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#961
Evenharmonics said:
By the way, there have been level matched audio DBT that detected audible difference.
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Class-T versus 300B? Yes, that's about the two extremes.

Charles Darwin said:
As I said before the differences I think I hear between DACs are less than the differences I think I can hear between power amps
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It depends on what we compare. Are we comparing two extremes or not.

Average DACs have at worst -90dB of THD+N and the frequency response of? May be +/- 0.1 dB from 20Hz to 20kHz.

Problems with amplifiers such they can give away clues to differentiate are that even tho they have similar rated THD, they may hve different spectrum (H2 versus higher orders), different THD@40Hz (for bass) and THD@20kH (not to mention IMD and other many variables).

Evenharmonics said:
I'm not sure how one can use phrase like "connects you emotionally to the music" and hi-fi in the same paragraph... :scratch: You do know the meaning of hi-fi, don't you?
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I have studied/observed the correlation between Physics and this psychology for years.

"connects you emotionally to the music" has really correlation with "hi-fi" because that what music is. It is then about defining a new terminology because "THD" alone is not sufficient to define "hi-fi" (because of no perfect hi-fi, yet**).

Yes, some people don't want to change the definition of "hi-fi", but at least if they can list the physical variables involved to define "hi-fi" along with their weightings, for example:

"hi-fi" = 20% * THD1k + 10% THD40 + 10% * THD 20k + ...

then we can discuss easily in pure technical languages.

** If we can get the perfect "hi-fi" we wont have this problem. As long as we are far from perfect, it is really about taste. There are many variables that affect these tastes. The DDE mentioned above is part of the required quality. It's importance or weighting (compared to other variables) is difficult to formulate.

Because in design we usually encounter trade-off situations, I prefer to find the minimum thresholds for variables involved. These thresholds are derived from listening experience, by comparing numbers with perceptions.
 
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#962
practice, practice...

bentoronto said:
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3. Ken also tells me that he looks forward to the day when engineers and techies do the testing, no fools at home. [I couldn't disagree more. Decades of stage magicians have revealed the tricks of hucksters where scientists and engineers have been really duped. More exactly, I'll say something that will bring howls from all the wannabee engineers on this thread: leave human testing to the properly trained and experienced professional... applied psychologists.]

Ben
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practice does help, should be considered necessary before beginning to rely on the results

jcx said:
another thing some don't "get" about science experiments, especially human subject experiments is that even with a good experimental protocol there are problems in execution that can only be reduced with critical practice - for both the experimenters and subjects

all of us are fallible, make more errors in to us novel circumstances

it can be fair to criticize the "stress" of the testing procedure as possibly affecting the subject's ability - the way to reduce it is with familiarization, practice sessions

the experimenter's need for practice may be less recognized from the school book picture of "the scientific method"
in a undergrad Microbiology project lab - for 3rd year students, expected to have a couple of experimental lab courses as prerequisite - the grad students TAs told us that our 1st try with transducing phage would likely fail - only one of ~20 teams succeeded in executing the well documented, thoroughly "debugged" protocol - while being coached to write it out in our lab notebooks, check off each step...

"amateur" Psychoacoustics experiments are likely to have this problem given the difficulty of assembling/scheduling any useful number of volunteer test subjects, their lack of time commitment to trial runs to "debug" the experimental procedure, to build the experimenter's experience to accurately execute
then internal positive controls have to be included to check the quality of the experiment - again lengthening the subjects time commitment, stretched even further by having multiple time limited sessions with each subject to avoid working into fatigue


as a practical matter you could have your prospective subjects work through the Harmon "Golden Ears" listening test to increase their comfort with Blind, ABX testing, perhaps also serve as useful audio discrimination training
Audio Musings by Sean Olive: Harman's "How to Listen" - A New Computer-based Listener Training Program
Harman How to Listen: Welcome to How to Listen!

I don't have academic or professional psychoacoustic test design, experimentation experience even though I have been a subject a couple of times

I expect the experimenters need to do trial runs, with exit interviews on the subjects experience of the directions, testing - at 1st with maybe your buddies - but trial runs with "naïve subjects" that have the same experience as your full test's subject pool
and compare your test protocol resolution/accuracy against published psychoacoustic thresholds on known signals/modifications in the positive controls you should include

http://www.delta.dk/imported/senselab/AES125_Tutorial_T4_Perceptual_Audio_Evaluation_Tutorial.pdf may help with Auio Perceptual experiment design - though the book does seem to spend more time on standards organizations publications than the "science"


all that is a lot of work - why I mostly reason about "audibility" from actual professional scientist's published Psychoacoustic work and EE Signal Theory, measurements
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#963
Jay said:
Average DACs have at worst -90dB of THD+N and the frequency response of? May be +/- 0.1 dB from 20Hz to 20kHz.
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For my amps the relevant data would be 0.03% THD 20-20kHz, frequency response 20-20kHz +0 -0.5dB and Hum&Noise -108dB unweighted.

My convertors are a bit quieter at -114dB unweighted.
They were kinda cheap at £350 for 12 channels of AD&DA conversion.
I picked them after somebody years ago posted a blind test online between really cheap ones, mine and some rather expensive Apogees (£8k for 8 channels).
The cheap ones were readily distinguishable by me and dozens others but the differences between mine and the Apogees were very, very small indeed and only showed up in a/b testing.
If there had been minutes between mine and the Apogees nobody would have been able to detect differences but even though they were down to taste as nobody could tell which is more accurate.
Sadly the manufacturer has ceased production since and focus exclusively on industrial-type digital streaming solutions.
 
#965
planet10 said:
A sound system that provides an illusion of a musical performance. A device that provides entertainment. A sonic information transmission system. The end product providing pleasure to the listener.
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Incorrect.

Hi-Fi usually reserved for those that lose as little information as possible.
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Usually? Perhaps in your own mind because that's not what I saw when I looked up the meaning of hi-fi.

Given current state-of-the-art and the broad swath of target humans, a whole lot of wiggle room.
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For speakers, yes, as you have stated.
planet10 said:
It is particularily applicable to speakers because they are so bad, with many necessary compromises given today's technology.
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Current crop of DACs lose as little information as possible, beyond what human hearing can detect so it's good to go.
 
#968
Derfnofred said:
It should be mentioned that Planet10 has some pretty major subjective biases and theories in loudspeakers (at least in speakers, see DDR) that no one else seem to be able to validate, nor has much in terms of priors. So if no blinding protocol ever seems good enough for him, it has a definite (I won't say in the least that it's absolute) risk of being from motivated reasoning. Then again, there have been times where psuedo-studies on DIYAudio have been called laughably statistically significant and we agree that it's rubbish to make those assertions.
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Please refrain from these ad hominem attempts; eristic may help winning a debate, but will not help in finding the truth. 😉

Disclosure, I'm less likely to carefully look at the methodologies of studies that find null results than I am ones that find non-null.
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Quite common, but hard to justify. Is there really justificaton for this strategy to find in epistemology or theory of science?

The authors of the ITU-R BS.1116-x recommended (imho for good reasons) a totally different approach:
It must be empirically and statistically shown that any failure to find differences among systems is not due to experimental insensitivity because of poor choices of audio material, or any other weak aspects of the experiment, before a “null” finding can be accepted as valid.
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(ITU-R BS.1116-3, page 8)

jcx said:
<snip>
but its not "cover" for those claiming they already can hear a difference when the specific claimed difference is DBT ABX and they get null results
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Could you provide an argument why its not "cover" for those...?

I think we can make some inferences from accumulated null results happening with the people who assert they "know" the "signature" of the difference - can hear it through other confounders like level or frequency response variations
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Basically the result of a statistical analysis will be an answer to the question, if the null hypothesis can be rejected or not.
Any further conclusion will only be justified, it the test was objective, reliable and valid.

So inferences are possible but obviously not for tests of questionable quality.
 
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#969
Coming from a studio/pro-audio background I would say it's going to be almost impossible to beat the current Benchmark line but they do ADDA so you have more flexibility. Mytek has a fantastic product for the money. As long as it's got a good circuit anything can be modded to sound great w a combo of my fav opamps on the line levels and some clocks. I have a Digi002 modded that people think recordings were done on an HD system.
 
#970
just pointing out the difference between any naïve, misdirected, untrained subject being "ambushed" with bad DBT missing a sonic feature that others may hear, that they may learn pick up with guided focus, training

and a person making the claim that they do hear difference X, can give a wordy description of what "X" sounds like, insists "X" as a property imparted to the sound by a component/step in the signal chain that they can hear when many other elements in the chain are changed
I think most will make an inference from failed DBT test(s) of "X" by the latter when the subject is given opportunity to approve of samples, time, switching, train with the protocol, use source, equipment they agree they hear the difference with

since they "know what X sounds like" the situation is very different from the first case
 
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#971
Charles Darwin said:
Echo Audio who made mine switched from Cirrus Logic CS4272 to AKM AK4620b at some point.

Apogee used AD1852 & CS5361.

No idea what the cheap A.R.T. unit used.
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Thanks. From very few samples I have found Cirrus Logic chips to sound "high-end", can be compared with much more expensive stuffs, but I found it not so favorable in long listening (similar to NE5532, which I often found used in combination with CS chip).

I also have an A.R.T, using Cirrus Logic and TL072s. Doesn't look cheap but far from the -114dB standard.
 
#976
planet10 said:
We all know that a hifi should provide the illusion of a musical performance and that the other 2 are not mine but can be attributed to Nelson Pass & Julian Vereker. Do you know who they are?

dave
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You keep saying "musical performance" but hi-fi applies to all reproduced sound such as verbal speech as an example. Lo-fi equipment can "provide the illusion of a musical performance" too, so there you have it.
 
#977
My HiFi is supposed to reproduce the input waveform with high fidelity.
No more, no less.

I don't know about 'illusions of musical performances' which in the case of studio recordings ( the vast majority of recordings I own) never existed in reality.
At least not since the Beach Boys and the Beatles started using the studio environment as a creative tool.
 
#978
Charles Darwin said:
My HiFi is supposed to reproduce the input waveform with high fidelity.
No more, no less.
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Given current state of technology there is a whole lot of wiggle room in achieving that holy grail.

There is also the problem of the quality of what goes into the software we play as it is part of the chain that takes us back to the original performance.

I don't know about 'illusions of musical performances' which in the case of studio recordings ( the vast majority of recordings I own) never existed in reality.
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Even if created entirely in the studio (or on the computer) it is still a musical performance.

dave
 
#979
planet10 said:
Given current state of technology there is a whole lot of wiggle room in achieving that holy grail.
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You mean current state of speaker technology, right? Just checking...

There is also the problem of the quality of what goes into the software we play as it is part of the chain that takes us back to the original performance.
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How close to the original performance it is, is dependent on the skills of recording and mastering engineer.
 
#980
Evenharmonics said:
You keep saying "musical performance" but hi-fi applies to all reproduced sound such as verbal speech as an example.
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It is nice that a good hifi can also reproduce TV.

Lo-fi equipment can "provide the illusion of a musical performance" too
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True. Usually a not very good one, and ruled out as hifi by the rider in the definition i gave.

dave
 
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