courage said:
I believe so. We are able to learn new things of course, but I believe that these new things are given a place within our existing body of knowledge. In that sense, we learn slectively; each person will pick out certain parts from a new experience that fits his existing system, so if we both attend the same presentation you come out with different experiences than I, and neither of us may have picked up what the presenter found most important.
A classical example is a 'functioning' discussion with your boss. You both hear the same words spoken, but very often you have a much more positive impression of the discussion than your boss. The difference is largely in the body language.
courage said:
There are books written about whether my experience of the color 'red' is the same as yours. Do you see red the same as I do? No way we will ever find that out.
Jan Didden
janneman said:
Jan, your view on this is not well formed, imho.
In the recording itself there are competing sounds (such as the bit with the marching band recorded below some nominal other primary material?) within the recording. Also, most folks have substantial amounts of random noises present.
I've mentioned this before, but folks who live in suburban and urban settings typically have large amounts of subsonic (20Hz. and down) noise present at all times. In addition in many places the noise floor itself is higher than one might expect - all the time - to the point where you simply do not notice it unless you have a basis for comparison (like noticing how much quieter and calmer it is some place else - like out in the country).
This sort of "noise pollution" effects not only listening at a particular time, but also effects the psyche and hearing mechanism itself.
So, there may be many things that are technically present in any given recording or listening session that simply can not be perceived due to the effect of competing sounds.
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For general discussion:
On another topic, these so-called "listening tests" no matter who they are conducted by never seem to truly present a SOTA picture (technical data) regarding the test conditions, nor have I yet to find a published test that also shows any controls - ie. what thresholds test subjects were reliably able to discern any differences. In general these tests appear to statistically "prove" a negative, ie. people could NOT discern any differences reliably!
If anyone can post or provide a (free) link to "tests" that meet the above criteria, I'd be interested.
_-_-bear
bear said:
OK yes that is true. My comment was related to the cocktail party effect mentioned, where you have several simultaneous conversations going on and you can selectively tune in on one of them, effectively 'not hearing' the others. This is of course a function of your brain processing and has nothing to do with the ears; they cannot help but 'receive' everything that vibrates the air near them. That was the point: perception versus hearing.
I guess what you talk about is more like masking within a single conversation - if I can call a music piece that. I believe here we come more on the turf of the ear itself, that for instance the masking of a tone by the precense of other harmonically related tones is a function of the ear and not the brain.
But I'm not 100% sure about that - need to study it more.
Edit: Reading your post again, maybe you do mean not what I thought you meant. These competing sounds you mention, what effect do they have? The same as the cocktail party effect, ie you tune them out and don't perceive them? Then what does that do for a listening test?
Jan Didden
courage said:
Yo, Franklin, perhaps the best thing to do is to start a new thread with that question as the topic? Perhaps post the Ayre V3 schematic as a starting point for the discussion? Probably you will get others to participate.
You may have noticed that Charles Hansen participates here?
For whatever reason, Curl doesn't want to comment on the idea at present. Fwiw, if i were Mr. Curl I would have replied with a suitably nebulous response, perhaps something like "...there may be merits to the idea, and there are also some issues, at this time I don't have any specific comments to make..." etc...
Speaking for myself, and not having conferred with Curl at all, I'd suggest that you take what I said as if he said it... ? 🙄
John, I am available for a very small fee to handle your "public relations" issues... 😉
Having said that... what does a power amp consist of internally, what tasks need to be accomplished? That might answer your question(s) about the "zero feedback" solid state topology, if you think about simply that... 😀
_-_-bear
PS. Anatoly, I like what you say more and more as time goes on... 😎
bear said:
Wow! That would be the best investment he has ever made, regardless of the amount 😀 😀
Jan Didden
janneman said:
Accumulation of knowledge takes place constantly and is added to our framework, no doubt. Indeed experiences differ.
I would like to take the issue, wether you and I see the colour red the same, a bit further; do we actually see anything? If I, for example, walk in the park and look at a tree, what I see is my knowledge about what I have learned to recognize as a tree. Maybe, just maybe the tree is LOOKING at me and not the other way around.
Courage, Bear is right, and that is exactly what I would have said, if I had read your question in a different way. For some reason, I just took it seriously, realized that not using exotic components would compromise things so seriously that it would be almost impossible to go beyond the Ayre design. I should have told you to start there, because that is where I would have started.
I am always asked, even prodded by JAM to put something up that is easy to make for amateur audiophiles, and I have always resisted. I took your question as a similiar demand. Sorry, if I read you incorrectly. Thanks Bear, and as soon as you and I can have better personal relations, I hope we can be closer colleagues.
I am always asked, even prodded by JAM to put something up that is easy to make for amateur audiophiles, and I have always resisted. I took your question as a similiar demand. Sorry, if I read you incorrectly. Thanks Bear, and as soon as you and I can have better personal relations, I hope we can be closer colleagues.
courage said:
Errr... If you define 'looking' as 'receiving a visual image and interpreting it' I'm pretty sure it's not the three that looks. But if you define 'looking' as 'projecting an image on the visual-sensitive sensor of an observer' it IS the tree that is looking. Take your pick...
Jan Didden
john curl said:
John, apart from my earlier question, it could well be that you had a commercial design in mind, but I realize that it works the other way around; you design if you are asked and of course payed to do so.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I have developed 'superior' audio power amp designs that I have never built commercially. However, they still take hard to get parts, none-the-less.
Someday, I would hope to make them, commercially.
Someday, I would hope to make them, commercially.
janneman said:
What I am actually aiming at is, that the name "tree" associated with what we have learned to recognize and interpret as a tree, is NOT the thing. Naming it a tree, brings about a kind of seperation or division between me, the observer and the tree, the observed. The observer and the observed are fundamentally one.
courage said:
Sorry, I don't follow you. For me there is a clear separation between the observer and the observed. I agree that what we call the tree is not 'it'. The map is not the world. We clearly think in symbols that we give names. Other than that...
Jan Didden
Bob Cordell said:
I agree that the mastering of a CD is the biggest factor in sound quality. But the format does make a difference as well. If caps can make an audible difference in sound then too can the music format.
Just switching between two good measuring CD players when playing back the same CD has a big influence in the sound. My hope is that MP3 eventually becomes the the mass market format of choice and that maybe SACD or maybe a blu-ray music format could replace the CD as the Hi-End format of choice. Anyway that's my dream for high end audio. 🙄
Just really bugs me that the sound in of blu-ray movies can sound so great ( and yes, do to better mastering as well ) and CDs often sound so poor.
There's just that subjective "relaxing sound" you can get from LP and SACD that I don't experience with CD.
The tests that were performed using a number of pure (sine?) signals. To this extend it does not directly compare to music. However, the first fundamental fact is that it can be shown that signals, or “sound elements” that are detectable can be ignored randomly, and not everybody would have agreed to this. Therefore you can no longer “prove” with absolute certainty that there is no detectable sound difference between two different samples, just because individuals cannot readily hear it.
There appears to be yet another process at work that tries to “disentagle”, or group, competing sounds into different streams, such as when you hear more complex music with different instruments or groups of instruments (not to mention background noise,etc.). I think this "cocktail party effect" already applies to more complex music, when you may try to focus on different streams, say on the rythm section, or the singer, etc.!
Now if processing power is a limiting factor a listener can normally only focus on a few streams but with increasing complexity more and more selection is at work. Therefore my assumption is that a) you increase the chance of detecting differences if you perform extended listening sessions and only swapping between settings after longer intervals, and b) if you have some training or at least clues what you should be listening for (i.e. is there a difference in imaging, or in instrument timbre, or dynamics, etc.).
At least from all the informal sessions that I participated in people where assessing unknown material, in an unfamiliar environment, with many people present, and with short examples (but much longer than the 8 seconds that we may be able to store in short term memory).
P.S. I hope you can make some sense out of this. The longer I think about the issue the more convinced I become that there is some "intelectual" cocktail party effect at work in the back of my mind 😀
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