Hi John, Again, thanks for writing. Questions and comments always make me think harder because I often realize that I didn't state my question/problem accurately. You have a good point regarding gating. This is often evident to hearing aid users if settings are too abrupt (expansion seems to work better than gating for minimizing some noise). In my case, I use recorded speech and noise stimuli in research. Hearing-loss and cochlear implant simulators are often used so that I can use normal-hearing listeners as research participants. The stimuli may sound natural to normal-hearing listeners. There's often the problem of conditioned listening/hearing (sound design for movies depends on this) versus critical listening. We "expect" things to sound a certain way. In the case of my auralized (better stated as processed) recordings, the artifacts aren't heard--at least not to the normal ear. But if somethng is peculiar about the recording (such as is the case of mp3 files--this relies on psychoacoustics, too), then we can't say it replicates "real-world" listening even if it sounds good or is very hi-fi. Actual recordings with a Soundfield mic don't present the curious artifact. Creating the physical reconstruction of a wave field at the listener's head is ideal--and why I got started on Ambisonics. My IR-processed recordings sound ok--so long as they're played from the beginning of the file. But the artifact clearly indicates there's something very unnatural about the stimuli. Although it can be ignored by normal-hearing persons, I have no idea how the hearing-impaired (to include central auditory processing, not just sensorineural loss) might perceive the wav files--even when played from the start. Anyway, everyone's input is always welcome. I hope my previous note and this post help clarify my question/concern. I'm still learning--and this means learning to formulate questions in understandable ways. I'm very appreciative of people's time and expertise. Thanks and Happy Holidays, Eric
________________________________ From: John Abram <johnbab...@gmail.com> To: Eric Carmichel <e...@elcaudio.com>; Surround Sound discussion group <sursound@music.vt.edu> Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2012 6:50 AM Subject: Re: [Sursound] Ghost in Machine Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but this sounds completely normal to me. The artifacts are simply side effects of starting playback of recorded speech from the middle of a word. Is this situation going to present itself to a person using a hearing aid? I mean does the device itself act as a noise gate? -- with best wishes, John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20121215/461b8332/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound