No. 25
REFERENCE SERIES
No. 25 commemorates and celebrates our
quarter century of building the fi nest sub bass
systems, while pointing to the future and our
next 25 years as it employs our most advanced
design, engineering and craftsmanship.Wireless
Here I make a bold claim: the world around you
will continue to sound subjectively the same as
you age. The upper reaches of your hearing sensi-
tivity roll off as the years accumulate, undeniably
and measurably so. As a result, in crowded and
noisy environments you will find it harder to dis-
tinguish what someone is saying to you because
those high frequencies are used, if available, by
the brain to better localise sound and to allow
you to focus on a particular source. But all you
will know is that you find it harder to understand
what someone is saying. It will still seem like it
sounds the same as it always did.
This works a bit like the auto-white-balance in
your eyes. Back when we used film cameras, tak-
ing a photo under incandescent lighting would
result in an orange hue, which was invisible to
your eyes when you were taking it because your
seeing mechanism takes the video feed from your
eyeballs and processes it to look ‘right’, based to a
degree on averaging over time.
And so it is with your ears. Test it yourself.
Take a little cotton wool, loosely ball it up and
put it in your ear canal. Gently, at the very
surface, in just far enough so it won’t easily fall
out, but so that you can readily take it out. Leave
it there for a couple of days—actually, replace it a
couple of times along the way. Note the dullness.
But after a while sounds will no longer seem dull.
They’ll sound kind of normal. But you’ll have
greater trouble understanding what’s being said to
you, or picking out one voice among many while
conversing in a crowd.
Then take out the cotton wool, and suddenly
your world will be full of the tinkle of glassware,
birds tweeting outside the window, the oddly
bright voices of those around you. For a little
while. But soon enough everything will sound
pretty much the same as normal as your hearing
recalibrates to the newly bright signal.
That is, I suspect, why some hearing-impaired
people detest their hearing aids. It’s because eve-
rything sounds harsh and bright on first use. It’s
only by leaving them in for a reasonable period
of time without interruption that the hearing
mechanism can adjust to the tonal balance of the
new signals and make them sound right.Fundamental Misconception
So the fundamental misconception of all those
processors, starting with the ‘Loudness’ control,
is that the undeniable differences in hearing
sensitivity at different frequencies and volumes
requires some kind of redress.
It doesn’t, because our hearing already pro-
vides this. For sure, the treble component of the
music is reduced in level relative to the midranges
when the music is being played at backgroundlevels. But our hearing expects it to sound lower
in level. If doesn’t, the music is going to sound
harsh. The same is the case with respect to bass,
although in this case it tends to make the deeper
bass sound disconnected from the rest of the
sound. Your hearing expects the world to have a
certain frequency balance at any given volume
level. Alter that and it’s going to sound wrong.Gradual Improvements
There was a period a few years ago when many
brands not only had ‘Dynamic’ ‘Volume’ proces-
sors, but switched them on by default. That was
a dark period indeed for sound quality and I
wonder how many people found their equipment
less satisfying because of this issue.
Now, AV receivers mostly still have the proces-
sors, but switch them off by default. Thank good-
ness, although better yet would be to eliminate
them altogether.
If, perchance, you are using a home theatre
receiver, make sure that any such processing
is disabled. Look under the Audio or Audyssey
setup menu, or consult the receiver’s manual.
When you first switch it off, if you’re used to
it, your system may initially sound a little dull,
but just persist for while until the true character
of music has had a chance to assert itself.
Stephen Dawson