yes. the problem is that some explicitly regard this forum as a place for speculation, not a truth seeker's place. I sometimes think that this forum needs a manifesto. the reason I keep reading it is that I'm fed with the ones where people gush over price tags as a norm and I think it provides a much needed balance. but I'm not sure if that's not a thing of the past.
Dvv did you ever try the Allison speakers ? I briefly had some loaned to me . I loved them but didn't have the right house for them .
Villchur
I can't help feeling Ed V's ideas were stolen , watered down . then sold as far better by others . How many nice big houses built from his work ?
I was to meet Mr V . Alas the man would would have taken me there died . I had been warned no BS ( as if ) . I think I would have known that . I tend to be very correct when I meet someone obviously superiour to me . In Oxford that is frequent .
We both lived in a town called Woodstock I think ? Mine I guess was the original one ?
Villchur
I can't help feeling Ed V's ideas were stolen , watered down . then sold as far better by others . How many nice big houses built from his work ?
I was to meet Mr V . Alas the man would would have taken me there died . I had been warned no BS ( as if ) . I think I would have known that . I tend to be very correct when I meet someone obviously superiour to me . In Oxford that is frequent .
We both lived in a town called Woodstock I think ? Mine I guess was the original one ?
Truth never stays still . Feynman , Speculation moving to proof is science . Speculation is for the brave ( or daydreamers ) . If not become a drown ? It was almost laughable how Feynman solved the mystery of the Challenger disaster . Luckily him not me . Giving a man a kicking when he had cancer because he dared do more than support the cover up or whatever . Shame on them . He speculated correctly . Truth will out . Yesterdays truth isn't much use in the future , good enough most of the time . Absolute truth will be beyond anyone here and that is no disgrace . We may soon be put to shame by computers . They care nothing for rules and will consider anything as an OK idea . Then number crunch and say they have an idea . We will be relegated to also ran's because lateral thinking is not our greatest suit . Men can't multitask . We will be obsolete . Speculation moving to proof ? I hope not . Drones , we might fight to be them as our only function ?
So what is wrong in being a speculator ? I strongly doubt that any science that anyone holds to be true didn't start with a speculation ? Lets write down all the science and close the forum . Or better still say did you read page 99 5619 yet . How fascinating and how reassuring I have nothing to say . I once though I had something to say and I was wrong because page 99 2233 had it covered . At best how sterile .
As I said yesterday 75% of what I do is wrong and doubtless many would have known long before me . 25 % at a good guess isn't . Some is new .
Truth and price , I will drink to that . Cables make a difference , I can drink to that also . The ones a friend made for $4 better than the $200 ones he had . It wasn't , not bad considering . Better . Used XLR , that's all . Still unbalanced although XLR .
In any half civilized discussion, data is an argument. And a powerful one, but NOT absolute.
To an extent, truth IS subject to a vote. Say you have an amp which measures out of this world - be that as it may, the majority of those listening to it may regard it as far from perfect, never mind what the measurements say. Heard a few such specimens - on the 'scope, a feast for the eyes, in a living room, dead as a doornail.
Works the other way, too. Example - Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amp. It was much loved in the UK and in Europe, it did sound solid, but measure it, and you'll faint at 5% of intermodulation at even very low power levels. So, data says it's a piece of junk, but ears say that while it lies like a dog, it does so with puppy eyes you cannot refuse.
Let's not forget here that these are products, whose job is not to be absolutely good, but for people to like them and to sell in large numbers.
Define "truth", please.
If there ever was a vague term in all of human history, it must be term "truth". It always has been a moving target.
I know of Roy Allison and his company, yes, but unfortunately, I have never even seen one of his products. Much to my regret.
Villchur I could say I "know" via his products, AR speakers, although by the time I got to buying them, Ed was long gone from the company, as was Henry Kloss (who was developing KLH, another company I like to remember).
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straw man argument.
truth = A can be distinguished from B with statistical relevance by a person with normal hearing. or not.
this is audio, a rather low-end engineering field, not quantum physics or the search for parallel universes. if it sounds different it does, if it doesn't, it doesn't.
later edit: "A can be distinguished from B with statistical relevance by a person with better than normal hearing" is acceptable too, as long as "with statistical relevance" still applies.
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sure, but it looks like for some speculation equals going from point A to B without a map, compass, GPS and blindfolded. for others it means using all the above means and only toss coins there where there's no GPS signal, the compass is broken, the region is not mapped and there's no-one to ask for directions. but even then, there are means that generally give a larger chance for success.
and, to my best knowledge, there's no Feynman amongst us. "and stop comparing yourself to Galileo".
me neither, the inmates have just about taken over the asylum
I suppose in a world where even the reality TV is scripted and voted on, we shouldnt be surprised that truth is seen as too passé and popular opinion given more weight than honest attempts at factual information. Facts can be phoned in these days.
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Personally, I think I'm rather partial to this variant: Pragmatic theory of truth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ...
as a side note, linking to page numbers is useless because there's a setting in the user control panel for the number of posts/page. I have my interface configured to show the maximum number.
this is as on-topic as it gets and I'll be extra short since I wrote about this in detail in another thread. I compared amp A to B. amp A won by a large margin. after a while level-matched comparison followed and they sound nearly identical.
turned out that amp A has much higher gain and I was simply listening at larger SPLs (you know, larger headroom, crest factor and all that). I'm likely driving it into clipping judging by the position the knob generelly sits at and also it's clipping very differently. apparent result is more detail.
I watched a video just the other day and a guy said many things can be explained by noise in the neural networks in our brains.
one psychoacoustic fact that stuck to my brain is that even if all the receptors in our ear "fire", the upper processing layers pick a number of them based on statistics. sometimes the ones that do fire do not win the 'grand prize'. if many are excited, the larger the chance that they are picked. but I wonder what's the result if noise makes up for the lack of data.
if people only considered how easy it is for one to fool oneself...
I watch some other forums and I used to be surprised about the number of "opinions on oil/spark plugs/gas/etc please" topics. until I realized that some consider truth to be the average of all opinions.
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indeed, some even mistakenly use the word.. 'fact', when they are obviously talking about popular opinion (sometimes only personal opinion) the word has completely lost its meaning.
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And some people prefer beer to wine, or chilies to chocolate - so what?
Why is this forum some ivory tower of truth seeking? I thought it was about building audio gadgets.
Were things really that much better back in 2004 when you and I joined? Weren't there speculations and objective vs subjective arguments back then, too? I do agree that this forum is nicely averse to "price = good" and the members here tend to be more practical than on the other audio forums - I like that too.
But not everyone here is a 100% pragmatist. Nor do they need to be.
Actually deploying Feynman as an exemplar of truth is rather ironic, as he found philosophizing to be tedious and urged people engaging in it to get back to calculations and the business of physics.
An astonishing intellect in any case, and a remarkable example of someone who was both quick and deep. He was also courageous --- the O ring problem was his clever dramatization of what he'd been tipped off to by a military man beforehand, not a sudden inspiration at the hearings. But dramatic it was. His afterword in the book about the disaster was a telling exposition about the changes needed in NASA culture.
One of my regrets was missing meeting the man in the summer of 1965, when I attended a science program as a teenager and he was scheduled to visit and speak, as he'd done in previous years. But at the last minute he was called to Washington.
An astonishing intellect in any case, and a remarkable example of someone who was both quick and deep. He was also courageous --- the O ring problem was his clever dramatization of what he'd been tipped off to by a military man beforehand, not a sudden inspiration at the hearings. But dramatic it was. His afterword in the book about the disaster was a telling exposition about the changes needed in NASA culture.
One of my regrets was missing meeting the man in the summer of 1965, when I attended a science program as a teenager and he was scheduled to visit and speak, as he'd done in previous years. But at the last minute he was called to Washington.
And some people prefer beer to wine, or chilies to chocolate - so what?
Why is this forum some ivory tower of truth seeking? I thought it was about building audio gadgets.
Exactly.
Those seeking pure truth and wisdom are on the wrong forum.
The odd thing is that it's exactly such people who have the strongest convictions which are well neigh immutable. And since plain tolerance has not been expressed as a mathematical formula, they make sure they have nothing to do with such poo-poo subjectivism.
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