I never said that it should not change the sound, I said try to listen to your music and look for cues. Is it more involving? Do you find yourself listening longer or less intently with one vs the other? Are you more drawn into the performances with one or the other? Sure its subjective, but that is how I listen to music. The performances of each recording are not the same and so every combination of components are never the same. I try to achieve an overall balance that involves me more deeply and I can repeat this to prove to myself that I am not just fooling myself.
If this does not work for you, what can I say. It has served me quite well and many people that I have tutored in how to develop a good stereo system would agree I believe. We all obviously have biases, whether based in science or subjectively. I have refined my personal testing procedure through years of listening to what the audio world considers to be of the finest caliber of equipment, not theory or measurements. I also have been fortunate to listen to many live performances as often as I can afford to, as this is what I enjoy most, real live acoustic music.
My purpose is not to turn the world and all of its known scientific reasoning on its ear. I simply trust what I have learned through my experiences to guide me to a sound in my system that is satisfying and realistic to me.
rdf:
Not sure why you're telling me I'm not "rocking your world with paradigm shifts" - I'll take it you disagree with me. I'm not arguing for paradigm shifts anyway, just testing methodology shifts - subjective to objective. I know perfectly well how science works - a subject close to my heart - and I understand DBT perfectly well too. Do feel free to point out the shortcomings you perceive in my understanding though - they ought to be addressed, after all. As for this thread, how much of it do I need to understand, to address the issues at hand? I've responded to specific things and I've always quoted them. Sure I'm late to the discussion - and the forum - but I'm sure as hell not reading through 840-odd pages of discussion! As for the rest of your condescending screed, I fear you may have misunderstood what I was saying. Science already handily answers the question of audibility of cable differences, so there's no need to second-guess physics with double-blind or any other types of tests. That doesn't mean though that I'm 'biased', my decision isn't random or personal, it's a decision informed by hard science. At some point you have to trust existing scientific knowledge and not keep going back to re-invent it ("the wheel") yourself, and that's what I do. Mean while, I reiterate again that the pro-difference advocates cannot prove their case. By the way, DBT removes the Clever Hans effect. You ought to know that by now.
Feel free not to argue then. There are other threads, forums etc to attract your valuable attention
Not sure why you're telling me I'm not "rocking your world with paradigm shifts" - I'll take it you disagree with me. I'm not arguing for paradigm shifts anyway, just testing methodology shifts - subjective to objective. I know perfectly well how science works - a subject close to my heart - and I understand DBT perfectly well too. Do feel free to point out the shortcomings you perceive in my understanding though - they ought to be addressed, after all. As for this thread, how much of it do I need to understand, to address the issues at hand? I've responded to specific things and I've always quoted them. Sure I'm late to the discussion - and the forum - but I'm sure as hell not reading through 840-odd pages of discussion! As for the rest of your condescending screed, I fear you may have misunderstood what I was saying. Science already handily answers the question of audibility of cable differences, so there's no need to second-guess physics with double-blind or any other types of tests. That doesn't mean though that I'm 'biased', my decision isn't random or personal, it's a decision informed by hard science. At some point you have to trust existing scientific knowledge and not keep going back to re-invent it ("the wheel") yourself, and that's what I do. Mean while, I reiterate again that the pro-difference advocates cannot prove their case. By the way, DBT removes the Clever Hans effect. You ought to know that by now.
What rdf is saying is that a particular test he doesn't like could have been biased toward "no differences" by the experimenter (in this case, someone who indeed expected no differences) being present. In a reductio ad absurdum, Moran could have been screaming and blowing a police whistle throughout the test and that would certainly bias it!
I respectfully believe that, in this case, my esteemed friend from the Great White North is mistaken, but he's certainly free to demonstrate evidence of his belief that the insertion of a 16bit/44.1kHz A/D and D/A conversion in the signal chain is audible and change my (and presumably Mr. Moran's) belief.
No, the detector is the statistical analysis of the results. That the question is about the ear-brain system doesn't affect the objectivity of the test methodology and therefore the test results. And this is not a test of cognifitive psychology but purely sensory ability. Does the ear-brain respond to differences in cables - or not? There's no room for subjectivity there. Even if the brain fools itself into not perceiving real differences or, equally, percevieing non-real differences - that's eliminated by the statisitical analysis. The end result is 100% objective. Hence, the DBT is not subjective. It cannot be, regardless of subject.
And that's why you need a DOUBLE-blind test and an open, inspectable test methodology. It's how science works. And I freely conceded he could remove all those influences in his DBT if he wished and it would still be a DBT. It's just that in my opinion a properly conducted DBT would be immune to that effect. Well, technically, the result would be 'can you perceive differences in cables whilst in the presence of a skeptic?' but the result would be the same I think
It certainly speaks to the power skeptics to intimidate people. As I said before, you have to ask why that is, unless the test subject has anti-skeptic biases of his own...
Last edited:
You suggested in an earlier post I'm new to this, please don't ask me to quote you for your benefit. You did note in the post to which you replied that I made specific criticisms of DBT protocols as applied? No, as you're stating the problem science doesn't answer the question and the unsupported insistence of limiting cable effects strictly to LRC in the audio bandwidth, when circuit interactions outside 20-20K have been discussed TO DEATH, is an artificial one.
Now that's how a gentleman and scholar handles it. Tip o' the cyber hat. Was it Moran? I'm thinking the BAS cable demonstrations. Re: DBTs, I'm not against them in principle but would ..... be more comfortable if they were long term and not public, say a sealed box someone takes home and clicks to their heart's content in a familiar surrounding for as long as is felt necessary. I do grant the null results of the usual public ABX say something of value about the magnitude of cable effects, though I'd put money down that even effects scientifically proven audible would escape detection in the bulk of them.
I don't really have a problem with your methods Curly. They aren't that much different than mine. I use my subjective experience over time as my main judgment of the things I am experimenting with in sound. But I will draw the line with certain things like ICs - which to me should measure with a flat FR or I am returning them.
I tend to go for active designs because they minimize the component variables you speak of. The more I think about it filter-amp-cable-transducer are all parts of one big machine and I don't think swapping any of the 4 blindly without double checking that everything works is a good idea.
The reason why is I have been burned when I purchased a used PC sound interface that sounded perfectly fine to my ears but had something going wrong with it because the FR was rolling off the bass 10dB. When I was trying to mix a song on this system I was wondering why when I played the song back on another system the bass was a sloppy loud mess.
Certain things in a sound reproduction chain are just supposed to perform a mundane task like not changing the sound. And this is the task of pretty much every component on the playback side of the chain. When you start judging this chain solely based on your subjective judgment of things like FR you are not likely to ever get a perfectly flat FR. I seriously doubt that any successful speaker maker gets by tuning crossovers and making/picking/tweaking transducers with there ears alone.
I tend to go for active designs because they minimize the component variables you speak of. The more I think about it filter-amp-cable-transducer are all parts of one big machine and I don't think swapping any of the 4 blindly without double checking that everything works is a good idea.
The reason why is I have been burned when I purchased a used PC sound interface that sounded perfectly fine to my ears but had something going wrong with it because the FR was rolling off the bass 10dB. When I was trying to mix a song on this system I was wondering why when I played the song back on another system the bass was a sloppy loud mess.
Certain things in a sound reproduction chain are just supposed to perform a mundane task like not changing the sound. And this is the task of pretty much every component on the playback side of the chain. When you start judging this chain solely based on your subjective judgment of things like FR you are not likely to ever get a perfectly flat FR. I seriously doubt that any successful speaker maker gets by tuning crossovers and making/picking/tweaking transducers with there ears alone.
curly woods:
I think after this I will leave you alone but I would say this - the audio world that tells you your equipment is the finest is the same audio world that has perpetuated the lie that cables and a dozen other snake-oil remedies to non-existant audio problems are worth spending a lot of money on. So you should think twice before trusting it. And if you and your clients really enjoy live music so much, why not spend a fraction of your stratospheric hifi budgets going to hear that music, rather than endless hours and dollars at home trying to reproduce the kind of details you never notice live? As one hifi reviewer once remarked, for the cost of a high-end component, you could go to hundreds of concerts or buy hundreds of CDs. I'm passionate about technology but it's still ultimately a means to an end. Spending weeks straining at the very limits of human perception to justify spending hundreds or thousands of extra dollars is just lunacy. If it's barely perceptible, it's barely worth paying for. Regular cables work just as well as uberexpensive exotic ones and the fact you take weeks and weeks of listening just shows how pointless those products are.
It depends what we're interesting in detecting, doesn't it? Statistical analysis is the detector because we're interesting in detecting whether cable differences are audible and only within DBT-produced data does that answer lie. Hence, statistics is the detector. To give a different example, take the LHC's experiement to detect the Higgs boson. They will run the same experiment probably millions of times to produce enough data to be *statistically* sure that the Higgs boson was produced. It's the only way. Statitistics is absolutely central to determining a lot of facts in science and, as such, statistics is the confirming detector.
Read this:
double blind trials
It makes clear the limits of subjective detection - as it says, relying on direct sensory confirmation only works where "a case of what is called a high effect size treatment, which means that the effect is so large that it is outside the range of normal variation and simple observation confirms the treatment's effectiveness."
When we are testing human perception of differences in cables, we run into: " a small effect and the subjective views of the researcher can overlap with the subjective views of the patient. This can lead to error." - and hence we arrive at the need (ultimately) for DBT techniques and statistical methods of determining an answer.
After a decision threshold was choosen, it is objective to conclude if a result is above or under this threshold, but the interpretation of this result is quite subjective.
We have to remember that due to the discrete nature of the steps a result might be slightly above our threshold but the next step would be under the threshold by a big margin.
BTW, afair Meyer/Moran themselves did write that their paper wasn´t a definitive answer to this audibility question, but of course later on the results were used in this way.
Unfortunately doing so leads to more inconsistency, as we have to belief that 4 participants were able to detect a difference between DSD and PCM high definition stimuli, while no one will be able to detect a difference between HD PCM and 16bits / 44.kHz CD format.
And furthermore we have to conclude that while some people are doing dbts on different dither algorithms for the reduction from HD format to CD format, Meyer/Moran already found the totally transparent solution.
@ Doomlord_uk,
i think you should analyze some of the well documented DBTs already done to get a better perspective where things in those tests were really objective and where subjectivity comes into play.
Sometimes researchers like Oohahsi tried to reach a higher degree of objectivity by using additional methods like EEG or PET scans, but up to now there is no way to find an objective answer to the question if a participant in a test does percept something or not.
You have to ask the participant and sometimes the answer will be "no" just because the participant only thinks that he doesn´t percept something.
And sometimes it will be the other way around.
Wishes
Why is an ear-brain system any more subjective than any other system? It's just a system, just like any other. Subjectivity lies in the interpretation of the results and the failure to exclude *psychological* and other factors properly. Just because 'sensory perception' is the subject of the test, doesn't make the test subjective. If I shine a light in your eye, the pupil should dilate. Testing whether that happens or not is not subjective. The fact the experimenter asks the listener 'did you hear that?' doesn't mean the answer is subjective either, in the aggregate, since the statistical analysis weeds out possible subjectivity from the listener. Hence, the test is not subjective.
Who claimed that?
Now why did I knew that, so clearly you have no experience in blind testing but you want to tell others who actually did it what will and will not influence the test.
Does it matter? What I use is not relevant to this debate.
Right now, I listen to music via Cerwin Vega AT-100s (AT-15s in the US) driven through 50p/m copper multi-stranded cable from a Marantz PM-64mkII amplifier, connected via el cheapo interconnects that I think came with an old sound card many years ago to a Yamaha DVD-S535 dvd player. My equipment stand is a cheapo MDF black-ash entertainment rack from now-defunct UK furniture store MFI. Room treatment is non-existant and room placement of equipment is dictated entirely by the practicality of space limits (my room is full of stuff right now
).Btw, I'm in the process of fixing up a Yamaha M-85 power amp, when I do it and the C-85 I have will replace the Marantz. I also have a Lecson system but that's also faulty and needs fixing, at which point I'm selling it.
I enjoy my music
Andre:
SY:
You don't need experience in something to understand it. Secondly, clearly your blind testing methodology is in error, regardless of whether I've done any DBT tests myself. You don't have to be a believer to question belief, and you don't have to be a tester to question testing methodologies.
SY:
And? Perception by it's nature is conscious but the subject, the ear-brain system, is still just that - the subject of the test. Consciousness is just part of the ear-brain hearing system. The listener in the test either believes he hears or not, that's a concious decision, but the answers he gives in the aggregate (unless he's deliberately lying) are still objective data.
Does it matter? What I use is not relevant to this debate.
I enjoy my music
Yes it matters.Have you chosen your system by listening to it before buying it?It is actually relevant to let us know this detail.I am interrested to know how a person with your thoughts,chooses his hi-fi system.
I believe you when you say you enjoy your music.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.