Sound Quality Vs. Measurements

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The reviewer is blind.

True. I am getting Linear Audio Vol 8 ready for printing, and it will have a Guest Editorial by John Atkinson. There's a lot of read-worthy stuff in there, but one thing he said was that (I summarize/paraphrase) the reviewer cannot begin to hope to be objective. What he must do is make clear what his biases are, where he is coming from, etc, so the readers can place his comments in perspective. Then, if readers start to 'know' the reviewer, his comments (and comparing his comments in other reviews) it will help the reader with his quest for HIS ideal system.

Jan
 
There is and interesting test done in psychology called pink box, blue box. Children up to a certain age think any person will know which box they have put something in. At age seven usually most children have learnt that what is secret is secret. From this they learn to lie. This ability to understand how others differ is innate in most and possibly has to be learnt by psychologists?

The interesting thing is I am convinced animals better understand this than humans. They do not corrupt their thoughts with written words.

It is said those who succeed most in life cheat and lie economically but do . The well told lie is the most successful thing in life. People hate the truth.
 
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There is and interesting test done in psychology called pink box, blue box. Children up to a certain age think any person will know which box they have put something in. At age seven usually most children have learnt that what is secret is secret. From this they learn to lie. This ability to understand how others differ is innate in most and possibly has to be learnt by psychologists?

The interesting thing is I am convinced animals better understand this than humans. They do not corrupt their thoughts with written words.

It is said those who succeed most in life cheat and lie economically but do . The well told lie is the most successful thing in life. People hate the truth.

This is a very interesting observation. Do animals lie? I seem to remember that one researcher (could have been Frans de Waal from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta) showed that primates can deceive their kind for personal gain. He also showed (I have the description of his studies on this here) that they can be altruistic, so apparently these are no exclusive human traits.

Jan
 
This is a very interesting observation. Do animals lie?

Absolutely. When I was a teenager, my family had a Dalmatian. If my mother was in a chair that the dog wanted to sit in and wouldn't move, the dog would go to the back door and scratch furiously, as if her bladder was about to burst. My mother would jump up and go to the back door, and as soon as she got there and started turning the knob, the dog would immediately bolt over to the chair and jump in, looking very pleased with herself.

"Congratulations, Mom, you just got outsmarted by a dog!"

Regarding test sensitivity, that can be handled in different ways, depending on what the question to be answered is. As one example, if someone claims that Box A sounds different than Box B and I have an ABX format, I will first ask if, switching back and forth between them, the listener still hears the difference. If I get a "yes," then X is brought in. If I were testing the effects of a CODEC on a group, I'd be using a positive control of a CODEC known to be audible at a just-noticeable-difference level and ensure that the listeners can score significantly. And so on.
 
Well it doesn't really matter how you rationalize your particular view. You don't KNOW!

Jan

23 years at Oxford. Yes I heard that sort of thing before.

Descartes had much trouble with this. His " I think therefore I am " was his only way of believing in the reality he so much needed. He saw dogs as machines. I do. His inspiration from water powered machines. He started to question his reality.

The creed so simple to have confidence in is reductionism. Not a creed I give much time to. Where is the spiritual? The Egyptians removed the brains from the to be mummified people. They understood it's connection with body movement. They did not consider the brain to be the person. I couldn't possibly say what is true. But you do not know and that's for certain. And me neither. I supect you think you do and I supect I have the advantage over you? I know I don't know.

Reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
No its not ignorance at all! I would bet that almost anyone, when detachedly (sp?) considering this, would say: yes of course, that's non-sense, how can anyone say so!

But it is a basic tenet of humans that we are disposed to blindly assume 'I' am better than most, or maybe the best of all! This is evolutions' way of making sure that we go on and on and survive against all odds - if we would be aware of our shortcomings and insignificance we would have disappeared from the face of this earth long ago!
So this kind of behaviour is very important as it enhance out 'success' in life.

Then again, we DO have the capacity to look at things the way they are, especially when it does NOT concern ourselves but others. That's why we feel we make all the smart posts while all the others are the stupid ones. ;), not realizing that 'the others' think exactly the same thing about us!
Are we not an interesting breed??

jan

So it's not the neck, but the throat? Since the end result is exactly the same, I honestly don't see any difference.

Assumption is the mother of all big f-ups. That's why we need knolwedge, so we assume as little as possible.

I and the people I am friends with do not assume we are better than others. Perhaps in some fileds, but in other fields, we are behind those people.

The one and only thing I assume, and that only because statistically I know I am right, is that I have had the good fortune to have had a very colourful and rather good education, better than most (but not all). In proper sequence: Yugoslav-Turkish-Pakistani-Yugoslav-British-Yugoslav (at the time, old Yugoslavia still existed).

The good fortune of that is that I have seen the same coin from both sides and from several different angles.

The price I paid was being weak in natural science subjects, which require consistency, something I could not have with such changes of countries and education systems.

My feeling is it was a most worthwhile trade, but then, I would think that, wouldn't I? But imagine being educated in a Marxist system, followed by a muslim milieu, back to Marxism, then off for some hymn singing in a Church of England chapel, and then back to Marxism. Oh man, what a ride! So I ended up as a moderate liberal, what the hell else could I be?

And - I am especially proud of this! - I never learnt how to hate anyone. I can dislike, but never hate, never wish misfortune upon anyone. I much prefer to like someone, although some people make that a monumental task.
 
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Regarding test sensitivity, that can be handled in different ways, depending on what the question to be answered is.

I'm working with a fe friends on a test to establish the audible difference (or not) between 'CD bandwidth' (20kHz) and 'SACD bandwidth' (up to 50kHz).

We have prepared musical instrument recording fragments that contain energy up to 40-50kHz, as well as a version where everything above 20kHz is deleted.
We will assemble a large group (30+) and present them with musical fragment pairs and ask if they are different or the same. All double blind of course.

Question is, how do we establish a baseline? Cut the bandwidth progressively until the difference becomes clear to everyone?

jan
 
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some audio phenomena are more easily heard in headphones and Electrostats can be very linear with extended frequency response
particularly time/phase discriminations like the inter aural time delay and differential group delay/"absolute polarity"

just buy a STAX SR-009 for everyone - but I hear the wait for Justin's Blue Hawaii SE is several years
 
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This sort of suggests we should take hi fi as perfect when it is and accept our own limitations? Don't think that attracts me much. Daft, as pleasure and beauty are imaginary. And that's the rub. Where it works is, there is a surprising overlap in how people like stuff. So the science should be. What is it we like?

"Hi-fi as perfect"...... I'm curious which headphone, speaker or IEM is perfect...... or close to perfect?

"overlap in how people like stuff"...... That's a complicated topic, put six identical twins in Japan, America and France, two twins in each country.

"pleasure and beauty are imaginary". Come on, the pleasure from Morphine is not entirely imaginary, so how could the pleasure from listening to music or walking along a beach be imaginary? They're equally real aren't they?

Beauty is a little imaginary, a little real.

A Zen garden versus a piece of concrete.

Vivaldi versus the sound of cats fighting.

Right?


It is said those who succeed most in life cheat and lie economically but do . The well told lie is the most successful thing in life.

Are you referring to economic success?

Even then, a lot of multi-millionaires suddenly wind up in jail, right? Like Khodorkovsky.


Deception is just one of many survival skills in nature.

Animals do it to survive.

Humans do it out of spite, greed and avarice.

No that's just women. :eek:
 
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