What's the stunning transparency of QUANTEC Room Simulation based upon?
Psychoacoustics - the cocktail party effect in this case.
Whom?
The cocktail party effect, discovered in 1953, describes the ability of the human auditory system to focus its listening attention on a single talker, among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations.
Photo: Henning Hraban Ramm / pixelio.de
How pronounced is this effect?
Within such selective perception, the hearing reaches noise suppression from 9 to 15 dB, i.e., the acoustic source, on which humans concentrate, subjectively seems to be many times louder than ambient noise of the same level. This even holds, if the ambient noise is louder than the information by a similar amount (»negative S/N«). On the other hand, a microphone recording would capture mainly background noise, as any selective perception does not apply.
How is this related to the acoustic transparency of a room?
To come to the point: within a room, a side effect of the cocktail party effect would result in a greatly reduced perception of spatiality: the information sounds dry and with minimum reverberation. A microphone positioned at the same place would capture blurred, slushy, and over-reverberating information instead.
Once again, QUANTEC seems to be ahead of the pack...
That's by no means our merit! - It was surprise to us, too, that even within the scope of the cocktail party effect, perfect Room Simulation behaves just like a real room, and provides the human hearing with the necessary clues. If those clues are unavailable, as it's the case with our competitors' reverberation devices, the human auditory system reacts just like the microphone: the sound is unintelligible, slushy, and with far too much reverberation.
www.quantec.com/?id=faq039
Feb 2010, updated Aug 2011, Nov 2011, Mar 2013
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