Blah blah blah. Even ignoring yet another intellectual clunker from the objctionists, in this case that it's impossible, or difficult, to built tube equipment which meets every proven scientific metric for being audibly 'blameless ahead of a loudspeaker', is it your contention that spending more than $300 ahead of the speaker terminals exceeds the best mankind can possibly achieve in home audio reproduction? Any $50 CD player + chipamp + Home Depot wires + appropriate speakers is your conceptual audio pinnacle. If not, build a LOGICAL, CONSISTENT case why not, one that doesn't rely on 'audiophools'.
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Believe it or not there are some people who would prefer a Picasso painting to a Playboy centerfold print even with three of 'em.
The problem is when they tell you either is the real thing.
Paint stores sell mostly white, but they have a wall full of color samples.
A good book to read is Sound FX by Alexander U. Case, then tell me what is in that recording.
Starting with an accurate sound system one can apply tint, let me know if you try to mix colors of paint and get back to white. (OK for lighting guys get back to black)
If you can hear it you can measure it, but that does not mean what you measure is always important to what you hear.
The "real" thing is what Picasso saw when he looked at his painting and what the Playboy graphics artist saw when retouching the pictures. The results were judged by these persons within a certain framework. If a reproduction technique is not able to provide that framework, then the art will be altered.
So,tube amp users are average audophools.You've just increased the number of audiophools Markus.Some here will not like it.Perhaps you should have another category for them.How about dinstinguished audiophools?
Undoing a nonlinear process is infinitely more complex than undoing a linear one, but its still within the realm of feasibility, the theory is known. MP3 has an even further complication in that is it not stationary - the nonlinearities depend on the signal which varies in time. It's definately possible.
Now more to the point, it is absolutely possible to "undo" MP3 to the point of inaudibility of the differences. The distinctions now become even grayer.
A rather 'Clintoneque' use of the word 'undo'.
When data below a certain masking threshold is discarded, depending of course on how completely it's accomplished, arguably insufficient reconstructive data remains above other system imperfections such as distortion, quantization and thermal noise, etc. on which to determine the original magnitude or frequency. The best you could hope to do is replace the lost information with a feasible substitute, turf shared with Eventide Harmonizers and some philosophies of circuit design, both tube and solid state.ESP?
I'm talking about loss of detail and phase coherency to realistically reproduce staging, ambience etc.
I would say it is an audiophool that disregard the rest of the system. I've made entry level bookshelf speakers perform far above what everybody thought possible by connecting them to a good system and also as I've said earlier the best speakers in the world can't recreate information that are lost before it even reach them. (Unless your name is Earl I guess.)
Although it's rather arrogant and narrow minded for the poster to ridicule and demonize those who do or don't hear what he hears in audio playback components (I don't hear it, so by inference you must not either), none-the-less I respect the poster's position that he thinks that tube amps and other "crazy stuff" alters the signal. But I have very little respect for those that don't base their opinions on actual personal experience, so I would would ask the poster, would you mind providing us with two or three examples of the situations where you heard with your own ears tube amps altering the signal? And would you please give us the context of those listening experiences, such as where the tube amps were heard (At home? At a friends? At an audio dealer?), what the audio system consisted of (What source? What preamp? What tube amp? What speakers? What cables?), and the amount of time you spent listening to the tube amps?
On second thought, never mind... this thread is supposed to be about cables, and I'm taking it too far off topic with talk about tube amps.
Moderator, feel free to delete my posts.
That stuff is all linear so my comment is quite correct. RDF had a point about uber nonlinear stuf being difficult to "undo", but anything linear is almost trivial - its just frequency response.
Thats quite OK, we moved on from cables. We're on amps now. Maybe in a year or two we will get arround to those things that actually matter.
Personal experience is valid if its answering the right question. Lets say there are two devices A and B of the same type (cables, amps, CD transports, whatever). We have a range of questions about A and B:
Q: Does A sound better than B? A: Listen to both. Choose which one, in your personal evaluation, sounds better. You have privileged access to that judgement, its yours alone. No one can dispute the veracity of your choice – disagree with it yes, but not refute it. For this test, it doesn’t matter what the electrical performance of A and B are, its not relevant for the question.
Q: Is A or B accurate? A: Measure both. If the frequency response, distortion, phase response etc is within generally acceptable bounds for accurate performance then we can say ‘yes’ the device is accurate. What’s ‘generally acceptable’? Based on psychoacoustic research, flat frequency response plus or minus some dB limit, distortion % below some pre-defined threshold etc.
Q: Is A more accurate than B? A: Measure both. If the frequency response of A is flatter than B, or has lower distortion than B, or is numerically superior on the chosen parameter, then yes, A is more accurate than B.
Q: If A is more accurate than B, does A sound better than B? A: First of all determine if there is a difference to be heard. Conduct a double blind test. If there is a difference heard between A and B, then just make a judgement as to which one you prefer. If a difference can’t be detected, then A is measurably more accurate than B but the difference doesn’t matter - because they can’t be distinguished on audibility grounds (but you may prefer A over B for design aesthetics, or the fact it measures better, or its more expensive, or of course any other preference).
CSI | ‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’: How Parapsychologists Nullify Null Results
Now, what do those quotes remind me of...? Where am I...
Now, what do those quotes remind me of...? Where am I...
Maybe we should repeat why something like a standard set of requirements for scientific work exist.
The goal is to ensure that the work is objective, reliable and valid and to make it possible for readers to evaluate the work and to rely on the results or to reproduce the work to confirm the results.
If, for example, a paper does not answer the question if a part of the test setup was defective right from the beginning or just failed "somewhere" during an extended test period then an essential part is simply missing.
Normally it is mandatory to have a full set of measurements for the test gear and some controls to ensure that it does work properly during the test routines.
If, as another example, the paper does not contain the information how many participants were doing the test and does not tell the reader if each participant does the same test routine or not, then another essential part of the needed information is missing.
There is quite a lot more that is missing in the paper.
As stated before, that does not mean, that their results couldn´t be true, but just that the study does not meet the requirements for serious work.
That´s why confirmation bias is so dangerous; it lets you accept results only because....
Wishes
Oops - blunder!
I said in an earlier post:
Q: Does A sound better than B? A: Two stages. First, conduct a double blind test to see if there is an audible difference between A and B. If so, then choose which one, in your personal evaluation, sounds better. You have privileged access to that judgement, its yours alone. No one can dispute the veracity of your choice – disagree with it yes, but not refute it. It doesn’t matter what the electrical performance of A and B are, its not relevant for the preference question. If there is no audible difference then you can choose either A or B on whatever non-audible criteria you like (even by flip of a coin).
I said in an earlier post:
Q: Does A sound better than B? A: Listen to both. Choose which one, in your personal evaluation, sounds better. You have privileged access to that judgement, its yours alone. No one can dispute the veracity of your choice – disagree with it yes, but not refute it. For this test, it doesn’t matter what the electrical performance of A and B are, its not relevant for the question.
Of course the procedure should be:
Q: Does A sound better than B? A: Two stages. First, conduct a double blind test to see if there is an audible difference between A and B. If so, then choose which one, in your personal evaluation, sounds better. You have privileged access to that judgement, its yours alone. No one can dispute the veracity of your choice – disagree with it yes, but not refute it. It doesn’t matter what the electrical performance of A and B are, its not relevant for the preference question. If there is no audible difference then you can choose either A or B on whatever non-audible criteria you like (even by flip of a coin).
Quite correct. There is no accounting for "taste" and a personal "opinion" cannot be invalidated no matter what. But, if there is a difference between A and B then its completely logical to determine which one is the more "accurate" and this is entirely independent of anyones personal opinion either way. Further, if your personal opinion favors that choice that can be shown to be "less accurate" then you cannot claim to be interested in "High Fidelity", because clearly you are not. Preference and accuracy are simply not the same things.
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