Artifcats & Aberrations: Is and Is Nots

I'm sure a few of you have noticed I'm a total stickler about this... Ron might by the stickler on grammar, I'm the stickler on nomenclature.

In music if you smearing or something that sounds wrong, but is part of the music, that is an Aberration.

When you listen to music and you hear something that is clearly not part of the source material, that is an Artifact.


Examples:

In digital on the stream of bits artifacts do occur, if you have measuring gear you can see random bit that are not part of the source material. The thing is they are so short that they don't actually occur to the ears as an artifact, because they change the sound of the source material due to the perceptively low time they exist. This makes them an aberration since they're undetectable as a distinct sound but do occur as an incorrect representation of piano, guitar, etc. Truthfully that aberration is fairly rare to be detectable due to the short amount of time they exist (nanosecond?). But when for example a network player loses sync for a brief moment and you hear a "pop" in the music that has no explanation, that is an artifact. It's not part of the source material, it's independently detectable free from opinions of authenticity of the representation of the source material.

When a lot of amplifiers clip, they first come across as aberrations. It can make say a singer sound funny because while they should have climbed in vocal loudness, they got cut short. There is no artifact to be found, but clearly it's wrong as it's an aberration. However when clipping gets pushed really high you can get artifacts where there is no source material but clearly the amp has a malfunction and spews noises out because it is struggling to recover.

When you listen to vinyl ticks and pops are the most clear artifacts. They artifacts on the vinyl disc itself to begin with, and they represent themselves in the music the same way, as totally independent sounds from the source material.

If a speaker driver is damaged so it sounds wrong at certain moments, you've experiencing aberrations, but if the VC starts making a scratch noise due to rubbing something then you've got an artifacts along with the aberrations.


So...

I hope that helps people a little bit. When you describe one or the other it goes a long way to use the correct description. If you use the wrong one, most commonly calling aberrations as artifacts, it implies something is literally broken. Where as an aberration can be limitations of speakers, amps, source material, lots of things. Aberrations being noticed is an interesting characteristic to describe and define for equipment exhibiting it, as all of a sudden we can ask questions like, is there enough headroom? Are the gain settings right? Stuff like that. Where as if it where true artifacts it's more like; do IC's need replaced? is a cable severed under the insulation? is the buffer not caching out in the receiver? etc....

No one can be a full arbiter, but the most we figure out how to use common language the more fruitful we'll be on here with our discussion and especially when reviewing gear and giving feedback to each other. We already do some, where we ask questions to each other about descriptions. I pretty much every time give a nudge about artifact vs. aberration (I don't even fully like doing, but feel it is important). The last thing I want is tension to form, so getting a head start on reasoning and such helps lighten the load. Kind of like questions such as is your goal to have music sound like the source or like live music, helps so that other descriptions are not wrong and right for different goals but no one knows what the goals are.

Ya I hear you, it is a long road!

Someday in the future I may try to do a clinic at a show where I use the equipment but change parts to show a correlation so that the descriptions can better fit universally with what we know about the parts. For example if I do something that had zero effect on distortion but the music sounds less "distorted" (wrong, with aberrations) that'll help.

Luckily the difference between artifact and aberration is pretty dry and distinct. I certainly am in no place yet to try and make a glossery yet! It might be more like a book....