When I drink alcohol I get different reactions, with bubbles I get light footed and happy, with drinks I get forward an talkative with beer I get bloated and lazy. What is going on, the alcohol is the same so my reactions should be the same. At least in all measurable terms.
Audio is trying to fool our hearing to believe that we're somewhere else listening to some great music from a great performer, when that illusion can be kept alive for lengths of time the system works.
This has nothing to do with how it measures, we don't listen in signals we listen in transients and what happens over time, not how well a given product can replicate a sine or two sines. The world is much more complex than that to be simplified in such a groase manner
Audio is trying to fool our hearing to believe that we're somewhere else listening to some great music from a great performer, when that illusion can be kept alive for lengths of time the system works.
This has nothing to do with how it measures, we don't listen in signals we listen in transients and what happens over time, not how well a given product can replicate a sine or two sines. The world is much more complex than that to be simplified in such a groase manner
I don't listen to pop music, and polarity is not meaningful in that context- between multiple mikes and DI, there isn't a single "polarity."
OK, your polarity results are unsurprising; the sort of speaker you describe tends to have a very non-symmetrical response. I used very low distortion speakers when I fooled around with polarity.
In the context of boxes of gain, it really is quite simple. Voltage vs time, a one dimensional signal. Easy to compare input to output. Mikes, recordings, speakers, rooms, that's where the complexity (and interest) is.
The last 50 pages ?....try going all the way back to the start of diyAudio forum, evidence is provided ad nauseam.
Out in the real world it's called bullying, invariably accompanied by sycophant behaviour traits.
Breadth and depth of knowledge is not automatically intelligence.
Dan.
Yet all changes when you change a cable or place the "box of gain" on a different stand. Or you double the psu capacitance, yet the sine is the same, distortion remains the same. Just that the music is performed different, with different tempo and emotions. All is not measurable or we don't know how to measure it, or we don't know how to measure music performance. That is much much more subtle than something having great spechs.
For me the difference is the hifi system should reproduce the source with gain and the source material should fool the ear/brain into some thing like live music . IMHO that may be what JC views as his goal and not fashion SY. Feel free to correct me on my view I know some one will.
My goodness, I'm not sure I've ever designed and built a box of gain that was so microphonic or unstable that either of those things would make a difference to the sound. Perhaps in the "high end" world there actually are designs that poor, like that amp we were talking about a day or two ago with gross frequency response errors, poor distortion, and bad reliability for $10,000. Or those beautiful and stunningly expensive French amps with chrome chassis, gross slew distortion, sickly frequency response, and catching fire from time to time?
That's a system question, but I'd agree with your general view. John only designs boxes of gain, not mikes, recordings, speakers, or rooms, and those have a simple function- take an electrical signal and make it bigger.
Sy, you really need to get out more... A narrow mind needs good air. In music systems there so much that can create changes, inductance and capacitance form great microphones when vibrated, also something happens when your signal wire has half the gnd impedance. Again not visible in sines, but it can basically change the system quite a lot. Ignoring that is like commenting on the colors of a movie you have watched with sunglasses on. Being plain ignorant.
Expose myself to more incompetent designs than the ones I already know about? No, I don't think that's useful. I'd rather stick to competent designs.
Let's put an end to this silliness now ... at one stage, about 10 years ago, I got very interested in the business of achieving colour correctness for printer output - and researched and played around quite a bit with this concept. Yes, it's a fascinating field, with endless subtle variations and myriads of things that impact the process. However, I lost interest after a while, and moved on to other things - unless someone was going to pay me for being this fussy I wasn't going to bother pursuing it.
However, that is all about accuracy - and I repeat, this is not so important to me, in the playback of "older" recordings - I'm well aware that a recording can sound like a million different records, just by playing it on a million different systems - so, I'm focused on those qualities which ensure that the subjective impact is similar to listening to live sound ...
Unfortunately, there can be an effect - in hindsight, one of the reasons I struggled with my first achievements in "good sound" was highly likely this - but I was totally unaware of this "fetish", and never tried any experiments along these lines.
It's a materials effect, and a mongrel of a thing to get a grip on - as good a reason as any for going fully active, say, to bypass the whole nonsense ...
If "all changes when you change a cable or place the "box of gain" on a different stand," then yes, it's incompetent. And yes, there are some very good high end components out there.
That is indeed true. They do not "change when you change a cable or place the "box of gain" on a different stand." Designs that do are incompetent. As DF96 likes to point out, this is most common among the very cheapest and the very most expensive components. The vast majority in the middle are perfectly fine.
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