Have you come across the dead fish functional MRI results?
Dead salmon 'responds' to photos of people | MNN - Mother Nature Network
And its relevance to audio testing is ? ...........
Quote from the article:
"Using a dead salmon as a test subject was ludicrous ..."
Quote from the article:
"Using a dead salmon as a test subject was ludicrous ..."
Yes. The nice thing about the process of science is that incorrect work is quickly spotted as such.
And speculation/assertion is given close to zero weight.
And speculation/assertion is given close to zero weight.
You were implying that scientists had a good understanding of how the brain functions. That link was one bunch of scientists pointing out that another bunch didn't even understand basic statistics let alone what the bits of the brain they were studying were doing.
You have to have a hypothesis before you can test it. I've proposed a hypothesis. I think I did pretty well with the coupling capacitor and the ground loop and I notice that now the ground loop has been proven the discussion has moved on from "it doesn't exist" to "you can't hear it".
I'm not even proposing anything outside the bounds of what seems to be accepted. Presumably the Audacity people got their -120dB number from somewhere. The noise is within that range of the music and near the bottom so is a good candidate as the root cause for something barely perceptible by the test subjects.
I don't see why anyone has a problem with this as a viable explanation of the test results.
I accept that it's far from proven. But there's nothing stopping anyone from trying again with a better controlled test.
Many of the arguments on this forum would disappear if only people learned the difference between 'which do you prefer' and 'which seems to be a closer reproduction'. People feel a need to justify their preferences by inventing spurious faults with the ones they don't prefer.cliffforest said:
Nonsense. At most you simply have to translate 'prefer' to 'least dislike'. Of course, choosing between two 'bad' things does not give the same scope for demonstrating one's (real or imagined) fine discrimination of ear/palate etc. There is even a danger of preferring the one with more significant and obvious problems!Jay said:
I've already answered extremely honestly about my preference in many of the posts above.
I have no preference between Opal and Ruby because neither of them are listenable for me. They are both therefore equally good/bad.
Why is this not an acceptable answer?
How would you answer the question "Do you want to lose your left eye or your right one?"
That is not the same question as 'prefer'. I may prefer a kick in the shins to a kick in the goolies but I would not pay money for either. Is the English language so hard to understand?heb1001 said:
I think the basic problem is that preference is an emotional response and the emotional response is "don't like" for both.
After that it comes down to a rational analysis of which one ought to be liked more based on any other factors available such as the spectrum analysis or whatever.
After that it comes down to a rational analysis of which one ought to be liked more based on any other factors available such as the spectrum analysis or whatever.
Hmmm... may be you're right. When people ask me between 2 bad preferences, I have never picked any.
Regarding Ruby vs Opal, I don't want them both, because I can easily have better one. But if I have to choose which one that I have to live with, I think I will choose Opal because from short listening of it I think Opal is less disturbing. From my experience listening to tapes anyway, I have never liked them more than I have liked turntable or CD.
So, it is not important which one to prefer. What important is the reasoning behind why we choose either of them.
The foot_tapper sample is different though.
I'm happy to say that in that comparison, for nostalgic reasons, on this day only, I preferred the tape version because it reminded me of my childhood.
It's softer and warmer and sounds like tape. Very easy to listen to and not fatiguing at all.
Would I want all music to sound that way now and for the future... no.
I'm happy to say that in that comparison, for nostalgic reasons, on this day only, I preferred the tape version because it reminded me of my childhood.
It's softer and warmer and sounds like tape. Very easy to listen to and not fatiguing at all.
Would I want all music to sound that way now and for the future... no.
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Then why not answer "neither"? instead of trying to impose your own agenda
which has totally skewed what could have been an interesting discussion.
Isn't this the whole point behind the Shannon-Nyquist theorem? You send a series of samples, then reconstruct them using the equation sin(x)/x. The reconstruction gives you back the original analog signal, or as much of it as will fit inside the Nyquist bandwidth. The analog reconstruction filter is what performs the conversion between discrete and continuous time.
You have the same "Nyquist bandwidth" problem with representing the music as a gigantic equation. The greater the information content of the music, the more terms your equation needs. (What is the equation for 3 seconds of white noise? What would it look like for different noise bandwidths?)
I find the recent listening tests interesting. The impression I get is that nobody has a clue what is going on until the results are revealed, at which point it degenerates into a frenzy of ***-covering. This is exactly what the "rationalist" theory of audio predicts. 😛
In my previous life as an electronic musician, I have "mastered" tracks to cassette to dirty them up. 🙄
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So you've done an analysis and estimated that there would be less pain with a kick in the shins.
I've done the analysis for Opal and Ruby and come to the conclusion that the pain is about equal in both and I still have no preference.
'Ought to be liked' sounds like a moral reponse. That is part of the problem. People feel they ought to prefer the one which best fits their ideas of what sound ought to sound like so if they find they actually prefer the other one they have to find an excuse.heb1001 said:
Someone who believes that he likes low distortion will be alarmed if he prefers the one with higher distortion, so he will infer that the other one has high levels of some undefined distortion which measurements do not show. Someone who believes that he prefers low noise floor will be alarmed if he prefers the one with higher noise, so he will suggest that the other one has something wrong with its noise: too much ultrasonics or infrasonics.
So far I have not taken part in these tests. Two reason for this:
1. I have no convenient way of playing downloaded files except through my laptop itself and I certainly would not expect to be able to distinguish anything but the worst problems with that.
2. I don't trust my ears. I design electronics to be neutral, have to trust others for my speakers, and just hope that my ears are happy with the result - so far they have been. I deliberately avoid 'nice' or 'impressive' or 'musical' etc. sound. I can tolerate CD, LP, FM and cassette - they each sound different but each can convey music.
I think they may have done something similar on MGMT's Oracular Spectacular and I liked that too.
Not necessarily too late, IMO.
I have posted 2 files recently, record from a cassette tape deck and CD data from the same live concert.
Cassette file has audible hiss, it has measurable roll-off above 10kHz and it has smaller dynamic range. Despite of that, there is a preference (heb1001) for the cassette file. This may indicate why, in another threads, master tapes are regarded superior or vinyl is regarded superior above even hires digital. IMO, it is the smaller information content what is in fact preferred. Hiss (dither) or 1/f groove noise mask the real signal details, + added distortion in both tape and vinyl adds originally non-existent information. I may be wrong, but it is my opinion.
In that case I was really talking about the problem of forced choice. If you are forced to make a choice based on an emotional response but can't differentiate on an emotional response then you are forced to differentiate some other way which can give spurious results.
I use a tube amp, I know it has high distortion. I don't have a problem with that because it doesn't bother me. I know I don't like high frequency noise though because I know it does bother me from having made mistakes in constructing the amp and then having had to find them and fix them. I know from this experience that stuff that is barely measurable can have a big effect.
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