So, when do I receive my Golden Ear certification? 
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Booooo. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I was right. I guess I prefer the sound of IR over the actual mic. Huh. That was a fun experiment. I’m secretly glad that I liked the IR better. And with such a simple way of capturing it too.
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I think I might like the IR sound a bit more, too.
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I liked the IR better as well, but the difference I was hearing was actually the amp flavor. Similar to the characteristic added by the waves L2 limiter at the Type A or B setting with a dither on. I had the difference right but my logic was backwards. I thought the amp flavor was the IR flavor.
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Congrats; Golden Ears wins by a nose.
The difference between the samples was small and it appears that I like fake sounds more than real ones.
.
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It has to be something that contains all frequencies of equal magnitude. Take an impulse of a single sample and run it through your spectrum analyzer of choice and you’ll end up with a flat line. The problem with single sample impulses is that they are prone to noise. For example, if you cough while recording your impulse, you’ll hear the cough loud and clear in the IR.
To reduce noise, you can either A) record a whole bunch of impulses and add them together. That takes a lot of time though. Or you can B) use a sound that is longer than a single sample but also has all frequencies of equal magnitude. A swept sine was will do this. It sounds like a whooooop. You do have to deconvolve after running through the speaker, but that’s basically running a convolution backwards, and you end up with an impulse response, but one that is less prone to noise. The problem here is that it’s more likely to produce audible artifacts if there is any distortion in the speaker. So it’s a pick your poison type of thing.
Given that your impulse response worked so well with just a single sample impulse, I’d probably go route A and just take a few impulses and add them together. It’s easy and quick because the IR is short, so you could just loop it and record it 10 times and it will take 10 seconds instead of 1.
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Aha… that makes sense.
Well, that was definitely no problem with my impulse response. I recorded it exactly the way I record my guitars - At blisteringly LOUD volumes, and with the mic right up on the speaker cap grille cloth. A cough or incidental noise simply doesn’t stand a chance!
I also used the power amp of my Mesa Boogie Lonestar Special to power the speaker (rather than a flat-ish power amp), so the impulse is actually of both speaker and power amp combined. The power amp isn’t being driven into heavy distortion (if it is distorting at all), but that allows me to take the FX loop send from the amp and monitor the front end of the Boogie, along with my overdrive pedals, so I can effectively record my amp silently if I use headphones.
All in all, I’m putting it down as a successful experiment!
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