John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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Dear friends, happy, prosperous and healthy 2018 to all of you, whether you are on my ignore list or not (yet;-).
May you design beautiful circuits and listen to beautiful music!

Jan

Happy New Year :)

“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST.” -- FZ
 
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Then it got disturbing. He heard no difference! Yikes! This is a guy who spends his life in front of orchestras, as a conductor and the imaging of his hi fi system was unimportant to him.

Many years back we did some work with a US Acoustic consultant; to cut a long story short, locating sounds from an orchestra in concert halls even with very skilled listeners was much, much harder if the subject was blindfolded - with the unsurprising exception of the one blind test subject. Our senses are very interrelated - like the McGurk effect. So perhaps your man was unused to working without visual cues.
We also did a number of sound reinforcement systems using delays to boost the perceived volume by 10dB or so without losing localisation - haas effect exploited. Our perception of location is complex!
 
Then it got disturbing. He heard no difference! Yikes! This is a guy who spends his life in front of orchestras, as a conductor and the imaging of his hi fi system was unimportant to him.
Nothing strange. He will catch the smallest false note you cannot not hear in the middle of the violins. The quality of the sonic caricature of his system does not interest him, he focuses on the play of the musicians. Most of the musicians I know are not interested in hifi.
 
Chance would be a fine thing. So for most of us who advocate this route we find ourselves having to evaluate the subjective listening of others

Others subjective listening is evaluated as to believability & a critical mass used to shortlist devices worth shortlisting for your own evaluation. I believe this is the approach most people in the hobby take?
 
Nothing strange. He will catch the smallest false note you cannot not hear in the middle of the violins. The quality of the sonic caricature of his system does not interest him, he focuses on the play of the musicians. Most of the musicians I know are not interested in hifi.
Agreed.
I do know musos who are very perceptive and critical of their own instruments sound and also very perceptive and critical of playback systems, but in my experience these are exceptions.....most musos are partially deaf and listen to the notes and NOT playback system sound quality.
I have also had Elvis fanatic customers listening on the very worst BSR TT type systems....whilst that vinyl is spinning Elvis is in the room.

Dan.
 
Many years back we did some work with a US Acoustic consultant; to cut a long story short, locating sounds from an orchestra in concert halls even with very skilled listeners was much, much harder if the subject was blindfolded - with the unsurprising exception of the one blind test subject. Our senses are very interrelated - like the McGurk effect. So perhaps your man was unused to working without visual cues.
We also did a number of sound reinforcement systems using delays to boost the perceived volume by 10dB or so without losing localisation - haas effect exploited. Our perception of location is complex!
David Griesinger often writes on topics such as this.

http://www.davidgriesinger.com/
 
Regarding 70kHz signals on vinyl, given literature I have seen shows that cutting heads really start to suffer above 18kHz, even with half speed mastering you will have trouble putting any sort of significant level above 40kHz in to start with and you won't be able to add enough boost to cut it at high level, even if you could play it back.

Iirc in the days of quadrophonic vinyl the rear channels (approximating 50 kHz) were indeed down (more than 12 dB) in level but nevertheless it was possible to cut the relevant information so it might depend on the meaning of significant.

It seems reasonable :) to assume that the RIAA preequilization curve can´t be extended without restrictions to higher frequencies.
I have to search for the "Sheffield Cymbal crash data" which was (if correct) even achieved without half-speed mastering, as it was a direct to disc record.

Stan Ricker even reported once to have cut a 61 kHz tone (would be 122 kHz on normal replay) accidentially in a half speed process due to a tape machine`s unusual bias frequency.

Of course noone should expect to find something like that on an ordinary/normal recording.

Which suggests that, although there may be HF information that bats and dogs can hear, the level will be so low that normal rise time definitions (10-90%) won't hold and CD, being able to slew rail to rail in one sample actually does a better job of it?

That´s an interesting question; i´d assume that at least up to 35 - 40 kHz the usual rise time definition is applicable.

Beside that i think that obviously explaining why an assertion might be wrong does gain more insight than playing just the "BS game" .

Just to mention it from "groupie" to "groupie" ...... :)
 
Of course noone should expect to find something like that on an ordinary/normal recording.



That´s an interesting question; i´d assume that at least up to 35 - 40 kHz the usual rise time definition is applicable.

Beside that i think that obviously explaining why an assertion might be wrong does gain more insight than playing just the "BS game" .

Just to mention it from "groupie" to "groupie" ...... :)

If I could inject, I'd argue the "BS game" portion is trying to hang one's hat on the ostensible bandwidth above 22.1 to some sort of superiority. Sure, it's there, but, as you write, there's no energy in any recording to leverage it. And we only need as much rise time (bandwidth!) as our ears can hear anyhow, which makes the whole argument kinda null. Nor am I arguing that NOS 44.1 kHz digital doesn't need more bandwidth to get a decent antialiasing filter in there, which is largely obviated by oversampling.

There's a large element of the "make up the justification after you've decided the conclusion" that is getting push back.
 
Maybe we shouldn't make too many assumptions about the linearity of human hearing. Says here, http://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.1912374 "Observers were asked to discriminate between a pair of 10‐μsec pulses and a single 20‐μsec pulse having the same total energy. The independent variable was the time, ΔT, between the two 10‐μsec pulses. The stimuli were also presented as elements in a periodic pulse train. The ΔT required for resolution of two clicks (two‐click threshold) was 10 μsec."

There are other situations where time discrimination and frequency discrimination don't seem linearly related in hearing. Jitter discrimination might be one.
 
Maybe we shouldn't make too many assumptions about the linearity of human hearing. Says here, http://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.1912374 "Observers were asked to discriminate between a pair of 10‐μsec pulses and a single 20‐μsec pulse having the same total energy. The independent variable was the time, ΔT, between the two 10‐μsec pulses. The stimuli were also presented as elements in a periodic pulse train. The ΔT required for resolution of two clicks (two‐click threshold) was 10 μsec."

There are other situations where time discrimination and frequency discrimination don't seem linearly related in hearing. Jitter discrimination might be one.

Make someone listen to 10-usec pulses for a week. Then switch it, they'll know.

I doubt that they gave them any indicators. I don't think humans can do audio without indicators. And I mean indicators that don't tell you anything.

For example you can give false positives and false negatives with associations that are still anonymous.
 
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