"Nick Gorham" wrote in message


Ian Molton wrote:

Up to a point, yes. but as someone else here pointed out - over ~8kHz
humans cant distinguish the difference between sine, triangle,
sawtooth, square at all. thats well below 22kHz.

I think the point made was over 8k sine and square was
indistinguisable.

...to review, that's because the first harmonic that is present in the square
wave is at 24 Khz.

The triangle, being symmertrical also has its first present harmonic at 24
KHz.

The sawtooth lacks half-wave symmetry and therefore has substantial content
at 16 KHz.

I would expect someone who's hearing went beyond 16k to tell the rest
apart.

That is not obvious, because masking can prevent people from perceiving the
lack of signal at frequencies that are lower than the limit of hearing for
pure high frequency sine waves. However, the second harmonic of a 8 KHz
sawtooth is probably strong enough to be noticable.

Actually doing this experiment might be non-trivial because it can be hard
to get really good sawtooth waves to work with.