I have to correct my statement as Lipshitz wrote "a few tenth of a decibel" :
"One fact, however, is indisputable,and that is that frequency response differences exceeding a few tenths of a decibel in magnitude between disk preamplifiers are audible."
The "0.1dB" assertion came up in a later diyaudio discussion where another member asserted that Lipshitz "demonstrated the need for 0.1 dB matching in the 70s".
(Lipshitz,Stanley P. ; "On RIAA Equalization Networks"; JAES, 1979 June, Volume 27, Number 6, 458)
But obviously Lipshitz meant not the absolut accuracy but the relative one when comparing two preamplifiers with the same cartridge.
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Living in Europa, with the few contacts I had with AES (as a professional) during ancient events like "Salon de la HIFI" in Paris, I had the feeling it was more a kind of a specialized private club than a true scientific organisation.
With obvious commercial influences underneath USA oriented.
Some conferences were obliviously commercial communications in disguise, with scientific studies made for that purpose as an alibi and for the image. Was-I wrong ?
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As odd as it is, but it seems that scientists are prone to forget about the scientific basis when another idea questioned their position, so scientists are humans first.
Thomas S.Kuhn´s Essay is still worth a read; Jerzy Neyman wrote a nice article in the 1960s about various factors that prevent the acceptance of new ideas even in the field of mathematics/statistics.
Wrt JAES we´ve frequently in the past discussed another example of questionable scientific basis of an experiment (the Meyer/Moran study comparing 16/44.1 to "hires") that got nevertheless published.
It's not a big deal, just that he makes no mention of anything in his CV and there is no mention of him in any reference. It would be odd in physics or math to never publish a major contribution.
I remember him from the TAS days. As for blind listening, such a furor, I tried to hear these things years ago even sighted I couldn't. Then there were the two TAS member's listening sessions I went to, stunning is an understatement. I did end up buying a TT and speakers from a reviewer.
No so odd perhaps. The term 'expectation bias' was coined in reference to human scientists (not audiophiles). Over at that other audio website, the guys in one tribe frequently misapply the term, not realizing it actually applies to themselves as much as anyone else.
Are you implying that there are people who are exempt form this human reaction?
That is fine, but the question of being true to the mixing engineer's intent is still open.
for those that live in the Seattle area (or willing to travel a little) there is a confluence of discussions between AES and JJ Johnston
...................................................................................
Hearing 099
Presented by
JJ Johnston - Immersion Networks
and
The AES Pacific Northwest Section
Plato Auditorium
Digipen Institute of Technology
Wednesday, April 24th, 2019, 7:30PM
Everything in audio is intended for human hearing, therefore it's helpful to understand just how hearing works. This talk discusses the very basics of the phenomena of human hearing, and points out some of the mechanics that makes this work. Along the way, the meaning of "loudness" as opposed to "power" or "SPL", etc, becomes clear, and the need for very different time/frequency resolution at different frequencies stands out.
A companion talk, on the spatial aspects of hearing may be available at a later date. (hint: if you want this, you need to tell someone!)
JJ Johnston
JJ received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1975 and 1976 respectively.
JJ temporarily retired in 2002 but worked 26 years for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research. He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC, as well as the AT&T Bell Labs or AT&T Labs-Research PXFM (perceptual transform coding) and PAC (perceptual audio coding) and the ASPEC algorithm that provided the best audio quality in the MPEG-1 audio tests.
The Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society - Devoted to the Art and Science of Audio
................................................................................................
the NW section of AES meetings are collegial events that are almost always interesting led by people who care about the sound of audio.
Cheers
Alan
...................................................................................
Hearing 099
Presented by
JJ Johnston - Immersion Networks
and
The AES Pacific Northwest Section
Plato Auditorium
Digipen Institute of Technology
Wednesday, April 24th, 2019, 7:30PM
Everything in audio is intended for human hearing, therefore it's helpful to understand just how hearing works. This talk discusses the very basics of the phenomena of human hearing, and points out some of the mechanics that makes this work. Along the way, the meaning of "loudness" as opposed to "power" or "SPL", etc, becomes clear, and the need for very different time/frequency resolution at different frequencies stands out.
A companion talk, on the spatial aspects of hearing may be available at a later date. (hint: if you want this, you need to tell someone!)
JJ Johnston
JJ received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1975 and 1976 respectively.
JJ temporarily retired in 2002 but worked 26 years for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research. He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC, as well as the AT&T Bell Labs or AT&T Labs-Research PXFM (perceptual transform coding) and PAC (perceptual audio coding) and the ASPEC algorithm that provided the best audio quality in the MPEG-1 audio tests.
The Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society - Devoted to the Art and Science of Audio
................................................................................................
the NW section of AES meetings are collegial events that are almost always interesting led by people who care about the sound of audio.
Cheers
Alan
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Isn´t that a completely different topic?
The assertion as such was suprising as any corrobating evidence from "formal" controlled listening tests was missing.
But overall, doing the RIAA equilization as correct as possible seems to be a good idea generally, but will obviously fail if the preemphasize applied is off in a unpredictable way.
That is already the second forum of this kind.
I thought the approach was promising at the beginning - and there are some nice and smart people overthere who are not only pretending to be interested in "audioscience" - but for some reasons it attracted more and more of the cargo-cult-science-section .......
And don´t miss jj´s other presentations archived at this site:
PowerPoint Presentations from recent (or not so recent) meetings.
There are a few things that need clarifying:
First, the AES was originally an ENGINEERING society, not a Scientific society. This freed engineers to write their opinions, and share their experiences in a publication. I suspect they had trouble with this when contributing to the IRE (IEEE today) that was more rigorous. The AES did have a two tier acceptablity for many years. First, just about anybody in the AES could give a paper (or lecture) at an AES convention (usually two each year), but to get published in the JAES you had to be vetted by appointed 'referees' so that the publication kept to a reasonable standard, but not a severe one.
I actually gave a lecture (with slides) back in 1973 about doing a quality sound implementation for a Rock film (Fillmore) and keeping the sound intact with Hollywood motion picture sound processing. In my case (Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox). No preprint.
Not so, today, or for many years could I have done my presentation at the AES.
By 1980, even Dr. Matti Otala could not get into the JAES with anything remotely controversial. This was when we all had to bail out and we actually turned to TAA or 'The Audio Amateur'. Walt Jung was rejected in 1977, by some professor, who played referee for the AES at that time, but was later kicked out of his professorship and who dropped audio altogether after that.
TAA, while a friendly publication, had its own problems, and sometimes we went to 'Audio' magazine with our better articles. Today, we would have trouble publishing anything new and useful that we may have found.
Now when it came to Dr. Lipshitz and his double blind test. He did an ABX test with Walt Jung's improved 2 stage phono preamp and the original Dyna PAT5 phono preamp.
To get the RIAA's to match (Walt's was VERY ACCURATE), they added a Dyna Equalizer in the path of Walt's phono preamp, not the inaccurate PAT5. Why, not the reverse, and make the RIAA accurate in both cases? Of course this biases the test against Walt's preamp with added distortion from the equalizer, but is also shows that Dr. Lipshitz did not hold ACCURATE RIAA in that much regard, but only DIFFERENCES in the RIAA which he could then blame audio quality differences on. Well, Walt's preamp failed to make the grade, so to speak, and so it goes with subsequent ABX tests.
Later, both Dr. Lipshitz and Walt Jung shared an RIAA paper in TAA, that was very useful to the rest of us, even today.
First, the AES was originally an ENGINEERING society, not a Scientific society. This freed engineers to write their opinions, and share their experiences in a publication. I suspect they had trouble with this when contributing to the IRE (IEEE today) that was more rigorous. The AES did have a two tier acceptablity for many years. First, just about anybody in the AES could give a paper (or lecture) at an AES convention (usually two each year), but to get published in the JAES you had to be vetted by appointed 'referees' so that the publication kept to a reasonable standard, but not a severe one.
I actually gave a lecture (with slides) back in 1973 about doing a quality sound implementation for a Rock film (Fillmore) and keeping the sound intact with Hollywood motion picture sound processing. In my case (Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox). No preprint.
Not so, today, or for many years could I have done my presentation at the AES.
By 1980, even Dr. Matti Otala could not get into the JAES with anything remotely controversial. This was when we all had to bail out and we actually turned to TAA or 'The Audio Amateur'. Walt Jung was rejected in 1977, by some professor, who played referee for the AES at that time, but was later kicked out of his professorship and who dropped audio altogether after that.
TAA, while a friendly publication, had its own problems, and sometimes we went to 'Audio' magazine with our better articles. Today, we would have trouble publishing anything new and useful that we may have found.
Now when it came to Dr. Lipshitz and his double blind test. He did an ABX test with Walt Jung's improved 2 stage phono preamp and the original Dyna PAT5 phono preamp.
To get the RIAA's to match (Walt's was VERY ACCURATE), they added a Dyna Equalizer in the path of Walt's phono preamp, not the inaccurate PAT5. Why, not the reverse, and make the RIAA accurate in both cases? Of course this biases the test against Walt's preamp with added distortion from the equalizer, but is also shows that Dr. Lipshitz did not hold ACCURATE RIAA in that much regard, but only DIFFERENCES in the RIAA which he could then blame audio quality differences on. Well, Walt's preamp failed to make the grade, so to speak, and so it goes with subsequent ABX tests.
Later, both Dr. Lipshitz and Walt Jung shared an RIAA paper in TAA, that was very useful to the rest of us, even today.
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I can see that getting a three time constant active filter right might not be considered profound by the IEEE.
Ask him about Hydrogenaudio and see if he goes silent.Flap. Flap. Flap. Flap.
Scott, I have every issue of the JAES till the year 2000 or so, and most of the others as well. If you should want to understand what I just said, you should carefully read the first issues of the JAES, and note their reasons for founding a new audio society.
Of course, by 1980, the IEEE was easier to publish in than the JAES. That's what Matti Otala found when his PIM paper was rejected for the JAES, and he simply put one in the IEEE.
Of course, by 1980, the IEEE was easier to publish in than the JAES. That's what Matti Otala found when his PIM paper was rejected for the JAES, and he simply put one in the IEEE.
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