Scott,
Count me in on this. I am a practicing artist who comes from a scientific background. What you describe has become steadily worse over the past 25 years. This collective collapse in a common consensus of scientific reason also happened at the end of the 1st Millenium. I can see both sides of what has become a societal divide, and have resigned myself to living in what is now ‘The Age of Stupid’. Nevertheless, I am perfectly comfortable with those who operate in the twilight of science. Some of them are here, and make a very valuable contribution. All I can offer is an overview of what seems to be happening, and right now, it is not altogether that good for the non-shouty types who simply want to talk, or listen to others talk, about audio.
ToS
In regard to your question about the difficulties in describing "the sonic character" which you further related to amplifiers with an example, it should be obvious that the GedLee-metric (more precise the sensory tests done) up to now could not provide new answers as it was just used for rating, but not for describing sonic characters.
Further it would not help to solve the most difficulties wrt amplifiers who often measured in the region where according to Geddes/Lee's description the new metric would mark it as imperceptable as the older metrics already do, but in reality some differences are still often perceivable.
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate this work but up to now it seems that there will be only a benefit in certain quite narrow cases; quite important is the mentioned phenomenon of loudspeaker differences occurring in dependence of the level.
@billshurv,
At a first glance that does not seem to be reasonable?!
As said above, the new metric per se does not provide more information about the description of sound, which is usually the primary interest of the reviewers/journalists and often of the readers.
Usually journalists love to have something new to write about so a new metric would be good.
Would it cut through the story? I seriously doubt it, but who knows.
Nevertheless I think that this new metric would be valuable for manufacturers.
Iirc Toole did not write much about it in his book either ?!
We'll if we could somehow relate the sound wheel thing to the gedlee work it might do a better job.
You know.......working together!
Or has that concept faded into the abyss?
Well science includes observation, if observations are ignored or dismissed without proper evaluation then science is dead.
You know.......working together!
Or has that concept faded into the abyss?
Well science includes observation, if observations are ignored or dismissed without proper evaluation then science is dead.
Isn't that classic "whataboutism" ?
The second one is a classic too, so let me ask, if you really want to own any abuse, evey insult, every nonsense in posts that you did not explicitely contradicted?
Imo it is a good test for the selfacclaimed scientific interest/basis/honesty if one looks at the response to scientific evidence contradicting prior beliefs.
Quite often it is then obviously more of cargo-cult-science but not the "real thing" ......
-) as stated before, the Gedlee-metric won't help wrt most amplifiers, DACs preamplifiers and so on.
-) it costs money and someone has unfortunately to pay for it (unhappy modern times; bell labs times are over); as said before if only a small percentage of the money spend for food sensory tests would be available in the audio field progress would/could be surprisingly fast.
-) don't underestimate the inertia of "we do it like we've always done it"
see for example Olive's blogpost from January 2009 :
Audio Musings by Sean Olive: What Loudspeaker Specifications Are Relevant to Sound Quality?
Reading that one would not believe that Geddes/Lee had "recently" done some new experiments with new resulting insights. 🙂
Overall Harman did not catch up, imo mainly because they are convinces that linear distortions and polar/4pi response are the main variables.
Personally ( and this may just be me) the 'description of the sound' is a key problem. There is no agreed framework so reviews wax lyrical about veils etc and no one is really any the wiser. The Gedlee metric to ME would be 100 times more useful than the specs a manufacturer normally posts, It may not be perfect but a step in the right direction. But I really don't pay any attention to reviewers any more. They have very little relevance to where my audio journey is going.
I will admit to having not read enough of Toole's serious work to understand the metrics that he uses. Something I must do.
He was a character. Certainly in the UK he was (I think) first of the 'self taught, not constrained by EE thinking' types. Not sure if we can directly blame him for the mess we are now in though. And you have to admire someone who can see a customer a power supply upgrade multiple times.
People who don't like what mmerrill and Jakob have to say tend to blame them for being unreasonable. People who don't like what chris719, or sometimes syn08, have to say tend to think they are the ones being unreasonable.
There is one side that does seem to exhibit more tendency to use disparaging language more than the other side does, IMHO, but there is some tendency on both sides. Referring to forum members as 'clowns' is one of the less offensive examples, but still likely a violation of the intent of forum rules, even if not rising to the level of offense requiring formal intervention.
It should probably come as no surprise that psychological research shows the exact same tendencies in humans as I described at the beginning of this post. Without even knowing they are it, humans to tend not only to blame the messenger, but also tend to attribute negative aspects of moral character to messengers presenting information contrary to one's own preexisting beliefs.
Referring back to my second paragraph above, Jakob2 may be doing more or less the equivalent of the 'clowns' comment when he refers to Cargo Cult Science, since the prototypical example of things like coconut headphones is quite extreme and probably going a bit too far if the intent is supposed to be accuracy of language. What usually happens is much a much more mild effect than full blown cargo cult-ism.
Yes, I can see how you might view the alchemists as being mired in tradition. For some reason they are reluctant to learn this new-fangled chemistry stuff, with all its periodic tables, binding energies and electron shells. Far too much maths for them. They want to carry on adding bits of frog to their designs so that the legendary 'wife in the kitchen' can smell the change even if she can't hear anything different.mountainman bob said:
A problem I see with the Gedlee metric is that it tries to reduce "sound quality" to a single number, just like THD (though Gedlee is certainly an improvement). I'd like to see (at least) two numbers, one for amount of (or the audible effect of) low-order distortion (say, second and third harmonics) and one for higher-order (maybe fourth harmonic and above). For a food analogy, a single number tells if a taste is strong or weak, but not whether it's vanilla, chocolate, sweet or sour.
This still doesn't cover time-related items related to speakers such as resonances and diffraction. Frequency response can sometimes reveal these things, but a flat or near-flat response won't guarantee they're not there.
Fine, we 'learn' the mathematics 'explanations' and then we listen....... and then we hear there is differences, what then ?.
You change to copper heatsinks and the sound changes, what then ?.
You change cables with the same LCR values and the sound changes, what then ?.
You put Goop or BQP in places in the system and the sound changes, what then ?.
The answer is you need to come up with better theory.
Dan.
Which might be pointing out the obvious, which is that , for 95% of us they are good enough already!
comes in virtins multi instrument now...
Confused. Earl was on the panel for that and they all seemed to agree on the main points.
Catch up with who? The JBL M2 is well received in studios, the Revel line seem popular in the home.
Nope. Everybody is entitled to an opinion. What's irritating in the characters you are mentioning is the absolute lack of any positive contribution. Just read a few posts above about the GedLee metric.
That, without a shred of positive contribution, as of what would be a metric for "sonic character". Other than vague allusions about "proper sensory testing".
And mind you, it is not about liking, it's about usefulness. I don't like broccoli, but I am not saying it's a useless or toxic vegetable that nobody should eat.
Not to mention that mmerryll and Jakob(x) are the masters of ad hominem, attempting to discredit by any means everything and everybody that doesn't match their views and (less than DIY oriented) interests.
When gentlemen members descend into a bottomless spiral of demanding citations to prove that they said something weeks ago, or even years ago, or on another form, they have, in my opinion, exhibited clownish behaviour. It's like reading a transcript of "Who's On First", except it's not funny. It is also not interesting or useful, and has nothing to do with DIY nor audio, but the rest of us have to wade through dozens of these posts hoping to find a circuit or measurement or something interesting. It is noise and it does not belong here, and it is not serious, it is ridiculous and puerile.
Show me the posts where he was being "bullied"
I was referring to scientific facts which he denies, do you deny them too?
I would be more likely to believe that is a real reason if you would go after others such as ScottJ, who are not engineers and who do not contribute as engineers might. Similar for others such as ToS. Why don't their lack of postive contributions to diyaudio irritate you? It seems most likely, irritation is not primarily due to the attributed factor.
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Thank you nexbleu at last something we can agree on, please somebody tell the noisemakers to just shut it and take their gossip somewhere else as has been suggested already.
TOS, EH, BS etc please just butt out and set up another thread and go for it with your gossip and opinions of others elsewhere, you guys are just clogging this thread and setting a down tone, please snap out of the ego thing and let's get back to advancement of audio...that's the reason we are here right ?.
Dan.
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Could be.. 🙂
Confused. I was relating to mountainman bob's question that started this subtopic and the efforts needed to do the experiments needed for mapping of sound quality descriptors to measured differences.
I suppose that virtins now includes/offers the GedLee-metric?
Yes, sorry, my try on humor.
Olive's blogpost is dated from January 2009, while GedLee's AES convention paper was presented in October 2003, so ~5 years ago.
Reading the blogpost one would imo not think that a new, (presumably) better metric was already available for quite a long time.
Admitted that afair no replications were done (as is unfortunately often so).
Catch up (might be the wrong wording) with usage of the GedLee-metric.
Did I say it doesn't irritate me? But your quoted characters have at least a sense of humor, far from the grumpy biased attitude accompanying the posts I quoted (yours too, BTW). This is one good reason why they don't stand as a thorn in my eye. Another one is they don't appear to have any axe to grind, or hold any grudges.
Otherwise, the "you too" argument is childish, and I suspect you know it.
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