Comment by Joeboy
14 years ago
> I don't know if the human ear can discern the difference between 0.03ms and 0.005ms but it's something I don't see mentioned often
That's the time it takes sound to travel 8mm. Do you think you could tell if an instrument was positioned differently by 8mm?
The ears distinguish directional audio in part from timing differences in what hits each ear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization cites http://web.archive.org/web/20100410235208/http://www.cs.ucc.... that suggests the brain is sensitive to timing differences between ears as low as 10 microseconds, or 0.01ms.
It's not the timing differences, it's the phase differences. The ear is exceptionally sensitive to phase differences between the ears below 1kHz. This information is captured exactly (to well beyond the naive precision of the sampling clock) for any frequency below Nyquist.
I get 10mm vs 1.7mm but it's roughly the same argument http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+*+0.03ms... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+*+0.005m...