sdl4 - distortion profiles are intriguing. More generally various forms of aural masking are intriguing. The aural cortex does somersaults to create the mental image we call ’hearing’. The entire chain from live event to listened experience is convoluted. I am committed to Jim’s approach that those factors are the business of those links in the chain. Unraveling and/or compensating for such problems downstream carries its own down-sides. Many products do just that: compensate for upstream deficiencies. One cost is that some sort of signal resolution or fidelity suffers. Philosophically, I would prefer Nelson to work on reducing upper-harmonic distortion rather than masking it with added lower harmonic distortion, which is more distortion, not less.
I should insert a life-long noticing that distortion is quite often a preference, in sound as in much of life.
I’ll also add that DMP’s founder Tom Jung used CS5s as mastering monitors because they helped him find and minimize those upstream artifacts which conversely would remain invisible via masking by downstream products in the service of ’sounding better’.
More later.
