Do we crave distortion?

[Keith_W]

Well, I suppose the amount of 2nd/3rd harmonics added by my direct-heated tube buffer IS sufficient to mask higher order products, because it sounds subjectively significantly cleaner to me. I'd love to be subject to a double-blind test.

That can be easily arranged. We can create a file with the distortion built in and see how many can tell which one has the distortion or "sounds better". How many are interested?

 

[DavidMcRoy]

How do you know?



Are you absolutely sure that you are hearing any disortion at all?

Part of my hypothesis is that people (inluding myself) are appallingly bad at detecting distortion in music playback. It takes specific training to gain the ability to detect low level distortion in music, and once you have that ability the notion of it being pleasing disappears completely. It would make way more sense if it turned out that we aren't really finding distortion itself pleasing, but are instead enjoying some simple side effect of it.

I appreciate your skepticism. I worked in audio for video and broadcast TV audio for 40 years, so I consider myself a "trained listener."

 

[DavidMcRoy]

That can be easily arranged. We can create a file with the distortion built in and see how many can tell which one has the distortion or "sounds better". How many are interested?

I'm game! Let's do it.

 

[DavidMcRoy]

Eh, I think I may have been unclear. There’s a sort of sonic characteristic that’s unmistakably archaic in those recordings. Is it owing to mixing decisions or limitations in devices, I do not know. I do know that whenever a sense of familiarity crops up I’d bring up the player to find it’s a recording from distant past. Italian dishes have much diversity in their tastes, but Italians wouldn’t have dreamed of tacos and sushi, so there is a certain Italian-ness to those dishes after all.

It has always escaped me how the old recordings were preferred yet no new recordings replicated the sound of the past. Think of the arsenal the engineers had in shaping sound, you’d expect they can replicate whatever sound we customers prefer.

Maybe they knew old recordings sound good, but also knew that there are other unimaginable ways a recording may sound good? Same for distortions and other sound treatments.

Sound mixing professionals use tubes and tube plug-ins all the time. I hear it on voice tracks (where all types of distortion are most easily detected, in my experience, because there's no place for it to hide in the brief silences between the words) all day long on some TV commercials, movies, etc. It's a very distinctive sound. Engineers don't do it for their health.

To clarify, I'm talking about pleasant-sounding distortion components that serve to distract the listener from underlying distortion in the signal that may be unpleasant, OR to simply add a pleasant stimulus to an otherwise pristine signal. For all I know there may be an element of nostalgia for that sound for some of us.

Audio production is part of the entertainment industry. It isn't usually a test laboratory for absolute fidelity. I find ultra-clean audio pleasant, but I find just the right kind and amount of added distortion enhances the experience for me, even though it obviously stands in the way of ultimate fidelity. Critics will complain about departures from absolute fidelity, but that might not have been among the goals of the project.

I'm reminded of this story: when confronted by a boardroom filled with record executives in the 1980s who wanted Joni Mitchell to adopt synthesizers into her projects, she protested, "stop trying to interior decorate me out of my music." As the artist, she wanted to be in charge of artistic decisions. (Ultimately, the execs beat her up on it. They hired Thomas Dolby to colaborate with her. His name appears on her album credits, yet Mitchell has never even met him. Those records didn't sell particularly well.)