of alignment. You would
only spot that with very costly test equipment.
Think that's bad, wait until I start railing against mpeg
compression algorithms. Most utilizations of mpeg joint-mode
still are 180 degrees out of phase between Left and Right at 1/2
sampling frequency.
You don't want to know where that is used.
AG
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