Another year, another Internet Blind Test, my friends! For me, doing this is important because it keeps us honest. It's worth reading this article in Audioholics published recently for an overview of the complexity of perception. I believe it's essential that audiophiles have an opportunity to participate in exercises of perception which I hope can enlighten ourselves and in aggregate, enlighten each other.
It's good to capture naturalistic data of audiophiles "in the wild" on top of information we may read from the "ivory tower" of Academia and profit-motive driven claims from Industry. Arguably, this is some of the most useful data. We can for example quite easily measure amazing levels of performance these days from our devices, but if we never correlate this to audibility, the data says nothing about relevance to humans, which at the end of the day is the only intent of these devices!
If you remember, last year we did the "Do digital audio players sound different?" test (the results systematically discussed starting here). This time around, in late 2019, Paul K [aka pkane] (who also wrote DeltaWave) contacted me to try out the early builds of his new software called "Distort"; aptly named software that allows us to purposely introduce anomalies into audio data. Among a number of distortions one could introduce is the one we've all heard off - harmonic distortion.
