Yes, carpenters are statistically more successful as high end audio designers. Too bad it doesn't apply for designing the LHC and LIGO equipment.
Somehow, I believe Richard is not at risk 😉.
I can understand why you reacted, Scott ;-)
BUT, keeping the Formula one image alive, if without engineers that designed the car, no race, so no pilot expected. Why not to accept that, when it is about to tune the car to his last refinements to win the race on a given circuit, the pilot has the last word.
Do you never sit in the driver's seat for your own hifi system ?
You could measure phase in various ways. Through your amplification system is pretty easy. All the way through your speakers gets more complicated.
That being said, there are subtleties of distortion that can sound good or bad to some people, and the subjective effects can be hard to estimate from looking at measurement data.
For the vast majority of people, once distortion is low enough they don't notice anything, so designing for them primarily based on measurements works very well. One should still double check by listening, of course.
For people who are 'very perceptive' listeners, as Martin Mallinson put it, making something they prefer can require a lot more listening and experimentation. Measurements are still very important, of course, and should not be discounted. But measurement alone isn't enough to predict subjectively satisfying sound quality for some small subset of the population. It isn't that there is anything that can't be measured, that's not the problem. Its just that we don't know how to correlate small differences in measurements to subjective satisfaction for the small population subset we are interested in designing for.
Yes, that is the true test & if you forgive me repeating myself, I'm of the opinion that this is because the internal auditory processing system gets to the point where it is exhausted/fatigued in trying to reconcile the slightly wrong pattern of signals with the internal schema it has that represents real world auditory object behavior.
I've said it before but auditory processing has a complex task to accomplish - the conversion of two streams of nerve impulses into a realistic version of the auditory objects that gave rise to that impulse stream. If you think about it, it's a very complex task & uses a lot of processing power. we are usually not aware of this processing effort & quiet happily can listen to the sounds of nature all day long without fatigue. When it comes to reproduced sounds, particularly music, if the signal stream does not tick all the ongoing cues that listening to natural sounds do, then we internally are forced to do more processing in an attempt to reconcile the sound stream to our internal schema of the auditory world. This unrecognised extra effort eventually gets expressed as fatigue (the more the mismatch, the quicker this happens). If the mismatch is severe we experience an unease with the sound because of too much internal confusion. A bit like one of those halls of mirrors where you can't trust what you are seeing & we become disorientated - is it in front, is it behind, is it a mirror or glass. In the hall of mirrors , it's fun as long as it doesn't last too long.
Again, this unease is not something that ABX blind testing is really designed to uncover - it is geared towards identifying X is either A or B - a very different way of listening
oh & btw, IMO, this unease is mainly the result of the electronics, not the speakers or room behavior (once these two elements are reasonably adequate)
Last edited:
Thanks Mark,
Your saying what I’ve basically come to realize from collective puzzle piecing....maybe like Scott says this wesayso feller can help shed some ‘street light’ on my puzzle.
I think he'd really like and get your quest for emotional satisfaction, seriously. 🙂
Ahem, since you are not in the audio business, who is “we” interested in designing for a small subset of the population?
And by the same logic, no statistical analysis will ever be valid, since the existence of a small subset of the population, that would lead to an opposite conclusion, cannot be confirmed or denied. Otherwise said, you cannot make everybody happy.
(and this is not directed at you, Bob)
Having conducted a metric s#!tload of amp auditions and other forms of gear comparison at AES shows and other venues, I can state there are indeed differences between amps. However if the sighted test crowd are looking to identify actual audible differences, then as I have proposed before, they need to take two different amps and put them into the same cases and listen for differences. Any acceptable listening period or protocol can be applied, it doesn't matter. Some will actually be able to reliably hear differences between some amps (especially if a tube amp is thrown into the mix), and most will not...sorry, but my experience says that is the truth. Even if differences are heard, there is often no consensus on which is "better" sounding.
In general I find talking about amp sound character on line is like dancing about architecture (credit to Martin Mull) it is besides the point, and there are too many variables between one guy in his SoHo apt with hard surfaces and street noise masking and another guy sitting in a farm house in Iowa with different speakers, heavily damped surfaces and cows mooing in the distance.
This disconnect leads to people comparing common single-number measurements, which I have two problems with:
1) Important characteristics are often not in the specs. In many years of radio and studio work, the differences I have been able to diagnose between otherwise properly operating amps have been due to matters unrelated to any published specs: performance in clipping (which happens far more frequently than most suspect, employ a high-speed comparator and see for yourself), EMI rejection, PSRR, common-mode rejection which can be a huge issue in many systems consumer and professional, stability into difficult speakers, cable sensitivity (it is a flaw) and other issues. I can relate stories about each of these amp problems, but this post is long already. Suffice it to say I have seen precious few measurements to quantify some of these characteristics.
2) Single number specs are not descriptive enough to be overly useful and my objection to single-number specs has been stated here more than a few times. As has been stated here before, an amp with 1% H2 will sound different from an amp with 1% H3 distortion so spec'ing 1% THD is next to useless. Different noise spectra make a single number s/n figure comparison pretty useless. Accompanying graphs can really help.
So I beg of those practiced in the art to please turn your efforts to coming up with better, more comprehensive specs and tests...maybe even some new ones. We need no further flowery prose as is often found in magazine reviews or ads.
I came here to learn more from the actual amp designers (JC, SW, RM, PM, et.al.) about the performance of specific amp stage topologies, their advantage and disadvantages, especially with regards to the aforementioned problems. I really like the Cordell book, but this forum has added to what it contains. Unfortunately those discussions have disappeared into the noise floor...
Howie
Well it certainly is nice to be able to have intelligent conversation on the subject and as howie says maybe designers could pay more attention to what causes different components signature sounds (I suppose admitting there are differences would be a good start) 🙂
- Status
- Not open for further replies.