Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Anyone need a new amp with some umph!!!!

Dean, as explained there when the name of the test is clicked, those test tones mask distortion less than real music does(i.e., a lower percentage of distortion is audible than on real music), but the "terz" tests mask to a greater extent than do the "octave" tests.

Thanks John, I read that in the pop-ups but what I don’t understands is the difference between the “octave,” “octave L,” “octave BI” etc… Maybe I missed it but I thought there was a generic pop-up for each the “octave” and “terz.“ I am much better able to hear the distortion on both the basic “octave” and “terz” tests than the tests which follow each of them and was wondering why.

An additional question I haven’t tried looking up yet is how distortion combines. Can you just add the distortion from each component in a system to get a reasonable idea of the total distortion in the system or is it more complex than that?

Yeah, Dean; it's more complex. Distortion in different components can add or subtract to/from each other depending on the phase relationships of the distortions. For example, negative amplifier feedback intentionally takes distortion sampled from the amplifier output, reverses it in polarity or phase, and adds it to the input("pre-distorting" it)so that the two distortions tend to cancel each other, making for a cleaner amplifier. In other situations these phase relationships are a matter of chance and can either increase or decrease the overall net distortion.