The danger is that some folks are extremely unreliable about their pseudo-ABX or, more likely, a protocol of unblinded A-B with a few days separation between the tests (say, the amount of time required to do said mods).
Please pass the salt; I'll need a truckload.
Different ones; the article i´ve cited was published 1985 in the JAES.
I think the wide spread in ratings illustrates the fact that interindiviaul differences can be quite large. Of course it might be that another far superior system would lead to convergent ratings if it supersedes the Quads as the best system.
Perhaps it's worth you doing some research into how fallible memory is before you try to suggest that I made an assertion without facts. That's without going into the effects of doing the modifications yourself and the emotional investment thereof on making any comparison even *more* difficult.
Any such comparisons are extremely unreliable at best. Heck, we don't like making such comparisons with instrumented experiments here given our uncertainty whether we did everything the same (or environmental conditions changed).
Insofar as to your reliability with informal testing, you've sunk your own ship all by yourself with the implausible claims made. Sorry. Maybe read Richard's list of logical fallacies for some help (and encourage him to as well). I didn't invalidate all informal testing, I highlighted an extremely common informal method that is entirely useless.
@Jakob2 - Posting material from or about a closed thread is prohibited. Your post has been deleted.Mr Scott #11, to you:
11. Thou shalt not assume because a perception is popular, it is false.
🙂
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#12 is the burden of proof is on the claimant? And that exceptional claims need exceptional evidence? 😉
Hi Daniel, Ok, the bit I object to is "The danger is that some folks....." gets extended to meaning proof that ALL listeners are hopelessly fallible, including professional mastering engineers and plenty others etc.
One thing we do remember long term is the overall groove or vibe of a replay system, and extended playing with a million tracks instills a memory of that system configuration characteristics.
Change pretty much any component of that system and a sonic change will be caused, and this change will be apparent but perhaps not immediately.
With extended listening the two sounds will be leaned/imprinted and thereafter distinguishable quickly and reliably.
Anyway that's my take it on it through long term repetition of discrimination of fine differences, very fine differences in order to discern what makes a system 'groove' or not, and by extension what to do about it, YMMV.
Dan.
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Not true. No component change can also cause the sonic change to the listener's minds by suggestion from others. Ever heard of speaker cable swap test where the listeners were told which cable is being used and they nodded their heads and reported all sort of sonic improvements caused by one set of cables over the other? What they weren't told was that the cables were never switched and that they were listening to the same set of cables all along.
I mentioned before that one of the possible long term storage mechanisms in auditory perception is summary statistics - this may well address how we store the characteristics of our auditory systems over long term listening. In other words, it is premised that this represents a compact & efficient format while retaining an information level suitable for the needs of auditory perception.
Some examples of this is found in these research papers (& others can be found) "Summary statistics in auditory perception"
"Listeners can detect gaps in continuous sounds that are as short as a few milliseconds and can localize sounds using time differences between the two ears as brief as a few hundredths of a millisecond. However, the information rate implied by this temporal resolution is prohibitive for storage—the representations retained for short- or long-term memory must somehow be compressed. Moreover, although fine-grained measurements of the sound waveform capture temporal detail, they do not make explicit the similarities and differences between categories that are important for behavior. The auditory system must derive more compact and abstract representations for memory and recognition."
This paper uses synthesized sound textures based on natural sounds like rain or the crackling of fire or applause, extracted the relevant statistical relationships.
And an interesting but not surprising finding:
"When listeners discriminated examples of different textures, performance improved with excerpt duration. In contrast, when listeners discriminated different examples of the same texture, performance declined with duration, a paradoxical result given that the information available for discrimination grows with duration."
"Humans Use Summary Statistics to Perceive Auditory Sequences"
"In vision, humans use summary statistics (e.g., the average facial expression of a crowd) to efficiently perceive the gist of groups of features. Here, we present direct evidence that ensemble coding is also important for auditory processing."
What both these papers demonstrate (& there are many others) is that our auditory perception mechanism is not just a frequency/amplitude/timing analysis machine - it is more complex than is assumed by some on this thread
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Yes, but these types of examples ignore the mechanism that Max/Dan was talking about & what I referenced in the research papers - summary statistics as a mechanism for storing the 'groove' of an audio playback system. To recognize if a different 'groove' has occurred in one's playback system due to a component change, one has to use longer term listening, not instant A/B analysis - unless of course the difference is large.
This is the elephant in the room that certain people want to ignore
Most research is based on hypotheses to be tested & can be classified as 'maybe' but the experimental results stand & do help to progress understanding. Did you even read the papers or is this your stock answer to everything I post? Have you done any research/reading into the area of auditory pereption?
If people recognized these possibilities & maybe did their own research into auditory perception, we wouldn't have such bipartisan discussions getting nowhere & frankly such closed-mindedness
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Shy question:
I am ready to accept that you (or anybody else making claims), as a professional mastering engineer, have extraordinary listening abilities and an amazing hearing that could discriminate for example excess noise from background noise.
So you think your extraordinary abilities should persuade me that Audio X is better than Audio Y, or change my electronics design patterns, by ignoring well know facts and instrumentation and hiring you as a (say, noise) measurement tool? Or are your extraordinary abilities yours and only yours, and can't be helpful to anybody of lesser abilities? BTW, somebody like you must be pretty unhappy, since it would costs you on average significantly more to make your ears and brain happy, compared to the next average person.
I sincerely don't understand this continuous crusade of sensory supremacy, at any price, over physics and science, as we know it for centuries. For some reputable designers around, that have a brand, a meal ticket to defend, or any other vested interest, I could (grumbling, though) understand. But some anonymous individuals coming from nowhere and making extraordinary claims in direct collision with the First Principles and shooting down anybody that dares to invoke Maxwell, Gibbs, Einstein, etc... with "I know what I hear"?
The other way around, there's no science crusade over sensory promoters. Just a healthy, normal skepticism and the need to prove the claims before taking them as facts.
Unfortunately life is to short, money is to short, and there is always a bigger fish to fry. As a rule, it is your duty, as a claimant, to put the money where your mouth is, and provide proof to the community satisfaction.
If I say "some LGMs landed yesterday in may back yard, kidnapped me, and attempted anal probing" who should be in charge of proving these allegations, myself or the forum members where I'm making the claim?
Here we go again - show me some rigorous examples of such A/B testing please!!
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