The Audio Engineering Society (of which I used to be a member) was publishing quite a bit of laudable research on "Psycho-acoustics" in the late 70's and 80's. Much of the claims mentioned in ED article sound quite familiar to me regarding various double-blind "subjective" test results. I've long known of our extreme sensitivity to phase differences; and used that much to my advantage in much of my work. And those differences can certainly be detected even 100dB (or more) apart.
For example: In listening to various types of RF filters for SSB we hear, for a given complex tone, many harmonically related components. When components become phase (time) shifted we hear that as a wishy-washy sound. We AMer's would typically describe this as not sounding "life-like". How many dB apart are those components? Quite a bit. Now raise that single tone, single channel example an order of magnitude to a complex stereo music signal with a multitude of possible aberrants. Ask any acoustician who tunes performance venues with damping panels about how many dB separation we can hear on minute sound components arriving at the "wrong" time.
Yes, I believe we can hear things we may have difficulty measuring. This is largely because our measurement techniques classically focused too narrowly on small bandwidths and "pure" signals. Digital analysis of more complex waveforms now make such (more "subjective") measurements feasible, although I've yet to see any test results or that sort yet; but I know they're out there.
On the other hand, I also believe the human brain lacks in certain sensitivities; like harmonic distortion. Seems we can tolerate quite a bit of waveform reshaping without being bothered. That's probably why we don't (generally speaking) hear "fuse" non-linearity. Just don't time shift it.
I think the article made good sense of a senseless argument. Only true audio-phools (and I DO mean FOOLS) would scoff at the science presented in lieu of some sensory superiority imbued by the bundle of money they just forked over for that $1,500 EIC AC power cord.
His conclusions, IMHO, were spot on, and likely nothing new to those of us who have worked with tubes and wideband audio. It comes down to the sound of highly damped low-impedance sources (alomost curent sources) versus lightly damped, "high"(er) impedance voltage sources. The comment that any SS amp can sound like a tube amp by inserting a series resistance in the output... PRECIOUS. It's not likely the audio-phools will be sending the author any Christmas card this year. LOL
He neglected to get into the discussion of distortion components being different when driven to excess but again, we all know the results there as well.
Thanks for the heads up Bear. An interesting read from ED to be sure.
Regards,
Mark