A/B'ing sounds clips to assess changes in tone is no doubt useful, but it is far from ideal. A critical variable is of course your "tonal memory" in moving from clip to clip! Ideally, you'd like to be able to listen to the clips simultaneously, to remove your "tonal memory" from the equation, but there's no practical way to do this.
But despair not! As a service to the boutique gear community, we're pleased to introduce a ToneDoctor innovation, called Tone Maps, that we believe will radically improve your ability to assess variations in tone over the web. Tone Maps of sound clips allow you to "see" tonal differences between sound clips in an extremely clear and informative way, through a relatively recent advance in applied mathematics known as "wavelet analysis". A Tone Map shows how the sound energy in a sound clip is distributed - at each instant in time - across different frequencies. Thus, by comparing Tone Maps you can actually "see" tonal differences between sound clips! Give it a try...we think you'll love it. After all, seeing is believing!
As an example, consider one of our splash page sounds clips, along with a modified version of it obtained by running it through a graphic equalizer:
Listen to the sound clips carefully. Can you reliably distinguish between the two clips using your "tonal memory". Not too easy, eh? How about the graphic equalizer settings? Any guesses? Now look at the Tone Maps. Can you "see" the difference in the tone? Pretty easy, eh? Can you now guess the graphic equalizer settings? No sweat, right? Welcome to the wonderful world of Tone Maps!
Tonal memory is just one critical variable. Another reason why it's hard to "hear" the difference in the clips, even though the tone maps are so different, is that your ears don't hear low and high frequency signals very well at the relatively low sound clip volumes. That's why it's difficult to hear the difference between the two clips, even though the original version contains much more high-end than the filtered version, and in a "live" setting, at high volume, you'd hear much more presence and chime in the original tone than the filtered tone.
Follow this link if you want to learn more about the frequency response of a "standard" ear and run a series of tests to determine the frequency response of your ear. Follow this link if you'd like to run a true "blind" hearing test on the original and filtered clips above.
