Weekly AUDIO NEWS for Feb. 21, 2001

Etown Web Magazine Shuts Down - One of the leading web publications covering the audio/video arena closed its doors last week. The company - based in San Francisco - ran out of money and transferred its remaining assets to its main investor, Best Buy. The site, which covered a wide range of electronic products including even microwaves and refrigerators, raised eyebrows last year by switching to strong e-commerce sales directly on the site of products that Etown writers were also reviewing at the same time in a supposedly impartial manner. A tough trick, and it doesn't look like it worked very well.

Evaluation of "Gifted Listeners" - The Communications Research Centre in Ottawa published an interesting paper in the November AES Journal titled "Auditory Models for Gifted Listeners." It starts from the observation that there has been much research into what differentiates those with normal hearing from the hearing-impaired, but almost nothing on what characterizes the so-called Golden Ear. Of course it's a great asset to have better than average hearing in any music or audio work. Such skills are found in audiophiles who are willing to invest large amounts of money in order to achieve the very best audio reproduction quality. (The paper also includes musicians in this group. I think many of us would modify that inclusion - perhaps having the hearing skills, but not in spending the money for better equipment.)

The Centre's tests focused on the subjects' abilities to discriminate very small differences in the quantization noise inherent in various digital codecs (A-to-D and then D-to-A conversion). The codecs tests were all based on using perceptual cues, taking advantage of the fact that most listeners do not hear weak signals which are masked by strong signals of similar frequencies. The unavoidable quantization noise is placed at frequencies where it will be least noticed. Formal listening tests were set up for the subjective evaluation of high-quality audio codecs using a variety of tones, speech and music. The subjects included music students, software engineers, trained musicians, music teachers, audio engineers, a singer and even a piano tuner and composer.

Although the auditory filter bandwidths of these listeners looked normal, some of them had very unusual abilities to detect the weakest signals that were buried in quantization noise. One subject stood out especially strongly in the tests. He could detect a probe signal deeply buried in noise. But he had also been involved in developing the very tests he was taking, and he was extremely careful in making his choices - often taking twice as long as everyone else. (Sound like some audiophiles you know?) The researchers concluded that it was very difficult to get a full picture of a gifted listener's psychoacoustic characteristics and that is why most studies focus on average listeners. They also felt that identification of codec sensitivity was likely to be governed by processing efficiency rather than by frequency selectivity.

- John Sunier

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