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Listener fatigue: what does it really mean?

Okay, so I used to think that listener fatigue meant that your ears just kind of got tired from listening to speakers that were overly bright. I don't have a good understanding of the make up of an ear, but I believe there are muscles in an ear that, I guess, expand and contract while we listen to music and I figured that's what it meant to have listener fatigue. Now, I'm thinking that listener fatigue is maybe more than your ears just getting tired but actually, your whole body getting tired and feeling drained. I experienced this time and time again listening to my paradigm studio's. They are somewhat bright and provide quite a bit of detail in my oppinion, so I'm wondering if, since there was such a great amount of detail coming through, that it was physically draining because I'm sitting there analyzing everything that's coming through the speakers. I would wake up and first thing in the morning, grab a cup of coffee and start listening to music (my daily routine) and 20-30 minutes later start nodding off and I couldn't figure out what was going on. I've been sitting here this morning listening to my new vandersteen's for two hours and can't get enough. I feel like I could listen all day and that I'm almost energized from listening vs. drained.

Soooo, what are your oppinions about what listener fatigue is and why it's caused?
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geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Mapman, my gut is you would probably like Boones Farm.

;-)
petepappp
37 posts
 
I find Ralph's response extremely interesting as I detect a hint of the significance of the subjective experience as a significant part of the musical equation. I don't think engineers like thinking like this, fortuneately for us subjective listeners, although I think he took his oscilloscope and sound meter with him into the netherlands. This poses an interesting question. If Ralph was able to build an amplification system that "trips all the audiophile triggers", dropping us to our knees in tears through manipulating the presentation of the source signals, would the system be considered high fidelity and would he be raped by the audio reviewing and audio engineering community for manufacturing inaccurate equipment? The Shehanian Diopsan/ Stereophile debacle comes to mind.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,931 posts
 
Csontos, you are spot on.

The specs an amplifier has on paper don't reflect the whole story though. An amplifier with very low distortion with steady state signals (sine waves, used to test for distortion) can act quite differently when asked to reproduce a waveform that is constantly changing.

The feedback used in the amplifier can have a huge bearing on this phenomena. So it does not follow that the lowest distortion on paper will also be the least fatiguing.

Generally speaking, the use of feedback in an audio circuit will reduce most forms of distortion but will leave audible amounts of odd ordered harmonic distortion caused by the ringing of the signal in the circuit due to propagation delays in that circuit. In a nutshell, the feedback always arrives back at the input of the circuit slightly too late to do its job right.

The higher the frequency, the more pronounced this problem becomes. Since our ears use the odd orders to sort out how loud a sound is, essentially the use of negative feedback in an audio circuit violates one of the most fundamental rules of human hearing. To avoid this you have to avoid the use a negative feedback.

Such amps and preamps that do so will seem to have higher distortion on paper, but quite often will have less listener fatigue on this account.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,406 posts
 

"Mapman, my gut is you would probably like Boones Farm."

Probably not. I like wine but am not crazy about most wines out of the bottle. I prefer to add my own "tweaks" as needed in most cases.
csontos
1,311 posts
 
Ralph, I gotta hear you tell me it's possible that odd ordered harmonic distortion in an ss amp can be low enough to render it inaudible with or without NFB. Please tell me it's so. I don't wanna buy a tube amp:)
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