That opens up an interesting point. In my experience (although without truly statistically significant results) people who are fascinated by "analog synth sound" tend to have higher upper hearing boundary frequencies than those who are not. About 10 years ago I could hear up to 16kHz at moderate volumes (did a self-test). Some 2 years ago it went up only to some 13.5kHz (at rather low volumes). Over this time I lost my fascination with analog synth sound. For a while I was then fascinated by certain kind of distorted guitar sound, but now that thing also subsided. I have a conjecture that there might be something (actually various things) in the upper frequency range which entertains the ear and thereby has a rather strong impact on our enjoyment of the sound. At any rate I used to be pretty picky about the details of the sound in the upper frequency range, esp. filter response curves. Some of those things might be even audible only subconsciously. E.g. I might not be able to tell differences in aliasing amounts between two different virtual analog oscillator implementations listened to in isolation, but when starting to use the respective instruments in the mix, the difference became rather obvious, although still difficult to grasp.
Best regards, Vadim On Tue, Dec 5, 2023 at 9:32 AM Frank Sheeran <[email protected]> wrote: > Andy Simper said: > > you need to look at the > > frequency response near nyquist and see how closely it matches > > I think that's mathematically true but how much can people actually hear > above 10kHz anyway? Unless they're like under 12 years old and in that > case who cares what their opinion is of the sound? :-D Maybe I just have > too much hearing damage from my years playing reggae keys but when I was > doing software dev in this stuff a decade ago I couldn't really hear the > top octave at all (at age then of 45 or so). > > -- Vadim Zavalishin Reaktor Application Architect Native Instruments <https://www.native-instruments.com/> – now including iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx
