Chapter 19

Reflections, Images, and the Precedence Effect

 

Sound Reproduction by Floyd Toole

 

AUDIBLE EFFECTS OF A SINGLE REFLECTION

Investigations of these effects go back many decades, and observations of our ability to localize a source of sound in an acoustically hostile — that is, reflective—environment were first recorded more than a century ago.

In audio in the past, the terms Haas effect and law of the first wavefront were used to identify this effect, but current scientific work has settled on the other original term, precedence effect. Whatever it is called, it describes the well-known phenomenon wherein the first arrived sound, normally the direct sound from a source, dominates our impression of where sound is coming from. Within ...

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