Most people have built-in biases, stake their ground and become entrenched in their position(s). 🙂
Perhaps to you but not to me. On the other hand, this endless pushing of opinion from subjective anecdotal experiences is both boring and useless.
You can't prove a negative. It's those who make the claim of audible difference to provide the evidence. The onus in on them.
Science can't 'prove' anything, at best it can only increasingly reduce doubt.
All humans have a whole lot of biases and heuristics that operate automatically and constantly, usually without conscious awareness having a clue of what is actually shaping thought. List of cognitive biases - Wikipedia
And then there is priming: Priming (psychology) - Wikipedia
Of course, we all have biases, but the important thing is how something sounds to us, not necessarily the next guy, us. Before I got into high fidelity, I used to collect guitars. I could pick an exceptional guitar from a dozen similar ones. I don't know why I could do this, but it served me well over the years, and then with reproduction audio quality. I presume some people can hear differences and others don't, or at least don't want to. Debating over this is a waste of time, and not very mature, I should think.
I really don't see what ESS or anyone else has to gain by any sort of dishonesty. They never pass on this marketing to the consumer.
And besides that, I'm not deaf, I can hear the difference between DACs.
Well somewhat to the effect JC is saying, different types of distortions... and different qualities of how the distortion figure is achieved.
But there's more to it than that.
Audiophiles will tell you all day long that certain things sound like they have distortion. What they really mean is that they sound distorted. They're vastly different things. And from our perspective where we nearly exclusively measure THD, at least with electronics, we may not see what they're talking about at all. They might even call extremely low distortion to be distorted (distortion to them) because it just doesn't sound like they believe it should. Now that's where things get complicated, as you're in contrast to the album itself, and everything in it's productions, AS WELL AS the quality of hearing the person has...
There's some real effort that's necessary to understand what someone is describing, and what you're both hearing. It's even more interesting when it's all online. I think sometimes it's a bit of relief when some people that work on designing gear can converse without nearly as intense of a language to audible feature barrier.
One can go on and on, but a couple of quotes taken from Wikipedia give the basic idea:
Concept of scientific proof:
While the phrase "scientific proof" is often used in the popular media,[13] many scientists have argued that there is really no such thing. For example, Karl Popper once wrote that "In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory".[14][15] Albert Einstein said:
The scientific theorist is not to be envied. For Nature, or more precisely experiment, is an inexorable and not very friendly judge of his work. It never says "Yes" to a theory. In the most favorable cases it says "Maybe," and in the great majority of cases simply "No." If an experiment agrees with a theory it means for the latter "Maybe," and if it does not agree it means "No." Probably every theory will someday experience its "No" - most theories, soon after conception.[16]
Do we really need to get into a philosophical debate though?
You do get on airplanes and expect them to not fall out of the sky, right?
Well, let's forget the 737 Max 8 for the moment.
Your car works, your cell phone works, your computer works. All made possible by math and science. Yeah, it's just a model, but it happens to work. Gets updated when there are new discoveries.
You do get on airplanes and expect them to not fall out of the sky, right?
Well, let's forget the 737 Max 8 for the moment.
Your car works, your cell phone works, your computer works. All made possible by math and science. Yeah, it's just a model, but it happens to work. Gets updated when there are new discoveries.
I'm not sure I'd call it dishonesty, I'd say it's giving the market what they want.
As I am sure you are aware, at least a decent chunk of the audiophile market is somewhat informed these days and will buy or not buy a component based on what's inside. It would be pretty hard to sell a super high end device with a PCM5102A or some other cheap and cheerful mainstream part.
Once someone started doing 32-bit and 384/768 they all started doing it for fear of being excluded based on that alone. TI even went back and warmed over one of the PCM17xx with a slightly updated digital interface and filter. Maybe some of that is selling to designers, too, but it definitely hits consumers, like with the LG phones + ESS DACs.
With regard to what you hear and your hearing, not much that's useful to discuss there.
That's easy to agree with because it's so vague and it's been shown on numerous occasions that people like a bit of distortion, i.e. sounds good
What kind of numbers do we have for an "extremely low distortion" sound? Most of the time transducer nonlinearities (which is not anywhere close to extremely low) dominate the distortion of the sound. The statement shows a suspiciously careless (or deceptive) gross misapplication of electrical distortion as distortion of the sound.
Unfortunately, too many respected figures propagate this false logic causing widespread confusion and stagnation, with moronic flame wars to top it off.
Why not discuss what measurement is lacking to obtain some correlation?
What is missing? Because surely, everything you are talking about is measurable?
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What is missing? Because surely, everything you are talking about is measurable?
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One would think. Problems can arise when people say things like https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/full-range/334614-markaudio-fare-kef-ls50-7.html#post5733733 and go quiet when asked about them.
And, that's a hypothesis that's fairly easily testable - simulate LS distortion and play that back via the lowest distortion method possible, for example. That's not difficult, agreed not ideal, but it's a first step and may well provide useful results.
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