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ASC president and TubeTrap inventor, Art Noxon, PE Acoustical provided a video lecture for this year’s Burning Amp Festival Attendees.

Read the quick summary below, then watch the video!

People know and love the classic Frequency Response Curve. Another test, the Multitone, has been employed more recently to assess other aspects of audio equipment performance, particularly distortion. Along these lines, an additional test is presented that assesses another oft-overlooked type of playback inaccuracy: room-induced dynamic distortion. This is prone to occur in real rooms when side-to-side wall and floor-to-ceiling reflections occur in the plane of the speakers. These reflections cause a rapid buildup of sound that is slow to decay, which disrupts the purity and accuracy of the source material (music) by causing staccato notes to linger and blur into subsequent sonic events. The result is lost clarity and coloration in the timbre of various instruments or voices. The required performance of a room in this regard is to allow 20 dB of level reduction within a 62 millisecond time window in order to convey the full dynamic range of the original material. Thus, the test signal used exhibits at least 20 dB of level change in this time interval, and does so while sweeping across the bass and midrange frequencies, those for which this problem is most likely to occur in real rooms. Read the entire PDF that accompanies Art’s video for a deeper dive.

This test is the MATT (Musical Articulation Test Tones)