The McGurk Effect

The McGurk Effect is a fascinating auditory illusion where you can be fooled by what you are seeing into hearing something different. A remarkable property of the McGurk Effect is that even though you know you are being fooled, you still hear the wrong thing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

What's going on here is that when the brain tries to process a complex sound - and virtually all interesting sounds are indeed very complex - it tries first to create a model for what it thinks it is going to hear, and adapts what it actually hears to best match with the model. Since humans are primarily visually-driven beings, the brain will above all else try to match what we hear to what we see. This has some profound implications for listening to high-end audio, and understanding what it is you think you can hear.

Ivan Fischer conducts Mahler's 4th

At BitPerfect, we love our Mahler, and one of the finest Mahler recordings available is - in our opinion - Ivan Fischer's wonderful account of the 4th Symphony with the Budapest Festival Orchestra released by Channel Classics. Thanks to Linn Records, this magnificent recording is available for download in your choice of high-resolution formats, up to 24bit 192kHz.

http://www.linnrecords.com/recording-gustav-mahler-budapest-festival-orchestra.aspx

On my system, I find that this recording needs to be played with the the absolute polarity inverted. With BitPerfect, just edit the iTunes comment field for each track and insert the word 'invertpolarity' (no quote marks required) anywhere in the comments field, and BitPerfect will take care of this for you.

I remember Miles

I thought I would share with you a reference track I like to use for bass articulation and definition.

I remember Miles.

Track 8 (My Man's Gone Now) is underpinned by a tasty combination of acoustic and electric basses, playing a simple, yet captivating ostinato. How well a system can resolve the two, both sonically and spatially, is a great tool to assess musicality in the bass.

Music Recommendations

Those of who who have been to our FaceBook page (see the link on the right) and "Like" us will have been enjoying regular posts containing music-related recommendations and observations.  I am going to start duplicating them here.  For the next couple of weeks I will be re-posting the older ones from FaceBook, and then when we catch up, the posting rate will slow down again.

I hope you find these both stimulating and interesting!