William Sommerwerck wrote:
the reverb (natural or added) in
recordings, being low level in nature and most audible when
the music program stops, is the first sonic component to
become masked by the reproduction rooms own sound.


Unless the room is unusually -- or pathologically -- reverberant, this is
not so. The average room's decay time is considerably shorter than the
reverb time of most recordings, and is incapable of masking it.

In terms of pure decibel levels, yes, but I think this is an area where
the brains's perception mechanism plays an important part. If the room's
acoustic is superimposed on the recording's reverb, the brain's auditory
processing get a confused muddle of sound that it knows cannot
coprrespond to a real physical space. Remove the listening room sound,
and if the recorded sound included the natural reverb of a real room,
suddenly you can hear the "shape" of that room and everything becomes
more realistic.

Just a theory, to try to explain DDD's observation.

Anahata