The "this" to me is that the mind is a top notch DSP processor, which allows it to do an admirable job of compensating for 'flaws' if it so chooses, or is inclined. How else is it able to listen to an atrocious quality replay of a piece of music that you have great affection for, and allow you to thoroughly enjoy that, because you can "hear past" the SQ problems ...?
I would throw it back onto the 'experts', for them to demonstrate that statistically there is no difference in people's ability to discriminate between 2 versions of 2 sound file that have the same technical differences, when one track is meaningless sound texture, and the other is catchy popular music, say.
I have done tests with quick switching between tracks, not DBT, and have been able to "watch myself" start with being able to clearly distinguish, and steadily get worse the more times the switching happens ....
Probably because you are missing what is going on. You are allowed to skip what you don't like, in case you didn't know. 😉
Seems to me you are interpreting something other than our mind succumbing to external influence such as what we are told (see quote below). Look up "power of suggestion" on Google. DBT is to eliminate the bias coming from such influences.
So you've never done a level matched DBT of electronic audio gears but you are critical of its "flaw". How does that work? 🙄
To buy into the "tube sound" concept you become the equivalent of an audio racist, and loose your ability to objectivity judge the amps sound. There never has been a measurable reference accepted by a scientific community relating to "tube sound" so it is strictly subjective. Since you cannot quantify one subjective conclusion to another what is the point of arguing it ? In my earlier statement I was not saying a human does not have the ability to turn off his internal DSP and judge sound analytically, I am saying there is no indicator light. One thing to keep in mind our processor has the ability to objectively interpret localization. This ability evolved from survival of the species not listening to HiFi. If you think about it the brain has processing ability to localize sound, I am sure it perceives digital input though you interpret it as analog. Being exposed to everything digital I would think the mind will eventually evolve to interpret digitally recreated sound differently than it does now.
Bill
Bill
Because I can perceive what happening, over time, in my hearing system even when the test is fully sighted: even though I know at each point, at all times, whether A or B is playing, after a number of rounds of listening, A and B merge, subjectively, to effectively become acoustically indistinguishable.
Therefore, if the test is not sighted, DBT, the results could only be worse still ...!!
I looked up some of Evenharmonics posts to see if there was evidence of an expertise in DBT. What I found was that in the real world he's no different from the rest of us who make A-B choices on the basis of listening impressions. And in addition to that he does what we all do - ask for subjective listening impressions from others to assist in component choice. No shame in that. No shame in holding DBT as a theoretical goal. But please, lets do a bit of reality testing here and base our comments on what actually happens, not some kind of abstract mythology.
Evenharmonics: "I’ve looked through some of the threads here on different output transformers which cover measurements and prices. What do you say we share some listening impressions?
I recently switched from Hammond 1627SEA 2.5K Ohm primary, 160 mA, 30 Watts to Electra-print 3K Ohm primary, 100 mA, 15Watt for my Tubelab SE amp which uses 300B OP tubes. It may not be apple to apple comparison due to different numbers but the impressions between them are as follows.
- Ep (Electra-print) has better imaging between instruments and vocals than Hammond.
- Ep produces little better controlled mid and high (if this is a proper term) and sounded smoother.
It’s only been a week so that’s what I have so far. Those who switched output transformers, what was it like?"
Other than this, it's been very interesting reading posts from those who are actually starting to deal with the real issue of how we process sound.
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A doctor once asked me the question "what is the primary function of the brain?". His reply was "ignoring things". This is quite a neat way of stating that our brains only have the processing power to "notice" and deal with a small number of factors at any one time. Amongst other things this helps explain eyewitness unreliability - they "see" the same thing but "notice" different things depending on the limited information their brains select to process. It's pretty clear that this is what happens in audio - one listener "notices" soundstage, another bass, another midrange, another the emotional effect. In my case as a musician it's timbre.
It's not what we exclude that counts - exclusion is inevitable. Which is why a flat frequency response from 20-20k Herz may not be "noticed" if other factors are more important to the listener. Think of cartoons - why do they look more characteristic of a person than photographs? They exaggerate one or two distinctive features. The result is immediately recognisable even where the legs are shortened and the nose lengthened. It "looks" spookily like the real person.
I believe that this is what happens in subjective listening. People use SETs because, for instance, "the vocals sound spookily real". Maybe the bass is light and underdamped or the treble restricted, but what counts is what is INCLUDED in our processing, NOT what is EXCLUDED. And on that basis we make judgements, just as we do in real life. "Tube sound" is no doubt based on what we selectively process, not on what is measured in the lab.
I'm Welsh and there's a joke about Welshmen being given names for what they do - their distinctive feature. Jones the Fish, Pritchard the Meat etc. It goes like this - a man asking for directions up in the mountains comes across a shepherd who launches into this diatribe:
"I'm Thomas, you see. I built all these fences here. Do they call me Thomas the Fences? No. I made all these gates you see before you. Do they call me Thomas the Gates? No. I shag one sheep........."
It's not what we exclude that counts - exclusion is inevitable. Which is why a flat frequency response from 20-20k Herz may not be "noticed" if other factors are more important to the listener. Think of cartoons - why do they look more characteristic of a person than photographs? They exaggerate one or two distinctive features. The result is immediately recognisable even where the legs are shortened and the nose lengthened. It "looks" spookily like the real person.
I believe that this is what happens in subjective listening. People use SETs because, for instance, "the vocals sound spookily real". Maybe the bass is light and underdamped or the treble restricted, but what counts is what is INCLUDED in our processing, NOT what is EXCLUDED. And on that basis we make judgements, just as we do in real life. "Tube sound" is no doubt based on what we selectively process, not on what is measured in the lab.
I'm Welsh and there's a joke about Welshmen being given names for what they do - their distinctive feature. Jones the Fish, Pritchard the Meat etc. It goes like this - a man asking for directions up in the mountains comes across a shepherd who launches into this diatribe:
"I'm Thomas, you see. I built all these fences here. Do they call me Thomas the Fences? No. I made all these gates you see before you. Do they call me Thomas the Gates? No. I shag one sheep........."
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Well, all that handwaving is fine (TLDNR, to be honest), but let's try to stick to the topic: do you have any evidence or data showing that there is an intrinsic difference between the use of a tube and the use of silicon in similarly performing boxes of gain? If not, man up and admit that you're just asserting without evidence. If so, let's see it, in some detail. It's an extraordinary claim, so demands tight evidence to have any credibility greater than UFO abduction claims.
No, that would be "I'm still waiting for any significant contribution from you to the perception of sound".
It would be a help if you could start to distinguish between data and sound.
It would be a help if you could start to distinguish between data and sound.
So, are you saying the tube amplifier is intrinsically different in its frequency response (e.g. weak bass and restricted treble), and that this is what causes the brain to pick up on specific qualities that are called "tube sound?" If so, then you seem to be saying that differences in the amplifier's frequency response, which could therefore perfectly easily be measured in the lab, lie at the heart of why it sounds different.
And yet on the other hand you say ""Tube sound" is no doubt based on what we selectively process, not on what is measured in the lab."
So could you clarify which you are saying is the case? Does the different sound correlate with measurable characteristics of the amplifier, or not, according to your viewpoint?
Chris
I have no experience with designing or building tube gear, but have noted in many of the "lesser" units that I've chanced to hear that they appear to mask or smooth out low level detail - in the worse cases the whole realm of subtle ambience cues appears to totally vanish ... and if these would otherwise be badly reproduced, then it's probably going to be subjectively less unpleasant to just have this information go missing ...
Why this should be so I can't really say ...
Why this should be so I can't really say ...
Hello Chris, thanks for that. I'm just trying to explore some ideas here, and I welcome any input. Brain processing isn't my area of psychology so maybe others can help. There's some information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
The estimate of processing power of 126 bits per second comes from this, which is pretty out of date and I'd be grateful for a later source:
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some
limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63
(2): 81–97.
Some aspects of selective auditory attention are discussed here:
Selective auditory attention - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This kind of selectivity, which I believe posters have referred to ("you hear what you want to hear"), is not referred to not as a disorder, and seems more prevalent in males: "The whole sound message is physically heard by the ear but the astonishing idea is the capacity of the mind to systematically filter out unwanted information."
So as in previous posts, I'm exploring the idea that if we can only process part of the sound we hear, then our perception of "tube sound" or whatever will be a question of what we selectively prioritise. I would guess that there could be empirical evidence found for this, though I can't put my finger on any specific studies related to tubes. It would help if anyone else knows of anything.
Anyway, if our processing is so selective, then my question is how relevant is laboratory testing of, for example, the full frequency spectrum if a listener's attention is insufficient to process it. If the inflow of auditory information is 100,000 bits per second (verification needed) and only around .126% is being processed then we have quite a serious disconnect between data and perceived sound.
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Sound indeed comprises data. The data of listening tests, the data of measurements. The sound field itself- it's a physical thing, lots of data there.
If you're now claiming that sound is something beyond physical and thus not amenable to characterization and quantification by measurement and controlled listening, then we're back to UFO abductions.
I thought it was 100,000 bits? Now it's 126 bits? What is a "bit" in this context?
Still no evidence beyond anecdote, eh?
Still no evidence beyond anecdote, eh?
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