Oddly in any case. The Matrix Test: how could the cable swapper behind the right speaker possibly not know which system he was connecting? One amp is far left and in front, the other far back and right. If the speaker cables were the same length it wouldn't be brain surgery to figure out. A good likelihood is the test was effectively single blind, yet still null.
Re: the Coppola reference, a modern OTL (the Transcendent) has a max output Z in the 1/2 ohm range. Stereophile's test into their synthetic load showed FR variances of about +- 0.3 dB, arguably within clinical audibility. I couldn't find data on the Futterman but it's unlikely to be better. Why didn't reflect in the results?
Call it 'grousing' if it floats your boat but the fact remains had the results been significantly positive these issues would be called out and the test diminished.
Perhaps because that's getting down to the marginalia? Personally, I wouldn't have used Magnepans (impedance curve is quite flat, and that 0.3dB might be considerably smaller), but the qualities so beloved of religious audiophiles ("detail" "soundstage" "liquidity") are supposedly unrelated to frequency response.
Remember, Stereophile's synthetic load is NOT representative of the impedance of the speakers used in this test!
The great redirection!
Have you ever done a ABX test? will you ever do one? I think people should be forced to do one if they want to ramble on day after day on how flawed they are.....I would enjoy knowing they figured out how much money they wasted
Do you sell audio equipment?
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Because no difference was the conclusion often reached.... hmmnn
I'd be dissapointed if Andre thought otherwise...
But hey, he hears "it" so it must be true. No proof needed. Logic and reasoning, no thanks.
A few have addressed this in the many recent pages, but THIS is the primary source of your rejection of the claim?? That you cannot solder steel??
Heck, I have many times soldered stainless steel. And in case you are wondering, soft soldered stainless steel.
Really quite simple, use an appropriate flux.
If it is needed (and I don't mind doing it if you want) tonight I can find a coat hanger and solder it together and post the pics.
Tho I suspect you have me on ignore...lot's of discussion recently about that...
...but on the off chance you haven't and would like me to do that for your own increased knowledge base then let me know.Quite simply it does not. OTOH, what it often does is imply the existence of nothing else than buster and fumbling attempts to sweep under the floor any evidence contrary to what they'd like to find.
But, if all you have is constant 'that does not work obviously, because I disagree with it and refuse to try it myself' then you are not really advancing the discussion are you.
Presumably I am now putting words into your mouth and derailing the conversation. Interesting how a lot of people accuse others of their own actions isn't it.
That last point always seems to follow you around brooke like a shadow....
So in your view, the brains of the 'subjectivists' do not exist in the physical world. Incredible
Was that a deliberate misinterpretation of what was written? If so, why???
We started briefly down this path recently..but for some reason those posts were wasted by the mods...??? not that they were rude or abusive??? Who knows, it might be the solution to this whole debate!! Nahh
As those posts are gone, I run the risk of misquoting you so sorry in advance if that happens.
Anyway, you stated that it may be impossible for any of us to even know that another sentient being exists, or something along those lines.
I think you called it the 'difficult question' (??)
Funny thing about that one (am I the ONLY real person in the world and all else are some construct-how can I ever know) is that I clearly remember pondering that around age six or so. Also funny is around that time I first imagined the existence of the 'multiverse', an infinite number of universes all existing side by side yet unable to communicate, a bit like the reflections of mirrors in mirrors.
So I was quite surprised to come across these type of concepts years later when first reading about the many possible interpretations to explain some of the experimental results in quantum physics!
So, rather than it actually being the 'difficult question' as claimed, rather I tend to view it as a shallow and useless question often considered and discarded by six year olds.
We can discard it even on the basis (by it's own construct) that it is unsolvable so useless in any practical sense.
So, it comes back to 'can you NOT think of any way for someone to prove they can hear what they claim'? I do, for example, find proof enough that you can perceive and comprehend this discussion via keyboard, and I base that on your responses to the electronic screen in front of you.
Is that not kind of like the Turing test?? How to determine whether or not you are talking to a person or a computer (or perhaps to determine whether or not others are as sentient as ourselves??)??
So, can you not think of any possible test that can show someone hears what they claim??
I did have a look at that successful cable test in the hi fi mag, that (naturally) has come up before in this thread. It is worth a read for it's amusement value!
We used a standard blind ABX format for the test. The subjects couldn't see what was being changed, or even if there was a change taking place.
Really?? Then why do they say this later??
There seemed to be a distinct volume difference between the cheapest cable and the Chord (the cheaper wire was quieter). This distinction was less obvious with the slightly more expensive 'cheap' cable.
When you think about it, a slight volume difference is often not perceived as a slight volume difference but a difference in quality, so one starts to wonder just how different the volume was when it was readily perceived as a 'distinct difference'...ie we are in way more than a 'slight difference' territory now.
But they also claim to have done a standard ABX format??? Still, I guess we all selectively pick and choose what we want, if you want cables to sound different then you'd ignore that little inconvenient fact.
The final thing that had me chuckling???
While the differences between the cheapest cable and the Chord were relatively easy to spot, our panellists had noticeably more difficulty in distinguishing between the £7.99 Maplin special and the £500 Chord Signature. The differences were extremely subtle at best. Then again, we would expect that anyone who's prepared to pay £500 for an interconnect, is prepared to listen VERY closely.
We see that the expensive chord cable was distinctly louder (wonder what would have happened if it was the other way around???) than the cheapest cable and so were relatively easy to spot (no mention of better or worse, just it can be distinguished..tho no doubt they meant better??).
Yet, when This (volume) distinction was less obvious with the slightly more expensive 'cheap' cable the result became our panellists had noticeably more difficulty in distinguishing between the £7.99 Maplin special and the £500 Chord Signature. The differences were extremely subtle at best.
There it is, when the volume difference was easily noticed, it was easy. A slight bit of vol matching and the differences were subtle, at best. And we KNOW they did not do any actual level matching, and closeness in vol was purely accidental.
RDF, why do you not apply the same 'dissection skills' to this test you wave as proof of cable audibility as you do to the matrix test??
Oddly in any case. The Matrix Test: how could the cable swapper behind the right speaker possibly not know which system he was connecting? One amp is far left and in front, the other far back and right. If the speaker cables were the same length it wouldn't be brain surgery to figure out. A good likelihood is the test was effectively single blind, yet still null.
Re: the Coppola reference, a modern OTL (the Transcendent) has a max output Z in the 1/2 ohm range. Stereophile's test into their synthetic load showed FR variances of about +- 0.3 dB, arguably within clinical audibility. I couldn't find data on the Futterman but it's unlikely to be better. Why didn't reflect in the results?
Call it 'grousing' if it floats your boat but the fact remains had the results been significantly positive these issues would be called out and the test diminished.
OK, so it seems you're excluding the fact that the brain itself is a physical thing. Yet phantom pain is created by the physical brain, so there is a physical basis for it. So by giving this example, are you saying that phantom pain is imagined pain, because there's no perceived stimulus for it? If you're not, do you have another example for how you reckon believers perceive the sound of cables?
It might be a misinterpretation of the original meaning. That's why I responded to it, so the original writer could clarify. Equally though, the original meaning might be nonsense.
We started briefly down this path recently..but for some reason those posts were wasted by the mods...??? not that they were rude or abusive??? Who knows, it might be the solution to this whole debate!! Nahh
As those posts are gone, I run the risk of misquoting you so sorry in advance if that happens.
Anyway, you stated that it may be impossible for any of us to even know that another sentient being exists, or something along those lines.
I didn't say that, as it happens. But the difference doesn't really matter in this instance as I said its impossible for us to know that any other existing being is sentient.
The 'hard problem of consciousness'. Not too shabby
Very impressive for a six year old. What went wrong subsequently?
Quite the opposite of my experience with kids - they ask the deepest questions, not at all useless. I think its adults that call kids questions 'shallow' as a way to hide the fact that they don't really know the answer.
The view that you considered as a six year old just happens to be the view that Walter Freeman reached after studying the brain for many years. Which is that each brain creates its own reality, we're all solipsists in our own individual universes.
Yep, it is rather like the Turing test - Turing seemed to believe it was possible to have a computer's responses be indistinguishable from that of a sentient being. How would it respond though to being asked its mobile number?
I prefer to rephrase the question - can anyone think of a possible test that shows what people describe they hear? To me, the answer is obviously 'no' as its like this for all our perceived senses. Can I think of a way to share my own taste experience of a ChongQing hotpot? Or of the smell of an osmanthus tree in bloom? If anyone could, there would definitely be a Nobel for it. The flip side of course is it would put poets out of a job.
Hi,
After ten years of adhering to this forum I think I can safely conclude that you're one of the few and perhaps the only one to make ad rem and ad hoc remarks.
You are therefore, and it does not stop there, one of the few truly intelligent people I ever met on any forum.
Now lets see how smart you really are facing the garden gnomes, the real world.
For some resaon I, invarialby, fail that test....
L'enfer, c'est les autres nains de jardin....Dixit?
Cheers,
After ten years of adhering to this forum I think I can safely conclude that you're one of the few and perhaps the only one to make ad rem and ad hoc remarks.
You are therefore, and it does not stop there, one of the few truly intelligent people I ever met on any forum.
Now lets see how smart you really are facing the garden gnomes, the real world.
For some resaon I, invarialby, fail that test....
L'enfer, c'est les autres nains de jardin....Dixit?
Cheers,
thanks abrax...I prefer to use names (often easier to type if they have an odd user name....not referring to anyone in particular haha) so what's yours?
As I said, it would be quite possible that I misquoted you seeing as how those posts were wiped. Still, exact quotes aside, I think I got your essential point.
Umm, drugs at uni??? Heck, I remember clearly very young looking around the room (ie reality) and thinking to myself, 'Is this IT? It was all a charade somehow, we were looking at the shadows of reality rather than reality itself.
You are quite right there. Before all the social conditioning (and dare I say it, the modern education) gets at 'em. And what is really funny, you will find that a lot of adults have quite a bit of trouble answering those simple questions! 'It just is ok?!'
Well personally I would not put too much emphasis on the brain, but yes indeed. Your reality is quite different from my reality which is again very different from Tom, Dick's and Harry's.
Then of course, we all share a common reality which we can all agree upon. THAT apple here, that cat THERE. That common reality can be a bit fluid depending on the participants, but eventually (said with manuels voice from fawlty towers) no matter who the other is, somewhere there will be a common reality . That datum would even apply in an asylum. There it might take a bit ;longer to find it,and might be very narrow, but there will be a common reality somewhere.
Which segues very nicely back to this question, the reality constructed in each of our own universes, does NOT necessarily need to stem from 'the agreed upon reality' (ie the martian in the room that only one knows is there).
No-one is denying the truth of someones assertion that 'I hear a difference'. The question is, does that perceived difference emanate from the 'agreed upon reality' (that which all can agree on as existing, 'all' used very loosely haha) or their own internally constructed reality??
So we are after a test that can distinguish 'agreed upon reality' from 'internally created'. Which, it seems to me, is what a DBT attempts to do.
Not sure if that was what Turing believed (tho I acknowledge you could know a heck of a lot more than I about it all), always thought it was just a test to find out what was on the other side of the screen, rather than stemming from a belief he could make computers indistinguishable. anyway, I know not a lot about it.
No, not sure you could do that. I might not ever taste that chocalatey midrange!
But I think you are deflecting here. That is not the question at hand. You might very well hear that velvet bass, you do not have to 'prove' to me that it is velvet, all you have to 'prove' is that you hear it when you say it is there, and not there when you say it is not there.
Not the same thing methinks.
That would not be very noble would it!
As I said, it would be quite possible that I misquoted you seeing as how those posts were wiped. Still, exact quotes aside, I think I got your essential point.
Very impressive for a six year old. What went wrong subsequently?
Umm, drugs at uni???
Heck, I remember clearly very young looking around the room (ie reality) and thinking to myself, 'Is this IT? It was all a charade somehow, we were looking at the shadows of reality rather than reality itself.You are quite right there. Before all the social conditioning (and dare I say it, the modern education) gets at 'em. And what is really funny, you will find that a lot of adults have quite a bit of trouble answering those simple questions! 'It just is ok?!'
Well personally I would not put too much emphasis on the brain, but yes indeed. Your reality is quite different from my reality which is again very different from Tom, Dick's and Harry's.
Then of course, we all share a common reality which we can all agree upon. THAT apple here, that cat THERE. That common reality can be a bit fluid depending on the participants, but eventually (said with manuels voice from fawlty towers) no matter who the other is, somewhere there will be a common reality . That datum would even apply in an asylum. There it might take a bit ;longer to find it,and might be very narrow, but there will be a common reality somewhere.
Which segues very nicely back to this question, the reality constructed in each of our own universes, does NOT necessarily need to stem from 'the agreed upon reality' (ie the martian in the room that only one knows is there).
No-one is denying the truth of someones assertion that 'I hear a difference'. The question is, does that perceived difference emanate from the 'agreed upon reality' (that which all can agree on as existing, 'all' used very loosely haha) or their own internally constructed reality??
So we are after a test that can distinguish 'agreed upon reality' from 'internally created'. Which, it seems to me, is what a DBT attempts to do.
Not sure if that was what Turing believed (tho I acknowledge you could know a heck of a lot more than I about it all), always thought it was just a test to find out what was on the other side of the screen, rather than stemming from a belief he could make computers indistinguishable. anyway, I know not a lot about it.
No, not sure you could do that. I might not ever taste that chocalatey midrange!
But I think you are deflecting here. That is not the question at hand. You might very well hear that velvet bass, you do not have to 'prove' to me that it is velvet, all you have to 'prove' is that you hear it when you say it is there, and not there when you say it is not there.
Not the same thing methinks.
That would not be very noble would it!
This brings us back to the point when Markus says: "This is audio not epistemology".
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mult...ke-difference-any-input-1352.html#post2171474
Richard, though here in China I tend to get called 'Mr Bean'
Umm, drugs at uni???
Wow a real philosopher
Not many fess up to such notions!You are quite right there. Before all the social conditioning (and dare I say it, the modern education) gets at 'em. And what is really funny, you will find that a lot of adults have quite a bit of trouble answering those simple questions! 'It just is ok?!'
Yep, the easy questions are the hardest ones to answer.
That indeed is the only philosophical weakness I can see in Freeman's explanations. If all is created by the brain, then surely the brain is created by the brain. So all we're doing when examining someone else's brain is examining something created by our brain... Donald Hoffman has seen through that one, so his philosophy of 'Conscious Realism' makes more sense. He says that all 'reality' is just a species-specific hack, a user interface to something we'll never find out because we don't need to.
Its an illusion, though as Einstein said 'an extraordinarily persistent one'. Hoffman's argument would be that 'an apple (or cat) is just like a headache'. Do we believe there's a single 'headache' in a unified reality when we talk about having a headache?
What you're saying is that eventually we'll be able to find some overlap between individual realities if we look long enough. Yeah, I'd say that's down to shared biology. Since biological processes create reality, and all humans run the same processes, there's considerable symmetry.
The problem with the 'agreed upon reality' is its just like the agreed upon headache. Its not really there, everyone's headache has its own quality.
I'm not sure that that statement is true. I do see people saying 'there's no real difference' kind of phrases. I see people saying things like 'they only claim to hear a difference, they don't really'. 'The difference is only imagined'. Those are all paraphrases, not direct quotes. That's the flavour of things coming from the 'objectivists'.
THere's the problem again - 'the agreed upon reality'. All of us just have perception and perception is reality. Each perception is rather different. So the better question to me is 'what might be responsible for the perceived differences?' and 'how can we quantify perceptual biases?'. To me the interesting question is 'given a person without perceptual biases, is there a perceived difference?'
It seems to me that the DBT test tries to render a listener impartial. It is an attempt to make all listeners more similar by nullifying perceptual biases. Under such conditions, listeners don't usually hear differences. I do have reservations about the test stemming from the repeated decisions that are needed, but maybe that's grist for another thread on ABX testing.
I'm not an expert on Turing either, so my impression could be wrong.
So what would constitute proof? Your Nobel beckons if you can do it.
Subjectivists don't claim they can hear cables in ABX tests generally, they usually say they can't hear differences.
Meditation I think is worth exploring as a way to reduce perceptual biases. So if objectivists meditated more, they'd hear more. Conversely, subjectivists would hear fewer...
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