bob wrote:
Jenn wrote:

Indeed; it IS basic. Question: What are the audible symptoms of
harmonic distortion? Answer (and please correct me if I'm wrong): Poor
tone quality, faulty attack and release, noise (i.e. sounds that aren't
part of the music), faulty room resonance, distorted imaging.

I think you're wrong, in the sense that we don't really know much about
*how* particular distortions are perceived by listeners--or, for that
matter, whether most listeners perceive it the same way. But this isn't
something we really need to know.

Strange. You are not interested in investigating how people experience
distortion in musical terms, and yet you are absolutely sure that some
distortion in analog is what is responsible for triggering live music
pattern-recognition neural machinery. This in spite of the fact that
every proposed distortion mechanism would *change* the patterns that
musicians have carefully established in the music.




I listen to the gear using a known recording and compare the sound I am
hearing with the actual sound of instruments being played; a sound with
which I'm very, very familiar.

Yes, you've said. And you think you're very good at making this
judgment. But all the evidence I've seen suggests that, to the extent
that this is a testable skill rather than mere circular reasoning, you
aren't every good at it at all.


How do you propose to test the skill?

Mike