So basically your argument here is that things should be done competently and shouldn't be measuring the wrong things?
Why do you feel this is necessary to point out?
Nobody is arguing that the "measuring doesn't work, only listening does" crowd get the "results" they do, because we are concerned that they might be using deaf people and haven't taken steps to guard against this.
Carl Sagan had a saying "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
If someone wanted to claim X expensive speaker wire had minutely lower resistance over a long run, due to esoteric materials or construction. I'd be inclined to believe that. Since that is perfectly within the bounds of reason and what materials science can achieve.
When they claim that a piece of wire with minutely differing characteristics has a whole word salad of effects, that would require some very drastic and measurable changes to the signal.
Well, I want more than the word of some guy who claims something on the internet before I accept something like that.
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Earl where does the enjoyment of listening to the music fit in? BTW the Arabic world was doing quite well science wise while others were in the dark ages.
Occam's razor.
GOOD DBTs are hard to do, they are time consuming and require a lot of preparation, checking, effort and consideration of factors most people just don't think about. Much more than most people are willing to or interested in doing. It's one of the major reasons that developing new drugs is so horribly expensive.
And as I said above, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". These people aren't claiming some barely measurable difference, they are claiming dramatic, clearly audible changes that simply aren't possible short of there being a defect in what they are claiming to compare things to.
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That's all very well, but it is so easy to say that it wasn't done properly if the results aren't what you want to expect. cuts both ways
Tony.
Right On!
That's all very well, but it is so easy to say that it wasn't done properly if the results aren't what you want to expect. cuts both ways
Tony.
Occam's Razor.
Can you give me a remotely plausible explanation for how such changes could be accomplished and why they can't be measured?
I have a BA in EE and I know of no way that this could be the case, barring something being defective and absolutely no way such changes couldn't be measured. I detailed earlier the ways in which we can measure things that make the audio frequency range look like paint by numbers.
Yet you are trying to tell me that I should uncritically accept that there are speaker cables that are "magic".
Give me a solid explanation, backed up by science and I'll accept it, until then "I believe" simply isn't good enough in the face of overwhelming evidence that tells me something different.
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Irrespective of your degree (and please trust me on this, an EE degree isn't going to impress anyone here, this forum is lousy with engineers and scientists with advanced degrees), you have to be willing to accept that IF someone can demonstrate audibility of A versus B in a controlled test, then they're different. If you can't measure that difference, you're measuring the wrong thing.
The "IF" is a big one- merely "because I said so" and vague post-hoc answers to questions about controls and methods don't cut it for claims beyond the ordinary. So far, I'm unaware of any demonstrated audible difference that wasn't easily measurable, but I'm open to the possibility IF someone gives me solid evidence.
Oh I don't expect it to. Nor should it.
If I did, I'd have brought it up in my first post. Appeal to (unverified) authority is a weak reed to rest an argument on and I do not claim to be an expert on audio, but speaker wire is pretty dammed basic first year stuff.
I just wanted to point out that I'm not coming to this as someone who is completely ignorant of the technical aspects of things.
"Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence". - Usually attributed to Napoleon I believe.
Humans are all too fallible and prone to error, it's why I'm so skeptical of supposed tests that claim a result that isn't supported by any possible mechanisms I know of. Someone screwed something up is way more plausible than "This can accomplish things that don't make any sense given what it is and somehow the effects can't be measured."
I would love it if there was something that could make my audio system sound as face meltingly wonderful as some of this stuff is supposed to, but when someone is selling something for obscene amounts of money with no plausible mechanism for how it accomplishes those things, I'm guessing marketing BS is behind it and not any science.
There's always someone who will buy something simply because it's expensive and will give them bragging rights.
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Results so far, after 100 years of audio R&D?
I like the OP question, good to reflect on the big picture and results so far.
IMO there is clear proof that...
(1)We don’t know all the parameters we should be measuring.
(2) What we are measuring is not the whole picture.
(3) We don’t agree / know how to correlate what we are measuring.
Where is this proof?
Turn your back on a simple piano, vocal, drum and string quartet playing some simple piece, listen for a few minutes.
Now enter Sony, Harman, Wilson Audio or any mad billionaire audiophile with their ultimate " is it live or is it Memorex...perfect sound forever...blah blah" audio system.
No company or individual has been able to build a system capable of "fooling" the majority of healthy adults that the audio system sounds the same as the live musicians.
Now ask the audio system to recreate a full orchestra or big band and it becomes even more apparent current audio design is not doing what it claims on the tin.
As for all the Hubble telescope stuff i.e. " Because we can detect dark matter and cosmic rays therefore we must know everything about audio..." It is very naive and or arrogant to assume that a well-developed knowledge of one area of science implies an equally well developed knowledge of all other scientific disciplines.
But do I hope the next 100 years will see an improvement!
Cheers
Derek.
I like the OP question, good to reflect on the big picture and results so far.
IMO there is clear proof that...
(1)We don’t know all the parameters we should be measuring.
(2) What we are measuring is not the whole picture.
(3) We don’t agree / know how to correlate what we are measuring.
Where is this proof?
Turn your back on a simple piano, vocal, drum and string quartet playing some simple piece, listen for a few minutes.
Now enter Sony, Harman, Wilson Audio or any mad billionaire audiophile with their ultimate " is it live or is it Memorex...perfect sound forever...blah blah" audio system.
No company or individual has been able to build a system capable of "fooling" the majority of healthy adults that the audio system sounds the same as the live musicians.
Now ask the audio system to recreate a full orchestra or big band and it becomes even more apparent current audio design is not doing what it claims on the tin.
As for all the Hubble telescope stuff i.e. " Because we can detect dark matter and cosmic rays therefore we must know everything about audio..." It is very naive and or arrogant to assume that a well-developed knowledge of one area of science implies an equally well developed knowledge of all other scientific disciplines.
But do I hope the next 100 years will see an improvement!
Cheers
Derek.
How sensitive does your equipment need to be?
While we are at it...Lets make it a level playing field, compare the sensitivity of the instrument we are trying to fool ( our ear / brain ) with our mics and analysers...
" The softest audible sound has an energy equivalent to that given off by a 50-watt light bulb at a distance of 3000 miles.
The movement of the human ear drum involved here is sub-microscopic - it displaces the eardrum by a distance of one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom1. This is one four-millionth part of the diameter of a fine silk thread. It is a response to a sound pressure change of one billionth of atmospheric pressure (10^-9 atm).
It can also respond meaningfully to sounds up to 10 trillion (1013) times greater in intensity, at the threshold of pain. This range of response is so vast that we tend to measure it using logarithms (the decibel scale is logarithmic). An intensity increase of 1dB is roughly the smallest audible level change, a factor of 10 increase in intensity (a 10dB increase) sounds to us as something like a doubling of volume. Because of this we sometimes forget the vast differences of scale in the sounds we listen to. A rock band playing at 90dB is actually producing sounds a billion times more intense than the softest whisper. "
The above is a good starting point...Before we start talking about the human brain Vs PC's and MAC's...!
Link for more reading is : h2g2 - The Wonder of the Human Ear - A2451430
Cheers
Derek.
While we are at it...Lets make it a level playing field, compare the sensitivity of the instrument we are trying to fool ( our ear / brain ) with our mics and analysers...
" The softest audible sound has an energy equivalent to that given off by a 50-watt light bulb at a distance of 3000 miles.
The movement of the human ear drum involved here is sub-microscopic - it displaces the eardrum by a distance of one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom1. This is one four-millionth part of the diameter of a fine silk thread. It is a response to a sound pressure change of one billionth of atmospheric pressure (10^-9 atm).
It can also respond meaningfully to sounds up to 10 trillion (1013) times greater in intensity, at the threshold of pain. This range of response is so vast that we tend to measure it using logarithms (the decibel scale is logarithmic). An intensity increase of 1dB is roughly the smallest audible level change, a factor of 10 increase in intensity (a 10dB increase) sounds to us as something like a doubling of volume. Because of this we sometimes forget the vast differences of scale in the sounds we listen to. A rock band playing at 90dB is actually producing sounds a billion times more intense than the softest whisper. "
The above is a good starting point...Before we start talking about the human brain Vs PC's and MAC's...!
Link for more reading is : h2g2 - The Wonder of the Human Ear - A2451430
Cheers
Derek.
Derek one needs to take care in the standard definitions of acoustic pressure and intensity vs power and energy. Switching back and forth at will makes for apparent exageration of the problem. The light bulb analogy is essentially meaningless. A reasonably loud rock concert has about 50-100 acoustic watts output so say you have 120-130dB SPL in a close seat (bad for you) and at 1kHz the attenuation in air is ~5dB/km. The threshold of hearing is ~0dB SPL (-4 for some exceptional people).
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Yes, but the first response to something shouldn't be "aliens did it" either.
You might not know, but it isn't a mystery and it isn't black magic.
Nothing ever is, but even in the "live" situation, there is still things "masking" aspects, due to the acoustics of a room, changes in seating position, how your hearing has changed, etc... I don't see people like you claiming that therefore a live performance is some how invalid.
You don't agree, you don't know, is not the same thing as "WE". Well unless you're dressing up as Queen Victoria I guess.
See right here, the limitations you are describing are really down to what is coming out of the speakers, not the recording or ability to measure things.
There are quite clear and significant limitations on most forms of output from speakers, they are imperfect mechanical devices with trade offs and compromises.
But that doesn't mean that it is a dark art, the trade offs and limitations are well known and understood, even if there currently is not a good way to overcome that limitation.
Most of it really comes down to a question of space and cost. It takes a lot of equipment and power to generate low frequency bass. Individual drivers have limited off axis response and won't cover everywhere equally, that can be overcome with multiple drivers, but that introduces it's own issues.
Ultimately I suspect we are going to wind up with something akin to a phased array radar system for audio, where you have a "wall" of speakers to much more accurately reproduce sounds.
It's far more naive and arrogant to assume that simply because you think something is magic, that it can't be understood or measured.
We live in an age of miracles and wonders, but they're a product of science.
That's appreciation of the art, the source, and has nothing to do with the science of reproduction.
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No but that wasn't the point.
The specific instance being refferred to whlst there is a lack of information now available as far as I can tell made no extraordinary claims. He just stated that under a double blind test he successfully picked the cables six times out of six. He didn't state that there were night and day differences, or that the differences were not measurable. YOU assumed this because your beliefs state that he should not be able to do this
see above.
And here we have the irony again. What *you* believe is correct, but what someone else believes is not correct. It would be more accurate to say that it is your opinion based on these premises. Not to outright dismiss someone, who may well have met all of the scientific criteria you say would accept. Would you really accept it if it was done in a proper scientific way, or would you look for a way to discredit the test?
Tony.
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