[sdiy] Additive Synthesis - phase shifts important??

[Seb Francis]

Florian E. Teply wrote:
>
> I was just wondering whether we could hear the phase shift directly, 
> as the human auditive system uses phase shifts (or time shifts?) 
> between both ears to get the direction. But i have no idea if other 
> effects would be on the way.
>

I remember talking to a very experienced mastering engineer about the 
attributes of ideal monitoring speakers.  He was of the opinion that the 
relative phase shift between different frequencies made an important 
difference when portraying a true representation of a sound recording.  
Indeed you will find that very high end monitors have spec graphs 
showing not only amplitude response vs frequency, but also phase 
response vs frequency (with flat lines being the optimum in each case).

However I'm not sure how much this applies to an additive synthesis 
situation where you are adding continuous sine waves.  In this case I'd 
imagine relative phase would be less noticable, if at all.

Seb