Ear Fatigue

[Stephen J.]

I have a Katana 50 and a SE 245 that I keep in my office at work. It sounds better than I expect it should, but every time I play it my ears get worn out quickly. I never feel like this at home playing through tube amps at louder volumes. What is going on here? It isn’t loud, but I feel like I have been in a very loud environment. It doesn’t feel good. I am using the clean amp mode, nothing extreme on the eq with a little reverb.

 

[aamefford]

I have a Katana 50 and a SE 245 that I keep in my office at work. It sounds better than I expect it should, but every time I play it my ears get worn out quickly. I never feel like this at home playing through tube amps at louder volumes. What is going on here? It isn’t loud, but I feel like I have been in a very loud environment. It doesn’t feel good. I am using the clean amp mode, nothing extreme on the eq with a little reverb.

Loosely related - I spent about 15 years as a nutcase headphone geek - i.e. almost as bad as a guitar gear head. I found that some solid state amps had the same effect, but my $3000 tube headphone amp (and my cheaper tube amps as well) did not have this issue. As good gear heads do, we in the "Super Best Audio Friends" forum discussed this ad nauseam. The prevailing theory, much like you hear from at least some folks in the guitar amp geekery world, is tubes = second order harmonics prevail, while SS = third order harmonics prevail. Some think (or can show empirically?) that mosfets behave more like tubes in this regard. Anyway, just some thoughts on the matter. It could be the speakers, it could be less heard (higher frequency?) artifacts in the modeled amps as compared to real tubes. That's all I got. I'm sure more sane folks will have better explanations. Magic ?

Another thought - the digital to analog conversion. I had a series of ever more expensive DACS. The good ones were indeed better.

 

[László]

I have a Katana 50 and a SE 245 that I keep in my office at work. It sounds better than I expect it should, but every time I play it my ears get worn out quickly. I never feel like this at home playing through tube amps at louder volumes. What is going on here? It isn’t loud, but I feel like I have been in a very loud environment. It doesn’t feel good. I am using the clean amp mode, nothing extreme on the eq with a little reverb.

Try putting it in a different spot. If it's at ear level, try the floor. Etc. Keep experimenting.

We hear more room reflections from our amps than we might suspect; all rooms have modes that reinforce or reduce certain frequencies; some speakers are very directional, some aren't; and placement in the room makes a big difference.

Carpeting or lack thereof matters; the ceiling matters; the walls matter; the furniture matters. All of that stuff absorbs or reflects a variety of frequencies.

So do materials in the room - some rooms are bright, some tame higher frequencies, some reinforce low frequencies, some cut low frequencies. There is always doubling of bass and comb filtering going on in a room. A room with a concrete floor handles sound differently from a room with a suspended wooden floor. Tile floors sound like echo chambers, for example; that's why echo chambers were always tiled on the floor, walls and ceiling back in the day.

Also, the size of the room matters - a larger room tends to sound smoother and less peaky than a smaller room. Etc.