Nice one, Richard - I would use the phrase "The Power of Listening Without Listening" in the same sense ... I started in that fashion, and then over time learnt to identify what was actually going on in the sound, which gave it a certain, identifiable, negative characteristic. Positive characteristics I don't worry about - which is probably why I'm not a musician,
... gave it a go a couple of times, but it never clicked with my "inner being", !http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/music/gjerdingen/Papers/PubPapers/Scanning.pdf
“Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres”
with David Perrott, in Jean-Julien Aucouturier and Elias Pampalk, eds.,
Journal of New Music Research 37 (2008): 93–100
Abstract
Given brief excerpts of commercially recorded music in one
of ten broad genres of music, participants in this study were
asked to evaluate each excerpt and to assign it to one of
the ten genre labels. It was expected that participants
would be good at this task, since they were the very consumers
for whommuch of thismusic had been created. But
the speed at which participants could perform this task,
including above-chance categorizations of excerpts as
short as 1/4 second, was quite unexpected.
see also
http://music.psych.cornell.edu/articles/popmusic/Thin_slices_of_music.pdf
Krumhansl, C. L. (2010). Plink: ''Thin slices'' of music. Music Perception, 27, 337-354
Long term memory but very short samples to identify and folk do very well....
It's not a big leap to assume if someone has actually trained themselves to hear difference between excellent sound and not quite so good sound, that they can do it.
Great recording engineers can.
I am not an expert and I can hear when the HF part of a bass guitar note is not on time or been masked.
There all sorts of examples on utoob of recording engineers showing the unwashed how to make crisp bass sound by making sure HFs are present, etc.
Hi Richard.
Yes, I have done this for a very long time.
I have recordings of a band that I have extensively live mixed, so I well know both the singing voice and the spoken voice of the band's vocalist.
Ditto the in person voices of announcers on my local community FM station which runs minimal final processing and sounds nicely hifi AND natural on music and spoken word.
On my A system all of the above sound like they are in the room, on my B system, the above voices are still recognisable ala telephone recognition, but more a facsimile than the real thing.
So yes, spoken voices are a very good test of system quality.
FR issues, THD issues, IMD issues, dynamics issues, jitter issues etc become abundantly clear.
Any of the above issues and spoken word loses naturalness and relaxedness.
One caveat here is absolute polarity....if the reproduced acoustic polarity is wrong/inverted the replay will never sound right.
Wrong phase issues with multiway speakers are readily revealed and will inevitably spoil the party.
Dan.
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Dick,
In my end of the world most of what we do is sound reinforcement systems. These are different from public address systems as the goal is to provide adequate speech intelligibility without folks noticing the amplification.
The test we do is very simple someone talks while moving into and out of the microphones coverage. Either that or the volume control is faded in or out. (I prefer the movement method). When the system works correctly it is reasonably obvious.
Now interestingly enough a much tougher test is to make a mono recording at a distance. All of the comb filtering you miss from stereo hearing/room acoustics really sticks out.
In my end of the world most of what we do is sound reinforcement systems. These are different from public address systems as the goal is to provide adequate speech intelligibility without folks noticing the amplification.
The test we do is very simple someone talks while moving into and out of the microphones coverage. Either that or the volume control is faded in or out. (I prefer the movement method). When the system works correctly it is reasonably obvious.
Now interestingly enough a much tougher test is to make a mono recording at a distance. All of the comb filtering you miss from stereo hearing/room acoustics really sticks out.
My local AM radio breakfast announcer plays exclusively interesting hits from the past.
For sport/fun I find I am usually able to identify the track within the first few notes, if not the very first note.
Interestingly, many yesteryear hits cover a range of quality from abysmal to really good.
Of further interest is the fact that the good sounding tracks sound good on whatever they are played on...from portable radio cassette through to seriously good systems....this is the skill in good mastering.
Once the good mastering ear is learned, then differentiating good gear from bad becomes trivial.
Dan.
Talking about interesting hits from the past, anyone intersted in that should look up a triple CD album No. GLD 25420-1, -2 and -3, titled "One Hit Wonders". It's a compiled collection of artists who scored just one Top 40 hit and then disappeared. A good example are Zager & Evans and their "In the Year 2525" and Leapy Lee and his "Little Arrows". A worthwhile collection, available from Amazon.com.
And a next to perfct sound test I think is Waldo de los Rios' "Classics", BX416-2, in addition to being fabulous music as such. Rearranged Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Haydn, Verdi at al., all very well known pieces of music, almost a classical music hit collection, done in a modern way, but with good taste. Outstanding musical material.
The 'trick' is to focus on the unpleasant aspects in the sound - strangely,
Sorting out audio one uses the same technique - is that particular type of unpleasantness I experienced in configuration A now less with configuration B, one asks oneself ...
Of course if one is impervious to sensing extreme forms of unpleasantness on your taste buds, up your nostrils, rubbing against your skin, and, even intruding into your ears ... well then, maybe there's no hope for you ... though, thinking about it, it might make you very useful for sending into areas where they use "advanced interrogation" techniques ...
Just repeat, the Emperors cloths look fantastic, who is his tailor.
Yawn.
Like setting up a monitor by eye, it doesn't work.
A less informed reader might think so, but obviously since long time ago (at least since the exeriments wrt SDT i.e. signal detection theory, 1950s) it is known that the phrase "treshold" means (in this context) a more or less precise estimation for the mean of an underlying probability distribution, which is usually a normal distribution.
I am glad to see that you finally realised why a categorical assertion "after a few seconds the memory is.....and therefore an experiment has to be done in a way...." represents more a hypothesis than an established fact backed up with hard evidence due to experimental data.
Btw, the (in the original post from Bonsai) expressed connection between memory time span and "ABX" or "DBT" is a bit misleading, as neither is a synonym for a sound controlled listening test.
dvv, are you sure they are worthwhile? Customer reviews on Amazon say that these are not original recordings and that the set is a rip-off..
Inevitably, over 40 years later, some are bound to have left us and that cannot be helped.
To answer your question, that depends on how interested you are in that period. I am a collector of sorts (of music 1968-1978), so to me, yes, it is well worth it. If you are not a collector, or at at least an affictionado, you may feel differently. Take a look and decide for yourself, at least.
As for other comments on amazon.com, I am usually at odds with many of them. For example, I bought Al Stewart's greatest hits inappropriately tilted "The Year of the Cat", after his best known album, which I have and because of which I bought it, only to be drastically let down by discovering that the numbers I wanted to have had been left out and other ones inserted. I wasted my money, in my view, yet other customers were waxing lyrial about it. Go figure.
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I suggested a simple experiment that anyone can easily do to demonstrate what experimental psychologists have known for over a century. You can choose to do it or choose to make ever more fanciful excuses about why people can't use their ears alone for audio evaluation.
Interesting that you used that analogy ... because that's exactly what I do. Specifically, an LCD TV set, where all the standard colour balances were wrong - used one of the standard calibration DVDs, and it was still out, by a good margin. So, made a exercise of getting the RGB right to a single click or so of all the settings, back, forth, over a number of days, just using visual assessment to fine tune ... and quite a few years later, still perfectly happy with what I got - the colours always come across as being just right, for the type of broadcast, it never has a false quality to it, unless the station is pushing the colour saturation.
Huh?.
I used to do it routinely, it just takes skill and practice (and a few little tricks).
Every tv that went over my bench got the calibration treatment as part of my standard comprehensive fixed price plus parts repair/service.
Routinely I got feedback from customers saying that their tv had never looked better, and better than any tv they had ever seen.
I routinely found that consumer tv's were not set up correctly from factory.
Dan.
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Again it will be sort of right to your vision, but to set up a display device properly you cannot do it by eye... No arguments its a fact, if you want perfect colours then the eye will not do, for photography design etc. you have to use a dedicated device NOT your eyes. For TV films etc. you can get away with it by eye if you want as it is not critical but for critical work no way can the eye do it.
For TV maybe, but as I said to Frank for detailed work involving colour repeatability the eye is no good.....
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