High Frequency Reverberation for finer sound reproduction

The development of artificial reverberation in the audio industry has been aimed at duplicating the sound of real rooms, more and more accurately. No one ever considered the possibility of developing reverberation more desirable than real. Richard Burwen discovered that your ears really like to hear the high frequencies missing in room reflections above 5 kHz. Their most important characteristic is not the spatial and echo effect, but thousands of peaks and valleys in the frequency response that tend to ‘clean up' high frequencies in the music. Signal processing to achieve a wiggly frequency response having a carefully tuned trend can greatly extend the potential of an audio system and program material for realistic reproduction. This article discusses the thinking behind the system and explains the various processing options. Example sound files with different processing are available on-line at http://www.burwenbobcat.com .