Is One Subwoofer Really Not Appropriate For 2-Chnl

Bryon,

It's been decades since I did research in binaural processing, but I wondered why someone from a university in South Carolina would publish such an article in other than JASA. Some of the contentions about levels of neural processing of temporal information seem astonishing, so I wonder if peer review may have been a problem. I'm also skeptical about the use of non-standard equipment; it makes replication of results difficult. I'm skeptical about your arguments and your source of "scientific' support. As I said, though, I haven't followed psychoacoustic literature for decades.

Bryon,

I quit following the literature around 1970. I was an admirer of the Jeffries model of binaural processing, but a study I did using computer generated signals and narrow bands of noise was inconclusive about the phase relationships of the signal and noise even though the detectability of the samples differed markedly, and the models did not explain the results. I reported the results at a special JASA session devoted to Lloyd Jeffries, but never published them. After that, I lost interest in psychoacoustics.

I can believe moving a sub a foot or so can make a detectable difference, but I'm not sure I'd attribute it just to time alignment, given the potential interaction with room boundaries.

db

Bryon.

One of the most reliable phenomena in psychoacoustics is what Is know as the masking level difference (MLD). Present a mid-freuquncy sinusoid in correlated noise to both ears and adjust the level until it becomes inaudible; flip the phase of the sinusoid in one ear, and the signal pops up as much as 15 dB, depending on frequency. At the time, the data suggested the auditory system doesn't preserve timing as such up the neural chain, but may convey such information by the more central areas excited. Thus, the vector model of Lloyd Jeffries.

db

I got carried away in a dialog that really was off topic. Sorry.

db