fredex said:
I appreciate the sentiment, but it has nothing to do with wisdom. Unfortunately 😉
What I can't understand is that some people (no one particular in this thread of course, let's keep it friendly) go on for years and years groping around in the dark, when spending a few days with a suitable book will give you so much more understanding.
jd
janneman said:
But this is exactly the argument.WHY are they in the dark?Brains can fool anyone who "hears" differences or anyone who "doesn't hear differences".From the first lines one will read,this is the first thing he understands.
janneman
I find it hard to understand as well, the little I have read rules out the idea that we can trust our senses to always tell us the truth. I was reading somewhere about young guys modifying their cars for better performance. However when these cars were put on the dyno they performed worse than the stock model and yet the owners were convinced they had more power than before the mods. I can't help but see a connection to HiFi. 🙂
I find it hard to understand as well, the little I have read rules out the idea that we can trust our senses to always tell us the truth. I was reading somewhere about young guys modifying their cars for better performance. However when these cars were put on the dyno they performed worse than the stock model and yet the owners were convinced they had more power than before the mods. I can't help but see a connection to HiFi. 🙂
fredex said:
An equally good connection to hiFi,would be those who can't tell the difference between a stock model car and a trully succesfully improved one.
This means nothing in connection with the discussion at hand other than the recording was subjectively unintelligible. Regardless of whether the listeners were odd or normal...🙂
John
jlsem said:
Yeah, I get that.
But the point is that subjectively it was very intelligible to a lot of people. Were they imagining it? Or did they have better ears than the others?
I don't understand what all of the discussion on how the brain is fooled by sleight of hand has to do with listening to music. The success of sleight of hand depends on the manipulations being hidden from sight. So, no the brain isn't fooled. It just hasn't been given enough information. This is never the case in listening to music. More often than not, differences are perceived in listening tests that are wholly unexpected.
John
John
jlsem said:
It hasn't🙂 Nor do all examples of audible/optical illusions presented from time to time as "proofs".Concentrate on correct places/points of such illusions and they just dissapear.The trick has been revealed.
SY said:
Been reading this week:
Out of Our Heads. Why you are not your Brain.
by Alva Noë. (philosophy and neuroscience)
This is You Brain on Music.
by Daniel Levitin. (music and neuroscience)
Finished up Oliver Sach's MUSICOPHILIA last year.
Fun stuff!
jlsem said:
My answer would be that if you are doing a listening test then you aren't really listening to the music, you are listening for the sounds that the equipment makes. If you hear something nice or bad you can be fooled into attributing it to the wrong cause.
You say, "So, no the brain isn't fooled. It just hasn't been given enough information." And yet it thinks it has enough information to make a judgement, otherwise magic would not work on people.
Extreme caution is advised.🙂
You miss the point: your brain fills in information that wasn't there, and it does so seamlessly.
I was over my boss's house last night for a little while. I did a simple sleight for his 11 year old son (for magic geeks, it was a French Drop using a coin). The boy was delighted and demanded to know how it was done. He's a bright kid so I told him to figure it out. He and my son started going through the trick and one thing was (to me) key- they both insisted that the coin was in the hand that was part of the sleight. It was NEVER in that hand, yet both of them SAW it there.
The analogy to conjuring is that the notion of trusting your senses is a flawed one. Your brain just isn't wired for accurate reporting of input data, it fills in blanks, it makes stuff up, it recognizes patterns that just aren't there. If it didn't, magic wouldn't work. And our blind spot would disturb our vision And subconscious preconception wouldn't cause us to cling to superstitious notions with religious intensity.
No, this is not the case. When I go to listen to a system, I'm listening to the music.
There is really no such thing as magic, so it doesn't work on anyone. Take SY's example for a moment: "The take-away lesson was that Teller fooled himself. His expectations completely convinced him that he saw things that weren't there. And this is a guy who is perhaps the world's greatest manipulator of human perception and expectation." For Teller's brain to have fooled him in the context of an audiophile's brain being fooled, Teller would have had to have "seen" three balls under one cup as he had expected rather than one ball under each cup which was the actual case. He was simply faked out by someone who was one step ahead of him. So the analogy really doesn't apply.
John
fredex said:
I was refering to the examples presented here by some fellow members.As to your question,I hope not.If the idea was to make (their) sound disappear,we could live without them and wouldn't have to pay for them🙂
Of course,what I meant(and I'm sure you knew it)was that if you concentrate on sound/music correctly(depends on the individual)it will be easier to tell differences,so,there is no illusion,just the differences.That is of course, IMO🙂
I've certainly heard speakers trick people. A well known diy speaker. No bass. But the harmonics are there, so the brain and ear fill in the fundimentals.
"Wow, listen to that clean bass!" say the fooled.
(Yeah - it ought to be clean, so clean that it doesn't exist!)
As it has been said 1000s of times before - the whole Hi-Fi thing is an illusion. That might make it a little difficult to figure out what is real and what isn't.
"Wow, listen to that clean bass!" say the fooled.
(Yeah - it ought to be clean, so clean that it doesn't exist!)
As it has been said 1000s of times before - the whole Hi-Fi thing is an illusion. That might make it a little difficult to figure out what is real and what isn't.
I have to agree with Sy's post and the point about the brain filling in information - not necessarily accurately! WE hear what we want to hear and - I suspect - what we need to hear........If we have just spent say $7,500 on a set of speaker cables then by gosh we really NEED to hear an improvement over the $3000 set we have just written off!! 🙂
- Status
- Not open for further replies.