No problem, just to make an ABX, e.g. foobar ABX. Sighted test based on knowledge "which is which" is unimportant and useless.
P.S.: I placed the same test in a different forum as well. No positive ABX, as expected. Sightet preferences 50% : 50%. Guessing is that the "wire" file is the "tube" file. So it goes. This the true face of the "High End".
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Agreed, IME Foobar playback somehow changes when running ABX and imparts a 'sameness' that makes fine differences more difficult to differentiate.
External ABX boxes do the same, causing false negatives that can reduce ABX test sensitivity/reliability.
Dan.
I think he is researching something. He asked for preference? Preference is a useful thing to know, especially if the preference turns out to be for the (probably) most damaged signal.Markw4 said:
Pavel's alleged beliefs may or may not be interesting; they may or may not be true. I don't see how his beliefs can have polluted a simple blind test comparing a wire with a line stage and asking for preference and comments.
Now it could be that those who believe that they may have the opposite belief from Pavel may be unhappy if they find themselves rolling up evidence to support his belief, but they are not forced to take his tests and they usually are very creative in explaining away their test result after the unveiling.
First, let's talk about Aphex. I'm afraid that there is a great deal of inaccurate speculation as to what it is, its history, and what it does. I happen to know better, because I first used one 45 years ago, at the Aphex office in NY, and was actually shown the original circuit by the inventor, Kurt Knoppel (sp).
The Aphex was originally tube based, and invented by accidentally mis-wiring a Dyna tube preamp with the moving magnet cartridge attached.
It is called a 'sweetener' in the music world, and Jerry Garcia pronounced it as such to me directly, after I got him to listen to it in NY.
Used judiciously, it 'can' add a certain amount of 'space' or 'life' to an average sound track that is too dull or lifeless. It does this by adding some out-of-phase, or 'phasey' 2'nd harmonic, etc to the main signal. Too much will sound bright and even 'strange'.
Much later, it was made into a solid state version, but people other than the original inventor. Kurt, the inventor, was an interesting, complex, and I might say brilliant inventor. What happened to him after 45 years ago, I do not know.
The Aphex was originally tube based, and invented by accidentally mis-wiring a Dyna tube preamp with the moving magnet cartridge attached.
It is called a 'sweetener' in the music world, and Jerry Garcia pronounced it as such to me directly, after I got him to listen to it in NY.
Used judiciously, it 'can' add a certain amount of 'space' or 'life' to an average sound track that is too dull or lifeless. It does this by adding some out-of-phase, or 'phasey' 2'nd harmonic, etc to the main signal. Too much will sound bright and even 'strange'.
Much later, it was made into a solid state version, but people other than the original inventor. Kurt, the inventor, was an interesting, complex, and I might say brilliant inventor. What happened to him after 45 years ago, I do not know.
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Background on the Aphex from the time of its introduction: http://www.brianroth.com/articles/roth-aphex-review.pdf You can probably deduce a lot about its function from reading this.
That was all clear from the patent, it makes distortion which some folks like.
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Thanks for this info. Gary Liden took over the circuit/product design at some point in the mid-70s. He told me about it being tube based at first. Feedback from the studios was initially positive once the tube was engineered out; it was less noisy after that.
An interview of Val Gary:
"AURAL EXCITEMENT
How did you first find out about the Aphex Aural Exciter®?
At the time, I was working with Peter Asher and Andrew Gold. We decided to go see Paul McCartney and Wings at the Forum, and after the show we went backstage. Peter knew Paul fairly well because he was the head of A&R for Apple Records in the UK and his sister Jane Asher had been Paul’s girlfriend.
The piano sound in the Forum was just spectacular, so I asked how they got it. Paul mentioned the Aphex Aural Exciter and a gentleman name Curt Knoppel. So, I went and met Kurt, and we hit it off right away. The next thing I knew, I was mixing the first record ever using the Aphex Aural Exciter. Eventually, Kurt would sometimes come to me with modifications and ask me to try them.
What was special about the Aural Exciter?
What I noticed was the ability to get the stereo image much wider. There was also a silky high-end effect that you could get, depending on how much you added to each track, which is basically how I used it adding it to a track at a time.
I was also taken aback by how easy it was to use the device, which I used as a send/return because it seemed like a piece of stereo hardware. I remember first trying it strapped across the stereo buss like an LA-3A, but I couldn't control it as well, which is why I always had it in Mix mode with the knob at 10; I wanted the output of the device to be just the Aphex.
What were the first records you used it on?
The first album I used the Aural Exciter on was Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down The Wind in 1976. After that, I used it on Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Neil Diamond, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Andrew Gold, Orleans, and others. After the huge success of the multi-Platinum, Grammy® award-winning Linda Ronstadt album Simple Dreams, it became a recording industry standard.
It was very interesting back in the day how much mystery there was surrounding the Aural Exciter, especially since we always credited it in the liner notes of the records: "This album was mixed using the Aphex Aural Exciter system.”
People whom I spoke to years later in New York thought it was a big hoax, that there wasn't really a device at all. They thought the engineers out here on the West Coast just made it all up. I thought that was very funny!
Did you use the original limited-run tube version or the solid-state version?
I always used the tube unit. Toward the end, I was using the heavily-developed Aphex 712."
Val Garay on the Hits of the '70s and '80s | Waves
"AURAL EXCITEMENT
How did you first find out about the Aphex Aural Exciter®?
At the time, I was working with Peter Asher and Andrew Gold. We decided to go see Paul McCartney and Wings at the Forum, and after the show we went backstage. Peter knew Paul fairly well because he was the head of A&R for Apple Records in the UK and his sister Jane Asher had been Paul’s girlfriend.
The piano sound in the Forum was just spectacular, so I asked how they got it. Paul mentioned the Aphex Aural Exciter and a gentleman name Curt Knoppel. So, I went and met Kurt, and we hit it off right away. The next thing I knew, I was mixing the first record ever using the Aphex Aural Exciter. Eventually, Kurt would sometimes come to me with modifications and ask me to try them.
What was special about the Aural Exciter?
What I noticed was the ability to get the stereo image much wider. There was also a silky high-end effect that you could get, depending on how much you added to each track, which is basically how I used it adding it to a track at a time.
I was also taken aback by how easy it was to use the device, which I used as a send/return because it seemed like a piece of stereo hardware. I remember first trying it strapped across the stereo buss like an LA-3A, but I couldn't control it as well, which is why I always had it in Mix mode with the knob at 10; I wanted the output of the device to be just the Aphex.
What were the first records you used it on?
The first album I used the Aural Exciter on was Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down The Wind in 1976. After that, I used it on Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Neil Diamond, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Andrew Gold, Orleans, and others. After the huge success of the multi-Platinum, Grammy® award-winning Linda Ronstadt album Simple Dreams, it became a recording industry standard.
It was very interesting back in the day how much mystery there was surrounding the Aural Exciter, especially since we always credited it in the liner notes of the records: "This album was mixed using the Aphex Aural Exciter system.”
People whom I spoke to years later in New York thought it was a big hoax, that there wasn't really a device at all. They thought the engineers out here on the West Coast just made it all up. I thought that was very funny!
Did you use the original limited-run tube version or the solid-state version?
I always used the tube unit. Toward the end, I was using the heavily-developed Aphex 712."
Val Garay on the Hits of the '70s and '80s | Waves
Someone puts up two files without telling us which is which and everyone loses their minds. Goodness gracious.
Mark, short switching (and by what you describe that's in the hundreds of milliseconds range) with an ability to review is but one protocol, which may have better sensitivity, but poorer applicability outside of being able to tell differences in short tracks. It's no use having a measurement system capable of doing femtosecond sampling, if the time scale of the data is in seconds and the whole thing drifts over the hour long experiment (with no ability to continually recalibrate) and runs out of data storage. I would hope most of us listen to music on the time scale of minutes to hours, which challenges us in a different way, but I'm sure some folks (doing a mix/mastering) may need to examine things on a short time scale. Generally speaking, most studies I've seen stick to 10-15s clips.
Yes, it'd be nice to have an ability to do review in the foobar abx and have it take care of clipping files to the exact same length, but perhaps try doing a shorter set of samples in short succession and do something like a 100 trials rather than ten. Each trial may have less weight but that is counteracted but the high number of trials. As much as you find Pavel's tests unfair, you tend to take your objections to anyone claiming an effect inaudible at even the most minute level way way way too far and unsupported by the literature in many cases by greater than a factor of 100. Similarly, you take our incredulity very personally which shows immediately in cases like this. There has to be some balance in ones position. That said, a 0.5% h2 plus should well be within the realm of possibility and the files were provided for anyone to listen as they saw fit. I took objection to the revisionism after deblinding and don't care of someone honestly prefers one thing to another.
Mark, short switching (and by what you describe that's in the hundreds of milliseconds range) with an ability to review is but one protocol, which may have better sensitivity, but poorer applicability outside of being able to tell differences in short tracks. It's no use having a measurement system capable of doing femtosecond sampling, if the time scale of the data is in seconds and the whole thing drifts over the hour long experiment (with no ability to continually recalibrate) and runs out of data storage. I would hope most of us listen to music on the time scale of minutes to hours, which challenges us in a different way, but I'm sure some folks (doing a mix/mastering) may need to examine things on a short time scale. Generally speaking, most studies I've seen stick to 10-15s clips.
Yes, it'd be nice to have an ability to do review in the foobar abx and have it take care of clipping files to the exact same length, but perhaps try doing a shorter set of samples in short succession and do something like a 100 trials rather than ten. Each trial may have less weight but that is counteracted but the high number of trials. As much as you find Pavel's tests unfair, you tend to take your objections to anyone claiming an effect inaudible at even the most minute level way way way too far and unsupported by the literature in many cases by greater than a factor of 100. Similarly, you take our incredulity very personally which shows immediately in cases like this. There has to be some balance in ones position. That said, a 0.5% h2 plus should well be within the realm of possibility and the files were provided for anyone to listen as they saw fit. I took objection to the revisionism after deblinding and don't care of someone honestly prefers one thing to another.
Indeed. I was motivated by a suggestion that PMA was deliberately laying dastardly traps to lure innocent audiophiles to their destruction.
Anyway, color me deluded as well. Wouldn't be the first time. When I listened to the clips a couple of days ago I thought there was a reliably identifiable difference. This morning - no.
The first of Pavel's traps that I remember involved perhaps half a dozen files. I think one was the original and the others had been recorded through op-amps of varying pedigree. I couldn't hear any difference, so I cheated and analyzed the files. IIRC, the differences were around 70 dB down, comprising primarily white noise and a bit of 50 Hz hum. This challenge triggered a lengthy, wide-ranging debate that hit many of these points and more. I became somewhat skeptical.
Dastardly or not, I think Pavel's tests are valuable as occasional reality checks on claims of special powers.
I'm still intrigued/entertained by the identical files thing. Occam's razor suggests a few simple conclusions.
Edit to add (missed my window) that I missed your desire to de-escalate Mark, and will certainly respect that. My point as to you taking offense was an acknowledgment that you lens the whole topic of "online blind testing" with a lot of extra context that points to you taking an angle that may not have anything to do with the test in question as much as prior experiences.
The question to ask is “will Pavel’s SRPP circuit be able to be done right to not suck out the midrange?”.
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