Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
Eiron wrote:

" Experiments in the late 1940s suggested that the level of audibility
for second and third harmonics was of the order of 0.6% and 0.25%
respectively, and this led to the setting of a target value, within the
audio spectrum, of 0.1% THD, as desirable for high quality audio
equipment. However, recent work aimed at discovering the ability of an
average listener to detect the presence og low order (i.e. second or
third) harmonic distortions has drawn the uncomfortable conclusion that
listeners, taken from a cross section of the public, may rate a signal
to which 0.5% second harmonic distortion has been added as 'more
musical' than, and therefore preferable to, the original undistorted
input. This discovery tends to cast doubt on the value of some
subjective testing of equipment."


In the late '40s the public would not have heard anything approaching what
we consider normal these days for sound reproduction - there was only AM
radio restricted by the lines feeding the transmitters to about kHz, and
of course 78 rpm records. And pretty well all reproducers used single unit
speakers - often large. Amplifiers were invariably SET. So their
perception of what was or wasn't musical was influenced by what they were
used to.

Try actually reading the text, it was talking about the 1940's AND
"recent", i.e its not talking about the 1940's.

--
Nick