As you can imagine there are many types of distortion and Ralph Karsten ie Atmasphere can give you pretty much the lowdown on this.
audible distortion and tube gear?
I know that I have read on this site about "tube sound" having something to do with the way tube gear handles distortion, but would tube gear make it harder to recognize distortion?
The reason I ask is because I have a test CD that has several consecutive tracks of a test tone with no distortion and then on each track distortion is increased by a certain percentage. I am not sure I am hearing what it says I am supposed to be hearing as the distortion increases.
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You need to distinguish "distortion" which the ear likes vs. the kind it doesn't. The ear likes octaves, fifths, etc. I googled it for you and came up with this. |
Either of the below links will supply an info that will assist with this inquiry. I'm sure the content will be challenged by those with their own interpretations of the data.
https://www.sereneaudio.com/blog/what-does-jitter-sound-like
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If you think of distortion as a type of noise, then yes, you could say that if you start with a high amount of noise to begin with you are going to have a harder time, but not impossible, hearing low amplitude noise that's in addition to the original. On the other hand, our ears are pretty good at recognizing differences, so that's why I'd say it's harder, but not impossible. A bigger issue is the room acoustics, IMHO. Clean that up and you can hear a lot of things you could not hear before. |
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