ABSTRACT

The history of audio has had a frustrating tendency to produce ‘undefinables’ in terms of quality differences. The hi-fi press has invented a whole vocabulary of adjectives to describe sound qualities, but without objective verification there is no way to know if the terms mean the same thing to different people, or not. Spaciousness is one obvious example. In the stereo reproduction of music, spaciousness is a highly valued attribute, yet no unit of measurement exists for its quantification. Transparency is another example: we think that we know when we hear it, but can we prove it?