MATT - Musical Articulation Test Tones

The perfect tool for evaluating your room and equipment AND also for tracking the way changes in your setup impact the sonic experience.

Auditioning the MATT test in your listening room can help optimize speaker & listening position, and the effectiveness of acoustic treatment in your room. This will allow you to obtain the highest quality sound possible from the components in your listening environment.

How fast is your room?

Most audiophiles know how loud they can play their room before it begins to break up. Even the speakers have such a level threshold, above which we begin to hear cone breakup and/or cabinet buzz. The MATT test is an easy way to "ring out your room" without risking doing damage to structure or gear due to sustained power at one frequency. The test also excels at lower sound levels, where it checks out the room acoustic part of your listening experience, sorting out clear dynamic bandwidths from blurred bandwidths.

Download is free - so try it today!

Test Signal

MATT - The ASC Acoustic Test Signal

....play it first over headphones and then in your room. You hear a scale of rapid tone bursts that any hifi system should be able to reproduce. Your system could but it can't because the room keeps getting in the way. Then concentrate on the sound stage. It's a mono signal and the image should stay stage center, tight and focused. But it doesn't.

This test is a rapid gated slow sine sweep. It demonstrates the musical clarity vs frequency of the hifi system in your room. In some ranges of sound you will hear strong rapid dynamic sound level changes while in other ranges the tone bursts blur together in reverberant chaos. You can also hear the more familiar peaks and valleys of your room. Then play it again but this time close your eyes and concentrate on the sound stage of this perfectly mono signal. In some tone ranges the image stays put; stage center, small and tight, where it belongs. But the next tone range sees the image lose focus and fluff up into a ball of fog. And yet another sees the image up and wander off, flying around the sound stage like Peter Pan.

Freeware

As of April 10, 2018, MATT test becomes freeware:

The MATT test may be freely incorporated in third-party acoustical test hardware or software without attribution to ASC or Art Noxon.

It is also available on CD at Music Direct on the Stereophile Test CD-2 or in our online shop here.

How To Use

 

Using MATT as a Listening Test for Musical Quality instead of a Room Analysis Test.

Can your sound system play back 1/16^th notes at 120 bpm? Sure, your speakers can play it, but does it reach your ears clearly? Well, here’s the definitive audio test for the HiFi listening position, the ASC MATT audio playback test. It’s a 7 in 1 listening test. You’ll find you can’t listen to more than one thing at one time, even though in reality varying combinations of these separated listening experiences are going on all the time

1) First, you listen and concentrate on how the sound level varies over the first 5 octaves of sound. This is in effect sounding like the common sine sweep frequency response curve.

2) Play it again but this time concentrate on the clarity or blurring in the articulation of the staccato 1/16^th notes as they play up and down the scale. Play it louder or quieter, explore how the musical quality of your playback setup varies with loudness.

3) Play it again and this time concentrate on imaging, the stability and focus of what should be a fixed and dime sized center stage image throughout the first 5 octaves of sound.

4) Play it again and this time concentrate on the sound of the attack transient* of each tone burst, a tick-thump type of sound. It will begin to disappear well before the staccato blurring effect takes place.

5) Turn the volume up and this time listen outward, opening up to sounds from the room itself - sympathetic tones, rattles, drones and tinging sounds that are not coming from the speakers but are coming from the sympathetic vibration of walls, floor or ceiling, cabinet doors, book shelves, windows, panel doors, lamp shades, vases and decorative art.

6) Turn the volume up, stand near a speaker and listen to it working. You’ll find that the box will buzz here and a hum there. Because the tone burst is so short, there is no risk of damaging the speaker.

7) Play it again, a number of times, and each time vary the loudness of the playback. At quieter levels the playback seems just fine but above some loud level the playback seems to get out of control. Back the loudness down a bit. Just below this out-of-control sound level is the maximum listening level for your system, essentially how fast you can go. In very good rooms this might be as high as 95 dBA but most can run in the 85 dBA range while some (lots of glass) rooms run as low as 75 dBA.

*The MATT signal is a 1/16th second tone burst followed by a 1/16th second period of silence which ends with the beginning or attack transient of the next tone burst. What you hear isn’t the tone, but something more like a “tick-thump” type of sound which precedes the tone. This is the attack transient of the tone burst. As early reverberation and reflections fill the 1/16th second of quiet time preceding the onset of the next tone burst it raises the noise floor and masks or covers over the lower level leading edge detail in the attack transient. This masking effect reduces the listener’s ability to perceive the shape of the leading edge of the tone burst, the tick-thump begins to disappear and all we hear is the tone burst itself. This loss in the perception of attack transient detail occurs before any sense that the staccato of the notes are beginning to blur together. The information in the attack transient is what makes the sound from a particular instrument sound distinctly like it comes from that instrument. It puts the musicality into the music.

 

A complete discussion of the MATT test can be found on our main website:

acousticsciences.com/matt