Thirty experienced music listeners tried to set an optimum ‘wetto-dry signal ratio’ of the resulting mixed sound by adjusting the soft knob of the Lexicon 300 digital audio processor for eight different factory-installed room simulation effects. A preprocessed two-channel stereo studio recording of classical music was used as the input ‘dry’ signal. Results showed that experiment participants could be divided into two diverse groups, one of which preferred markedly greater values of the ‘wet’ signal than the other. The group of ‘wet’ sound advocates was composed largely of sound engineers, while the ‘dry’ sound preference came from acousticians and musicians. An approximately linear dependence of the optimal level difference of the input ‘dry’ signal and the processed ‘wet’ signal on the simulated reverberation time was found. This finding is in agreement with the conclusions of the psychoacoustical experiment carried out by Schmidt in three-dimensional synthetic sound field [9].

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