Misses the point completely - people prefer the speakers in sighted tests but this doesn't satisfy the scientific measure for objectivity as bias is cited as an influencing factor. Therefore, a very careful, formalised testing methodology is needed to minimise as much as possible these influencing biases & anybody presenting research in the scientific area needs to do this as Olive/Toole did.
What this means is not that this complexity is needed to prefer the best measuring speaker, both simple sighted listening & complex blind test listening come to the same result so the complexity is NOT needed - it's only needed for scientific research & presentation of objective findings
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I have no belief on this matter. I suspect that they might sound different, since both may be flawed in different ways: one by using a curious architecture, the other by cost constraints. However, take a good tube amp and a good SS amp and it has been shown that by some small adjustments (frequency response, output impedance) they can be rendered indistinguishable.Doppler9000 said:
'Good enough' means sufficiently good that the unit becomes indistinguishable in almost any reasonable ears-only test from any other 'good enough' item. Items which are not good enough are more likely to be distinguishable, except where they all share a common flaw but are otherwise good enough.
I simply asked a question. I do not seem to have received an answer.
In audio it is a large fringe. No collusion or coordination is needed, other than herd instinct. The poor teaching of science (and economics) in modern schools leads to lots of people being easily bamboozled.
There is ample evidence just on this forum. People with crazy ideas or simple ignorance of the basics - some of them engaged commercially in the audio business. Before I joined this forum I assumed that most audio was competently designed, and that 'more expensive' probably meant 'better design'. I now know that this was hopelessly naive, and the correlation between cost and quality becomes ever weaker at the 'high end' and may even turn negative. Items praised to the skies by journalists, but containing basic design errors and/or appallingly poor performance.
I told you, Doppler, you would get that answer the 'test' is what defines "good enough"
Now here's just one problem with that - how do we know the 'test' is sufficiently sensitive? How do we know that the test isn't masking differences?
Surely to use a test as the reference for defining "competent design" or "good enough" the test itself has to meet certain rigorous standards which have been shown to not influence the results?
What do we have here - a definition "almost any reasonable ears-only test" - pretty wide-ranging definition!! Wonder who decides what's a "reasonable ears only test"?
Who tests the test? Nobody. The suggestion was made early in the thread that some known & audible difference should be included in the blind test & used as a means of at least verifying that the test & participants have some hope of revealing similar differences (the level of this anomaly needs to be determined to define the sensitivity of the test itself)
Now here's just one problem with that - how do we know the 'test' is sufficiently sensitive? How do we know that the test isn't masking differences?
Surely to use a test as the reference for defining "competent design" or "good enough" the test itself has to meet certain rigorous standards which have been shown to not influence the results?
What do we have here - a definition "almost any reasonable ears-only test" - pretty wide-ranging definition!! Wonder who decides what's a "reasonable ears only test"?
Who tests the test? Nobody. The suggestion was made early in the thread that some known & audible difference should be included in the blind test & used as a means of at least verifying that the test & participants have some hope of revealing similar differences (the level of this anomaly needs to be determined to define the sensitivity of the test itself)
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You want a good Hifi ?
Mostly : don't read Hifi 'zines. You just read about margins between brands, distributors, ads editors incomes, grup of friends and sometimes corupted writers.
Better is to go the hifi consumers exhibitions... and most of the time it tells you just about how a combination of devices is poor or good (if Lucky, good room, etc, asf). No more !
Many Dacs are equally bad or close enough bad, and I think this what the op experienced, or the speakers were poor stuffs (most are) ! Price indeed not a good factor enough to sort them out.
Experience should be more interessant between a good vynil brand new without surface scratchs and the same reccording with a DAC. Of course with acoustical instruments recordings. If listeners are hearing no difference, discussion start becoming of a great interest.
Mostly : don't read Hifi 'zines. You just read about margins between brands, distributors, ads editors incomes, grup of friends and sometimes corupted writers.
Better is to go the hifi consumers exhibitions... and most of the time it tells you just about how a combination of devices is poor or good (if Lucky, good room, etc, asf). No more !
Many Dacs are equally bad or close enough bad, and I think this what the op experienced, or the speakers were poor stuffs (most are) ! Price indeed not a good factor enough to sort them out.
Experience should be more interessant between a good vynil brand new without surface scratchs and the same reccording with a DAC. Of course with acoustical instruments recordings. If listeners are hearing no difference, discussion start becoming of a great interest.
Was it through ABX “testing” that this indistinguishable rendering was demonstrated?
As was predicted, you chose a tautological definition. At least you are consistent.
The answer is relevant only if you choose to ignore logic and prefer, instead, to fit the answer into your narrative fallacy.
If I work in the audio industry, presumably I am a snake oil salesman and not to be trusted.
What if I was a farmer? Would I be less knowledgeable but more trustworthy, in your view?
Would you view the merits of a logical argument made by an astronaut differently than those made by a banker?
If all DACs sound the same, how would you explain a competitive market that prices them differently? Trickery?
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Marketing. Selling stories. Ergonomy. Esthetics. Functionnalities. National pride. The peace of mind that comes from buying something that comforts your beliefs.
I could add a dozen reasons...
What makes me sympathetic to the OP's positions is how the audio industry is touting "huge, night and day" differences between devices. Yeah... for speakers or headphones sure. For amps ? On difficult loads and at high level, ok. For DACs ? Subtle at best in my experience.
I could add a dozen reasons...
What makes me sympathetic to the OP's positions is how the audio industry is touting "huge, night and day" differences between devices. Yeah... for speakers or headphones sure. For amps ? On difficult loads and at high level, ok. For DACs ? Subtle at best in my experience.
I think it has already be acknowledged that humans can imagine things. No argument there. It is also true that humans can be convinced that something doesn't exist when in fact it does physically exist.
So what do we do? Hopefully we try to sort it out as best we can, and allow that our sorting might not be perfect. Maybe with enough work we can arrive at some reliable statistics as to the probability that our sorting is correct, and feel appropriately confident about it (neither overconfident nor under).
People who have done work trying to sort out what humans can hear, such as out own Earl Geddes, say that they have a pretty good idea what most humans can hear, maybe about 95% of humans (based on the test protocols that currently exist, and the technical performance of test equipment in use at the time research was conducted).
One thing we don't have is a Guinness Book of World Records category for being able to hear the smallest distortion humanly possible. That being the case, we don't know what is possible. We can conjecture about it, and we do, but it hasn't been measured.
As a matter of personal opinion, I do some blind testing but not with foobar, and I have blindly and repeatedly at different sittings identified file differences at a very low distortion levels, and lower than I could do with foobar ABX. In other posts I have already outlined particular shortcomings with foobar ABX that make it distracting when used for testing with very low distortion levels. It should be very easy to demonstrate with some small changes to foobar ABX, that people would probably start producing better scores with very low level distortion testing. But I didn't and don't write foobar ABX software and neither do you. So what do we do?
We argue. We make up silly stories. Pretty much everything but do some science to test a hypothesis that small changes to foobar ABX would result in significantly different scores for a certain class of test cases.
Now that we have that out of the way, shall we get back to arguing? 🙂
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How could the words chosen by the audio industry affect the validity of a null test?
It seems that you believe in the merits of the test because the results fit your world view.
Have you read this thread by the OP? It is an earlier chapter in his serial test/surprise cycle.
"World' Best Midranges - SHOCKING Results & Conclusions."
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The post was about price setting for DAC. Since you don't pick on that, do you accept the reasons I gave ?
And sympathetic just means that the results fits the data points I already have by experience with a few dozens DACs (and not bothering doing ABX myself btw). Nothing more.
And sympathetic just means that the results fits the data points I already have by experience with a few dozens DACs (and not bothering doing ABX myself btw). Nothing more.
Evidently the DAC chip manufacturers are so committed to THE LIE they are paying their engineers to come up with new and interesting ways to fool the public. I bet if you visit ESS, AKM, etc. they are just sitting around playing minecraft with marketing because they know all their chips sound the same anyway.
I'm so glad we know better than they do. We're awesome you guys.
I'm so glad we know better than they do. We're awesome you guys.
Wouldn't it actually take a positive effort to design a DAC chip that sounded crap these days? Most of the cost is probably in the housing
This one, or a more recent one? Audio Market Voices | LINN x AKM | interview | AKM - Asahi Kasei Microdevices [RWD]
Google "placebo effect" and "nocebo effect". Not one; both.
One exhibits the symptoms of the cure while eating sugar pills.
The other is fed sugar pills but exhibits the side effects (which are disclosed as part of the study protocol) of the medicine under test. And not just sniffles ... in some cases, where there was a chance of fatal complications, patients have convinced themselves they have the fatal condition, and in fact follow that up by ... you guessed it ... dying.
The "multi-billions pharmaceutical companies" have to filter out these participants and results; if they didn't, the MAJORITY of the subjects would be under one or the other false symptoms, making the research pointless ... no drug could be approved with the unfiltered results.
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Yes - I read that the cost of housing has gone up a lot. The insides are all the same, so they sound the same. That fully explains both the results of the test and the enormous price range of DACs.
Welcome to Team Awesome!
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Like I said, they're busy playing Minecraft. Just look at the pic. Just sitting around with laptops. How can they engineer something that is beneath the threshold of audible differentiation based on our awesome and rigorous standards?
The money is always dumped into the enclosure. Just look at the speaker industry. Another con!