Psychoacoustics of Soft Clipping: Validation through Time and Frequency Analysis

This study aimed to determine whether time and frequency analyses align with existing listening test results on different types of distortions, with a particular focus on soft clipping, which is often perceived as a clean form of distortion. By integrating theories on various distortion types and using existing listening test results as a basis for subjective perception, MATLAB was employed to synthesize and analyse the distortions. Waveform and spectrogram analyses confirmed that soft clipping maintains a significant resemblance to the original signal, supporting its perception as a clean distortion.