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....
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....