To ME yes, to YOU no. That's why its best we beg to differ! I think Alt is better than Pilsner. Is this fact or a preference? We have chased each others tails far too much on this over the last few years.
The Dog can already smell the explosive. You are training it to REACT to certain smells, no to be able to smell things it couldn't before.
You are training the dog to focus its attention on smells it previously ignored.
Its the same thing with human listeners, they could always hear what's there if they didn't ignore much of it. The problem is they need training of what to listen for, what to focus attention on.
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I am not aware of JBL training in a dopamine response to sounds. Sorry poor analogy, esp as you can't ask the dog.
The way to give humans a little hit of dopamine is not with doggy biscuits if that's what you mean. Sometimes praise will do it, depends. Possibly a very senior engineering telling a junior 'nice work!' could do it.
yeah. cos that's exactly what JBL did. Is it published what their method was?
Note also that everything I have seen from JBL suggests they think DACs and amplifiers are transparent, so this line may go against your cause.
Edit: AES preprint 3893 from 1994 was a paper by Olive on training listeners. I guess only Jakob has access to that.
Note also that everything I have seen from JBL suggests they think DACs and amplifiers are transparent, so this line may go against your cause.
Edit: AES preprint 3893 from 1994 was a paper by Olive on training listeners. I guess only Jakob has access to that.
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It depends how one tests for that. Transparent or not, either one can be shown true by experiment, depends how the experiment is designed. It also varies by test subject, of course.
Mark, the very problem is that there is no universal truth in qualifying what is “better sounding”. No matter how skilled listeners become, the outcome will never have any universal meaning.
My work is in recording classical music, so I am very often confronted with this eternal question; “what is a better sound”. I have come to trust my own hearing and my own taste as a valuable guide in making all sorts of decisions, but I am always aware that there will be other people that can and will defer from my opinion. And that’s their good right, of course. If I see that other people with some listening experience and a similar taste in music like my choices, then I am very satisfied. That is the maximum fulfilment I can strive for.
The whole discussion on listening skills is a difficult one. IMHO a listener can make more refined choices after listening to a lot of gear, recordings and live music, but there will never be any sort of objective standard.
That I (and many of my colleagues) are easily able to pass the Philips Golden Ear tests, will not mean that my judgement is more valid than that of other (maybe less experienced) listeners.
I can understand the need for people to be guided by a bunch of measurements in their choice of gear, and I have no grudge with ASR.
However, for me personally, that will never be the whole story, because IMHO my ears are capable to experience things that are not always directly translatable to these measurements.
Unfortunately, my ears will often lead me to gear that has good measuring results, but not outstanding (often the more expensive gear measures a bit less good than the mass-produced clean measuring stuff).
The objective camp will probably say that I thus prefer distortion, and they may be right. Personally I just “believe” that there are other factors at work that are not all reliably measured yet, but of course I cannot give any proof for this assumption, and neither can the objectivists proof that there are no unkown factors at play...
I can also understand that people become frustrated by mega buck gear and particularly by mega buck accessories in the Audio world. I guess that frustration will often lead to some resentment against audiophile folks and their vocabulary.
I share part of that resentment, but it won’t transform me into someone that stops using my ears as a final judge. When I listen to music I want involvement and musical enjoyment, and if a piece of equipment (that measured well) doesn’t give that to me, I won’t use it.
Will I therefore sink into an abyss of self-delusion and end up with a reproduction of sound that contains a lot distortion? I don’t think so, because when there is too much distortion or other anomalies (like in vinyl reproduction) my hearing becomes annoyed by it.
There is a lot of (excellently engineered) Japanese stuff on the market (from medium to very expensive), that has excellent low distortion that should indicate a perfectly neutral listening experience. Yet I may still not like a lot of those, because my ears find troubling aspects in how they reproduce sound. But that should not keep others in admiring these products.
In practice, my preferred gear seems to have been designed by engineers that do use objective methods to develop their product, but that at the same time like to make judgements by ear too. It seems to be a balancing act, because the gear that was designed by absolute objectivists or absolute subjectivists usually falls through for me.
Finally, I have always liked the challenge of reconciling the left and right side of our brain, and for me, audio is a great playing field for just that. If it were either 100% objective or 100% subjective, it wouldn’t be such a challenge and excitement. But that too is of course very subjective…
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I have it. Olive says, "the training works!!"
PM if you require more detailed information.
IME no kidding training works, that and practice.
With that sort of response no thank you. Quoting 3 words to back up you case confirms that you are no longer interested in any form of serious discourse, so I'll not waste my time.
Lucas, No verbal description will accurately describe a sound, and no FFT will either. IME one has to hear a difference to understand how it sounds.
Also, 'Better' can have meaning. In the ES9038Q2M Board thread I described and documented a number of mods that made a particular dac sound 'better.' People who performed the mods generally agreed the sound improved for the better. What they were actually hearing was improved accuracy of reproduction. To me that's what better means: less inaccurate sounding. It is NOT intended to mean the exact same things as: less inaccurate measuring.
Its not necessary to jump to conclusions. You can read the whole paper if you want. If you think I misrepresented it by selective quoting, then you can say so when informed with the facts.
By the way, it says a lot more than I quoted. I just happen to to agree with Olive, and with Jakob that training is important for some types of testing. Depends if you want to evaluate trained or untrained listeners. Olive wanted trained listeners and succeeded at getting them, that's all. I would like trained listeners too, not giving up yet.
As I have commented previously, the ear (rather the brain) is known to exploit at least third-order measures in developing our audio perceptions. As such, the use of at least two FFTs might then yield a better (pictorial?) description of our auditory perceptual capabilities. Furthermore, if we allow for the time for convergence on some prior learned percept, then we might also find evidence not only for many subtle audible artefacts that are not identified by second-order measures, but also for the ability to learn to hear those artefacts. Yet even in such a framework for analysis, we must further acknowledge that our perceptual apparatus bestows us all with a spectacular capability for delusion.
Well said. If i think i can’t hear it, then no-one else can either.
Well said.
This might add a spin to the discussion:New Research: Listeners Synchronize Brain Activity With Musicians
My 1st thot was that the effort of doing a blind test might well overwhelm this aspect of music enjoyment.
dave
Did they all use same evaluation method and what is that method?
Accurate to what?
Well said. Especially when the mind of listeners are primed with all sorts of expectations through advertisement, online shills, FUD... etc. And audio businessmen know that.
Before we get into what people do hear and don't hear, I'd like everyone to openly state their age.
🙂
🙂
Just looking at the title of this thread and ignoring its contents:
Because engineering challenges are fun, of course, or at least they can be when you can just make whatever you like and there is no planning associated with them, nor any customer breathing down your neck, nor any nonsensical spec points that you have to meet purely for marketing reasons. That is, when you design as a hobby.
Because engineering challenges are fun, of course, or at least they can be when you can just make whatever you like and there is no planning associated with them, nor any customer breathing down your neck, nor any nonsensical spec points that you have to meet purely for marketing reasons. That is, when you design as a hobby.
I think what’s being overlooked is the fine detail.
I suppose if you don’t have the desire to put the music under a microscope and you just listen without attention then maybe one never knows the difference? That’s about the only explanation I can come up with that fits with everything that’s level matched and is not broken sounds the same.
I suppose if you don’t have the desire to put the music under a microscope and you just listen without attention then maybe one never knows the difference? That’s about the only explanation I can come up with that fits with everything that’s level matched and is not broken sounds the same.
Any explanation on those who post claims online on how good / better their mod or high $$$ audio electronics purchase sounds instead just enjoying what they have?
