DIY Recording Guys · Vadim Kharaz and Benjamin Hull

62: Can You Trust What You're Hearing? (Davies Roberts - Flare Audio)

March 22, 2021·1 hr 19 min·5 clips

Davies explains why none of us can hear high-definition sound due to a 21 dB resonance flaw in our ears.

The setup is practical. Vadim first points listeners to a free recording basics ebook, then uses that doorway to split the rig into input and output. Input means instruments, playing, microphones, preamps, and the signal chain. Output is where you decide whether any of it worked. That is where the ears start to complicate things. Headphones, speakers, and room acoustics matter, of course, but the conversation keeps coming back to the body doing the listening. The guest changes the scale. He does not treat hearing like a clean measurement system. He talks about wind turbines, industrial noise, traffic, and everyday sound as health triggers. His claim is blunt: what people call sound problems may be distortion inside the ear, pushing an organic structure into the kind of stress response it uses for threats. So this is not just gear talk. The monitoring question turns into a larger argument about cities, events, noise, ears, and bodies. The EU context gives it more weight. The guest describes work to make people more aware of noise and to design quieter cities with fewer health consequences. Then the product logic shifts too. Technology that started as a listening device begins to sound, in his description, like a medical device for reducing stress from everyday sound. The pace is intense. He describes a small team on the south coast of the UK moving quickly through research and development. Money is part of the tension. Ambition and progress are there, but limited resources mean products have to reach market promptly. Benjamin and Vadim keep pulling the conversation back to use. Their fuller thoughts on the ear products are saved for later, which keeps this episode tied to what working engineers can actually hear and judge.

As heard by us

A practical recording conversation turns hearing itself into the gear question, from rooms and headphones to distortion, stress, and trust.

DIY Recording Guys takes a familiar home-studio worry, whether you can trust what you are hearing, and moves it from monitors and rooms into the ear itself.

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Why you'd press play

A recording chat that turns into a hard look at your input, your output, and your ears.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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