Article: Dynamic Range Day

[Bullwinkle]

On 3/31/2017 at 2:09 PM, esldude said:

...I have done this for friends I recorded.  Add a bit of compression maybe a touch of reverb.  Let them hear it and the original.  Compressed is preferred.  Add a bit more compression and compare the two compressed versions where more compressed is preferred by them.  Rinse repeat a total of about 6 times.  Then play them the first compressed version and the last most compressed version.  Noses wrinkle, eyes squint, then they say something like what happened to that one.  The least compressed version is preferred and the highly compressed version in comparison sounds 'wrong'.  I wonder how often this accidentally happens and the last comparison never takes place side by side.  Your ear always prefers the slightly louder sound, and compression raises average loudness.  If comparing two already very compressed versions you still may go for the louder even at the point it is very messed up because both are messed up...

 

FYI, there's a very famous paper "Intransitivity of Preferences" published in 1969 in Psychological Review by the late great Amos Tversky that does this very same trick. Tversky called the perceptual structure leading to this type of cycle a lexicographical semiorder. I think I recall Tversky saying that the earliest reported observations of such cycles were for some kind of auditory stimulus too--perhaps varying loudness. I will look it up.