Well as an irrational musician I am well aware how aesthetics can play a part in liking a piece of gear.
For instance do you think you could just take any good musician's instrument and paint it bright pink and it would have no effect on how they play?
For instance do you think you could just take any good musician's instrument and paint it bright pink and it would have no effect on how they play?
This is a well known aspect of hearing perception. The same phenomenon takes place when listening to notes played at the lowest end of the scale on a piano. The piano is certainly producing a very low fundamental, but many if not most people wouldn't be able to hear a pure tone of such a low frequency.
My own speakers don't go particularly low, but they faithfully reproduce the lowest notes on the piano just as I hear them from a real one.
John
fredex said:
But of course. Why do you think Harley Davidson patented the sound of their exhausts?
jd
SY said:
And there is a hugely advantageous evolutionary reason for this. If we acurately saw the world and ourselves objectively, we would all be in mental wards. The conjecturing of the brain helps us to cope with failures, disappointments and other things we routinely assign to others, not to ourselves.
In a very real sense, people in mental wards miss that capability of the brain to deceive ourselves and instead see themselves with all their pityfull errors and shortcomings we all have, but most of us successfully 'deceive'.
Steadfastedly refusing to even entertain the possibility that you cannot hear what you are sure is there is just one of the manifestations. Thank god we're not in the mental wards but instead can fight over these trivialities 😉
jd
Panicos K said:
Hmmmm..... I not so sure it as simple as that. Most of us know what real bass sounds like, at least in the real world. Hi-Fi bass might be different. But I often get the feeling that some Hi-Fi nuts just don't like bass. They'd rather have anemic "clean bass" than the real thing. Maybe the fact that so much bad audio has awful, boomy bass makes some audiophiles gun shy.
Big bass = bad audio. Thin bass = articulate.
So if all you get are the harmonics - your brain and ear can fill in with the cleanest bass line you've ever heard!
Sorry, going O.T. there......
You're making this up, right? The guy who thinks he's Napoleon is in fact Napoleon? Please, let's see some documentation.
John
panomaniac said:
Hmmmm..... I not so sure it as simple as that. Most of us know what real bass sounds like, at least in the real world. Hi-Fi bass might be different. But I often get the feeling that some Hi-Fi nuts just don't like bass. They'd rather have anemic "clean bass" than the real thing. Maybe the fact that so much bad audio has awful, boomy bass makes some audiophiles gun shy.
Big bass = bad audio. Thin bass = articulate.
So if all you get are the harmonics - your brain and ear can fill in with the cleanest bass line you've ever heard!
Sorry, going O.T. there......
You are right about "clean bass"and I would include "tight bass" too.I get a superbly clean and tight "bass" from my speaker's midrange driver.🙂 Just to clarify a thing.No one said that all"audiophiles"know what and how they should hear......
jlsem said:
It is like the guy who fights his financial problems with his brain and belief till he sees the next pile of bills he has to pay for.
Hi,
Napoleon surely had his shortcommings.
Cheers,😉
P.S. Conclusion of the last couple of pages:
People with excellent hearing abilities are just fruitcakes trying hard to deceive themselves. Which in fact makes them extremely sane people....
jlsem said:
Napoleon surely had his shortcommings.
Cheers,😉
P.S. Conclusion of the last couple of pages:
People with excellent hearing abilities are just fruitcakes trying hard to deceive themselves. Which in fact makes them extremely sane people....
Panicos K said:
My point is that if you have been foolish enough to spend a total of over $ 10,000 on cables, then you will CONVINCE yourself that they represent a BIG improvement in sound....even if no one else agrees! If you are honest and admit that they sound no better in reality then you feel soooo bad at wasting money. Few of us are like that, so we convince ourselves that we have the best cables, they show a problem with the amps/speakers/CD player/turntable et al - then we go and spend a lot more money somewhere else. I know people who have done that... .
We all know that a system put together with care can sound very good. But it is very easy to get bad sound from a system badly chosen at twice or three times the cost of a well chosen low-mid budget system.I have heard a system put together by a New York leading shop and exported to the UK which was pretty well cost no object. THe Import Tax was more money than my system cost! This system had cables which looked more like fire service water hoses than cables. We pulled these out because we believed that they simply did not let the information reach the speakers. They were replaced with well chosen cables costing 12% of those wonderfully marketed crap cables - suddenly the system sounded 'right' driving Watt Puppies. High budgets cause as many problems as low budgets! A good friend with vast experience as an exotic amp designer always said that without very good knowledge upgrading sound systems was a simply the swapping of one set of problems for a different set of problems.
No
- beyond a certain level high cost is not a way to accuracy or 'reality' of reproduced sound.I went to a small concert last night . A young and very good piano trio from Italy played Beethoven and Shostokovitch. I have never heard recorded sound which even approaches that experience
Panicos K said:
nope... that's not equally valid at all... you need to read some more and report back on "proof" and "reaching a conclusion"...😀
brianco said:
My point is that if you have been foolish enough to spend a total of over $ 10,000 on cables, then you will CONVINCE yourself that they represent a BIG improvement in sound....even if no one else agrees! If you are honest and admit that they sound no better in reality then you feel soooo bad at wasting money. Few of us are like that, so we convince ourselves that we have the best cables, they show a problem with the amps/speakers/CD player/turntable et al - then we go and spend a lot more money somewhere else. I know people who have done that... .
I have heard a system put together by a New York leading shop and exported to the UK which was pretty well cost no object. THe Import Tax was more money than my system cost! This system had cables which looked more like fire service water hoses than cables. We pulled these out because we believed that they simply did not let the information reach the speakers. They were replaced with well chosen cables costing 12% of those wonderfully marketed crap cables - suddenly the system sounded 'right' driving Watt Puppies. High budgets cause as many problems as low budgets! A good friend with vast experience as an exotic amp designer always said that without very good knowledge upgrading sound systems was a simply the swapping of one set of problems for a different set of problems.
No
I went to a small concert last night . A young and very good piano trio from Italy played Beethoven and Shostokovitch. I have never heard recorded sound which even approaches that experience
Your point/s are well understood and I agree to all.My point was to ask WHY most speak about thousands of dollars when they refer to cables?It is as if they are certain that when someone speaks of his cables,he must have surely spent thousands.This attitude wil not make their opinions more valid.Not to mention that it started to sound boring.
auplater said:
nope....try to find a post sometime ago (again about cables)where a member(non believer) told us that when driving at low speed he couldn't tell a difference between a Mini and a Porche.So,read what?Reading posts like that makes reading a joke.If you find that post,please let us have your report and opinion.IMO more than equally valid.
Edit:With his eyes closed,he said
jlsem said:
Of course not. I was referring to people in mental wards that are unable to cope with the demands of everyday life beause their brain fails to shield them from it by painting a rosy picture of themselves and their environment. I thought that was clear from the context. You chose to selectively take a case that clearly was not intended. A good defensive strategy 😉
I'll give you another example: a sports man who gives his all against huge odds and wins. Now, objectively, his chances might be minuscule. But his brain/mind/'I' is so bend on winning that he refuses to acknowledge the odds, telling himself: "I'm going to win this". Convince himself that he absolutely is going to win this. His mind/body system gives all that it has, and against all odds, he wins. In such a case you can rise aboe yourself, or literally run yourself to death. Apart from running yourself to death, the survival advantage of making things look better or yourself look smarter than you are should be clear.
What does this have to do with the audibility of cables? Everything. It clearly explains why those who believe that they can hear a difference will always find reasons or circumstances to avoid DBTs. It clearly explains why those that think there is no audible difference will always be able to come up with reasons why anecdotal subjective tests cannot be trusted.
Fortunately, humankind has come up with a good tool to circumvent this dispositon. Its called 'the scientific method'. It doesn't guarantee absolute objectivity or truth, but it beats any other method. Which, if you think about it, is pretty unnatural. And yes, there is a good book on it called 'the unnatural nature of science'.
Now, you might say, why isn't the scientific method just another deception that just makes us think it is objective? Because of it's success over several centries in explaining and then predicting phenomena and events. If you have a method that lets you put men on a moon across several 100.000 miles just by using the method to predict forces, acceleration, speed, angles, position etc and then succeeding is a pretty good method. I told you it is unnatural!
jd
Panicos K said:
I was assuming that those involved in this thread are not in a mental ward. OTOH, THIS may be the ward 😀
jd
- Status
- Not open for further replies.