Seeing it how? And how much "value" do you expect to find? Collecting raw data is one thing, albeit a highly nontrivial one. Processing it for graphic display requires decisions about what kind of display to create and requires substantial time, effort, and skill.
Well, such things exist for hifi and monitor speakers. I think it would be nice to be able to visualize it, partially to figure out why so many people seem to prefer horizontal 2x12s and 4x12s even when it seems like vertical 2x12s should do more of what a lot of people claim to want.
That's really the question I'm trying to answer for myself.
It's not clear exactly what would motivate such a remark, nor have I seen any evidence that it is correct.
Really? It's mostly to do with how people describe subtle differences.
One example is "tube warmth". If they're runninng linear, then okay....but it depends on the circuit involved. If you're talking about an amplifier (not necessarily a guitar amp in this context), the low damping factor essentially creates a low-pass filter. So...fair. But if you're talking about line in and out from some piece of studio gear running nonlinear, it adds overtones, which necessarily makes the sound brighter, not warmer, and may but doesn't automatically also low-pass, which means the overtones increase upper-mids and highs and the device
might roll off some of the top octave or so (but often doesn't). But, it's not correct to describe the sound as "warmer", even though almost everyone does.
Another is a preference you'll see from a lot of mixing or mastering engineers for tube EQs. They claim it's from added harmonic complexity, despite the fact that these devices are usually completely linear or at most add a tiny bit of octave (the plugin emulations tend to distort a
lot more than the hardware) and the actual
reason for the preference is the slightly odd curves that people tend to create with them that they would probably never think to create if they were drawing a response curve on a modern digital EQ, which actually comes from the parallel EQ topology (sum of band pass results) rather than anything inherent to tube circuits.
Parallel compression is another. Unless you're getting actual distortion out of the compressor, what you're doing when you turn down the mix knob is lowering the ratio and adding make-up gain...but people swear it gets different results. Some people are still convinced that parallel compression and upward compression are equivalent, despite the fact that the transfer functions look nothing alike.
There are a
lot more examples. Those are the first few I thought of.
I'm not convinced that many of these misunderstandings lead to sub-standard or bad results, but the explanations for them...don't make any sense.
