I do also remember going to the hi-fi store and listening to a few devices. Until sometime in the morning. Many hours. Together with friends, acquaintances, and unknowns also. A common language is also developed. And even strangers know a lot of terms and can relate to them. As far as I know, there is an audio language. Even internationally. It is more the degree of experience in terms of complexity or components and so on that can make the difference.
But I've also met people who go into a hi-fi store and ask about power, damping factor, weight, size, brass panels and knobs. They very rarely asked about linearly frequency response, and also about distortion values. Price too;-)
But I've also met people who go into a hi-fi store and ask about power, damping factor, weight, size, brass panels and knobs. They very rarely asked about linearly frequency response, and also about distortion values. Price too;-)
@ItsAllInMyHead you seem to have come to a point that I also arrived at. There has been some drift and a few small arguments along the way. I feel that @Logon started this thread with good heart and the best of intentions and it would be nice to have some sort of “measure” of the suitability of a system for oneself. So where to go from here?
“This system as implemented as a whole in this room scores 93”?
That looks rather like THD as a final arbiter of quality. While useful, it is far from the whole story.
So we need to ask ourselves what it is that makes us like our gear so much and how much of that is preference?
Can we be really objective and assess things in a way that we can completely stand over? If I assess a system and rate it, what degree of confidence is there that you and I will both agree to a close extent on that rating. Coming up with a protocol that guarantees this is challenging!
Clearly the assessment will be multifaceted and will need to include both sighted and unsighted aspects with the latter first for obvious reasons.
Whether this score is entirely subjective or includes measurements will no doubt be a subject of some debate.
I’d say there is room in such a scoring system to allow for preference, but perhaps eliminating this aspect from the single number score.
I would envisage this as a multi page form and that the number would just be a rough index.
It may be that a $13,000 DAC does get you close to audio nirvana, but if you your budget only stretches to $500 then what? It seems that there needs to be a way of scoring that gives an absolute number for quality, but that there is a “profile” that you can apply to see how well it fits your preferences and budget.
As someone once said,”For every complex question there is a simple and wrong answer!” (Einstein?)
There are many points here that need to be expanded and questioned.
Do participants needs to have a certain minimum score in Harman Hearing tests.
What about environment? Different rooms will always end up having a different score due to placement, reverberation, dimensions, absorption and so on.
I really need much more time to flash this out more, but I can’t just at the moment.
My biggest reservation is that this is likely to be too onerous to gain widespread adoption unless there is a driving force behind it - that would of course usually be a commercial interest.
For the sake of discussion we can call this LARS - Logon’s Audio Rating System!
Of course if you want to adopt LARS and are looking for a highly paid consultant to get you a rating do let me know. There’s nothing I’d like more than to go visit folks with great kit and listen to it for a few hours!
Ok. Enough from me for now. I’m sure you get the gist.
“This system as implemented as a whole in this room scores 93”?
That looks rather like THD as a final arbiter of quality. While useful, it is far from the whole story.
So we need to ask ourselves what it is that makes us like our gear so much and how much of that is preference?
Can we be really objective and assess things in a way that we can completely stand over? If I assess a system and rate it, what degree of confidence is there that you and I will both agree to a close extent on that rating. Coming up with a protocol that guarantees this is challenging!
Clearly the assessment will be multifaceted and will need to include both sighted and unsighted aspects with the latter first for obvious reasons.
Whether this score is entirely subjective or includes measurements will no doubt be a subject of some debate.
I’d say there is room in such a scoring system to allow for preference, but perhaps eliminating this aspect from the single number score.
I would envisage this as a multi page form and that the number would just be a rough index.
It may be that a $13,000 DAC does get you close to audio nirvana, but if you your budget only stretches to $500 then what? It seems that there needs to be a way of scoring that gives an absolute number for quality, but that there is a “profile” that you can apply to see how well it fits your preferences and budget.
As someone once said,”For every complex question there is a simple and wrong answer!” (Einstein?)
There are many points here that need to be expanded and questioned.
Do participants needs to have a certain minimum score in Harman Hearing tests.
What about environment? Different rooms will always end up having a different score due to placement, reverberation, dimensions, absorption and so on.
I really need much more time to flash this out more, but I can’t just at the moment.
My biggest reservation is that this is likely to be too onerous to gain widespread adoption unless there is a driving force behind it - that would of course usually be a commercial interest.
For the sake of discussion we can call this LARS - Logon’s Audio Rating System!
Of course if you want to adopt LARS and are looking for a highly paid consultant to get you a rating do let me know. There’s nothing I’d like more than to go visit folks with great kit and listen to it for a few hours!
Ok. Enough from me for now. I’m sure you get the gist.
Well, no.
What you quoted
is just an addition of mine (clearly marked as an Edit) to the first post of this thread after that @Cal Weldon posted the following comment
and in particular this statement
Which in other words, if I understand correctly, means that there is no skill in listening and that a supposed skill is boasted of only by the so-called golden-ears, but which in reality does not exist.
Since I don't like the word golden-ears and especially the derogatory concept that is generally given to that word here (although I don't think that Cal meant it in any derogatory sense in this case, but I don't actually know for sure), I tried to exclude the word and the concept "golden-ears" from this thread, if possible.
But I probably didn't succeed entirely if you misinterpreted my words (for the umpteenth time).
At this point it seems like we have two different lexicons, really very different, since not only do you always seem to misinterpret my comments, but aldo almost everything you attribute to me does not correspond to the reality of the facts.
Or maybe there's something else I haven't fully realized, and that doesn't appear very constructive at least in my eyes.
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I guess after you built that audio stuff you'll listen to it, right?
And maybe you can share your listening experiences on the dedicated thread, or am I wrong?
The same here.
Then, hopefully, may be we could finally start to understand each other, instead of getting a long series of misinterpretations as up to now. 😉
I had missed it, but it seems that not every one reads every post, it is not a fault of course, It happens to all of us, me first.
The above only serves to say that one is then forced to write things he has already written, that's all.
However, you mentioned "intelligence", but from my modest point of view "intelligence" has nothing to do with this thread and I've never mentioned it at all.
Only in one case a few posts above, I replied the word "smart" that a kind member ironically attributing it to me, let's make things clear: intelligence isn't even the last topic of this thread!
Logic yes, I've mentioned that word a lot of times.
I said that logic cannot replace knowledge and if it tries to do so it becomes an ignorant logic.
It is a simple logical syllogism, is there something wrong with that?
I don't think so, but there is something wrong with believing things about Hearing that you don't know and don't exist by applying your own logic.
How easy is that, right?
Classic example: no two people are the same, no two brains or ears are the same so we cannot share our hearing experiences.
This is bs.
There is a collective perception that all of us who can be put fairly homogeneously in a group have in common and that they can share despite the conclusions that their formidable and ignorant logic (logic, not them) has led them to and that is that their hearing experiences cannot be shared for the reasons already stated.
It is simply not true.
For the same reason that if I talk to you about the taste of Coca-Cola, simplifying the discussion, you know what flavor I am referring to even if we have two different brains and two different palates.
As said, you also need to be in good health and good faith, of course.
For the same reason if I talk to you about dry, scratchy and strident high notes that I heard coming out of that system or that device that I heard in my system that I know well, you know very well what I am talking about.
And we can also share it.
You would have done it too if you had managed to get the Topping amps you wanted to buy.
And those who attack those who do so from the height of their logic that cannot replace knowledge do not have that knowledge and therefore believe they are right.
By logic, not by knowledge.
But logic cannot replace the knowledge that one does not have about the sense of Hearing.
Not true. Here is one such quote from you where you call others "ignorant" and guilty of "fallacious logic".
"Frankly, I'm tired of reading the same thing over and over again: "the mind is too complex to be understood", "the quality of sound is too subjective", "the world of wines and its tasting is bs" and similar insipidities without any scientific basis, but based only on ignorance and deductive as fallacious logic."
And it's not the only time. There are other similar comments by you as well where you call people ignorant.
Ignorance is not an offense, it is a fact.
And as a fact it must be taken into consideration sooner or later.
If you know nothing about the sense of Hearing and you speak as if you did, your speech will be ignorant.
Where is the offense?
I never called you or people ignorant!
In this forum there are people who say much, much worse and no one says anything to them.
I'll not reply you anymore!
But what do you want from me and from this thread?
You repeat the same things over and over again.
The same identical things over and over and over again, and this has become stalking!
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Calling someone ignorant is an insult and offense whether you believe it to be or not.
And you have used that term repeatedly in your many, many posts, which all say basically the same thing.
You don't seem to be prepared to have someone disagree with you, and that's a problem when you write posts in an open public forum like this one.
And you have used that term repeatedly in your many, many posts, which all say basically the same thing.
You don't seem to be prepared to have someone disagree with you, and that's a problem when you write posts in an open public forum like this one.
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Sure I do listen to them , my chance ( so to say ) is that the inventors of the schématics I turn into builds are experienced music listener ( Nelson Pass , John Brown ecdesign ) and we seems to have close taste , because what comes out pleased me from the beginning , and I had to do very little change 😉
as I said in the dedicated threads , transparency , tones , stereo imaging , silences ,bandwidth , sensation of realness , lack of fatigue , etc .. all was there , and still after hundreds of hours
I had other gears before and listened to some others too from guys around , these experiences gave me the background to find "my way " in terms of taste and liking
so I am a Happy music listener 😎
.
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Most of us were born with the same five senses for the purpose of survival. You don't develop these, you have them. All these senses deteriorate over time up to the point they become useless. I cannot blame my 4K TV if it looks terrible if I unknowingly developed cataracts. Nor can I blame my speakers performing less than stellar because at my age I am becoming deaf. I am of the opinion that not a single contributor in this thread can convincingly claim that their ability to discriminate effectively what they sense is accurate in any way. This has nothing to do with perception, it is probably closer to hallucination or fabrication.
Sometimes it is hard to convince some subset of the population of something even if it is quite true. There are some people who will not be convinced that the earth is more or less round, or perhaps that men actually landed on the moon. My point here is about the psychology of belief itself, and about the problems of convincing people in general, or at least to give them pause to reconsider, when the only means to do so is textual conversation in a forum.
I am a big fan of Pink Floyd and listened to their music for decades. I am 100% sure that I have no idea whether the guitars are distorted and by what percentage, even if reproduced on a million dollar system.
Some days I like to turn the bass or treble up a notch or two, other days I don't. Why, I am supposed to want to hear it the way it was before entering a microphone on a stage somewhere in the world.
Some days I like to turn the bass or treble up a notch or two, other days I don't. Why, I am supposed to want to hear it the way it was before entering a microphone on a stage somewhere in the world.
Ah, well, that is another matter isn't it? Its hard to know by ear how an album was recorded, mixed, and mastered. But it can be easy to hear if a cymbal sounds like a real cymbal, and or if a bass drum head resonance sounds plausible. Maybe not easy to tell those things from only one album, usually better to use a carefully selected reference album to do listening tests. Its even easier to hear how much of the sound seems to coming from the speakers and how much of the sound seems to be coming from around and behind the speakers, and to what depth behind. IOW, there are some characteristics of system performance that can be observed from listening tests.
Markw4
Absolutely, unless the two of us are sitting in the same room listening to the same song, we can discus what we hear and we may still differ due to many other influences like thirst, hunger, state of mind N+1 variables, but we are inclined to agree on many issues since we will make each other aware of things that we hear or experience and the other will attempt to hear or experience these things as well.Mark, if I may be honest, if I did not hear something, like your proverbial cymbal, I may cal it something other. If I grew up on a farm with no TV or Rock Concert, a cymbal to me might sound like a cow to you. I could tell it is a cow because I know it, milked it.... I can only relate to what I see. Same with this auto-tuning voices. You find and absolute bad singer who cannot even hold a note be recorded on media having an angelic voice but in real life sounds like a frog. Is this the definition of fidelity.
As I say, perception does not count for me, you either know what you hear or it is foreign. You don't ask your mate when crossing the railway line, what is that whistle and he say it is a loud bird song. And when you look over your shoulder you see this massive noisy black bird storming toward you. You pick up a rock and throw it at the bird because for a fact you know that you will scare this thing away.
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Coming back to Logon's highly develop experience of listening, he may well be able to discriminate amongst instruments or even levels of distortion of stuff stored in his brain and even be capable of seeing this instrument in his minds eye. He can hear it and compare it with a now very recent sample of what he previously (although there would be discrepancies) and give a reasonable account of its accuracy without diverting to a real measurement, it is plausible. But ut will never correlate exactly to me hearing the same passage with say a two-day old memory. The sound is still the sound but our memory deceives us in thinking it is somehow different.
"usually better to use a carefully selected reference album to do listening tests."
I do not do listening tests at all, I already own the equipment,for many years. They do exactly what I set them out to do, convey my music in such away that I thoroughly enjoy it and bring back the memories and nostalgia from an era long ago. Speakers placed where I like them etc.
Thus to try and evaluate the sound is really not an option, only the enjoyment of the music is. If I listen to someone else's set-up I can hear differences immediately and I either enjoy it or don't, If it sounds markedly better than what I am used to considering the media and the equipment settings, I will try and replicate it with mine.
All differences are in the speakers, there is nothing prior that I would even dream to change, it took too long to develop it right. That is really why I ended up with three sets of speakers,
My favourite is the Rogers LS3/5a from some 50 years ago, A pair of KEF Concerto from 1972 and a pair of Apogee Scintillas from the early 90s. Each of these speakers represents a listening era. The Rodgers was my speakers in my dorm (bought from my friends dad for around $70 when I was a student, The KEF with my first paycheck and after working for a year I could afford a reference turntable/arm and cartridge LIN LP12 Valhalla & ITOK & Dynavector Ruby and Pioneer SA9100. According to the Hi-Fi magazines of the time the best system available. (We talking 1974)
Those where the Rock/Metal years. My best friend from varsity years was a classical musician and he coaxed me into classical music and of course I bought classical records and went to listen to him performing in the SABC Philharmonic Orchestra . The KEFs was to warm for the type of music and earning a reasonable salary and being unmarried I bought the Apogee Scintillas.
This was stellar, but a few years later we both got married and went our separate ways and I stopped listening to classical altogether, I did not actually enjoy this at all. That was when I set out to develop my own amplifier to provide me the sound that I really wanted. It took 11 revisions and about four years and I diverted back to the LS3/5a. I also thought that my calling was going to be in high-end amplifier manufacturing, but that never happened, since there is no money in it by the time you established a brand in competition with Marants, Pioneer, Sansui, Luxmann Kenwood or any of the brands at the time.
I have swapped back to the KEF Concerto on occasions, but never the Scintillas, to me they where for orchestral music, not Rock. The mid band and highs are stellar on the LS3/5a nothing beats them with human voice or clarity with just flat response from about 70Hz and up. They are pin point accurate but I must say they sound small because they are small. I drive them with monster class A amp and have more headroom than needed.
Siegfried Linkwitz (RIP), my ex boss at Hewlett Packard, Signal Analysis Div, suggested that I try his then newly invention based on an open baffle H frame woofer he was toying with at the time in his garage also suggested two original KEF B139 that would augments the lower octaves of the LS3/5a from the same manufacturer KEF. The cross over was 2nd order Bessel LP with phase and frequency control using the the same class A amps in bridge mode. They naturally melted into the LS3/5a creating a coherent smooth frequency response from about 19 Hz up to where the T27 could go. Since then, I listen to the music I loved from years ago. I am absolutely blown away every day I listen to my music and probably be happy for the rest of my life. If it was not for Siegfried and the BBC, I would probably still be looking for speakers. My system has never changed since I developed my amplifiers in 1982 - or 42 years.
The question that Logon posed becomes a little irrelevant since I do not know how to listen to equipment only in the last 42 years of listening on what I would call my reference system (the only one I had) that ticks all the measurement boxes with regard amplification probably the speakers would be close to as good as one can get. I believe from what I read that the BBC spect around GBP 500K and used all the equipment to their disposal to develop the audiophile reference LS3/5a studio monitors. I am not sure where LINN is in today's standards but they seem pretty well regarded. I forgot to say I use a WADIA6 CD player, which also at the time I bought it, was pretty well respected amongst the audio community.
Also in the interim I designed and built Isobaric Transmission line speakers which was way to large and way to big sounding for my liking, they sounded great, but it was a tiring speaker, it just offered way too much in sound that it overwelmed you. You felt anxious each time you turn the volume up worrying that the windows will shatter or ornaments will fall of tables,
I tuned the to 5Hz and should not have. I eventually gave them to a youngster that could become a party conversation. I then built a speaker, relatively small and revealed a mellow very posh sound, but this lasted fir only a few months until it was discarded. You can mess with these speaker CAD packages like WinISD and land on a totally unacceptable result sounding dull and uninteresting and discard tendull or shouting. KEF always at the forefront of design and measurement was my go to drivers and I know their strengths and weaknesses
My system in todays value I would calculate ion these online calculators is probably valued as GBP 30 000 and probably at the bottom of high-end but serves me totally, It never sounds restrained or compressed, I get full dynamic presentation with no restraint, I cannot hear any artefacts playing either loud or soft zero fatigue and absolutely enjoyable.
I do not do listening tests at all, I already own the equipment,for many years. They do exactly what I set them out to do, convey my music in such away that I thoroughly enjoy it and bring back the memories and nostalgia from an era long ago. Speakers placed where I like them etc.
Thus to try and evaluate the sound is really not an option, only the enjoyment of the music is. If I listen to someone else's set-up I can hear differences immediately and I either enjoy it or don't, If it sounds markedly better than what I am used to considering the media and the equipment settings, I will try and replicate it with mine.
All differences are in the speakers, there is nothing prior that I would even dream to change, it took too long to develop it right. That is really why I ended up with three sets of speakers,
My favourite is the Rogers LS3/5a from some 50 years ago, A pair of KEF Concerto from 1972 and a pair of Apogee Scintillas from the early 90s. Each of these speakers represents a listening era. The Rodgers was my speakers in my dorm (bought from my friends dad for around $70 when I was a student, The KEF with my first paycheck and after working for a year I could afford a reference turntable/arm and cartridge LIN LP12 Valhalla & ITOK & Dynavector Ruby and Pioneer SA9100. According to the Hi-Fi magazines of the time the best system available. (We talking 1974)
Those where the Rock/Metal years. My best friend from varsity years was a classical musician and he coaxed me into classical music and of course I bought classical records and went to listen to him performing in the SABC Philharmonic Orchestra . The KEFs was to warm for the type of music and earning a reasonable salary and being unmarried I bought the Apogee Scintillas.
This was stellar, but a few years later we both got married and went our separate ways and I stopped listening to classical altogether, I did not actually enjoy this at all. That was when I set out to develop my own amplifier to provide me the sound that I really wanted. It took 11 revisions and about four years and I diverted back to the LS3/5a. I also thought that my calling was going to be in high-end amplifier manufacturing, but that never happened, since there is no money in it by the time you established a brand in competition with Marants, Pioneer, Sansui, Luxmann Kenwood or any of the brands at the time.
I have swapped back to the KEF Concerto on occasions, but never the Scintillas, to me they where for orchestral music, not Rock. The mid band and highs are stellar on the LS3/5a nothing beats them with human voice or clarity with just flat response from about 70Hz and up. They are pin point accurate but I must say they sound small because they are small. I drive them with monster class A amp and have more headroom than needed.
Siegfried Linkwitz (RIP), my ex boss at Hewlett Packard, Signal Analysis Div, suggested that I try his then newly invention based on an open baffle H frame woofer he was toying with at the time in his garage also suggested two original KEF B139 that would augments the lower octaves of the LS3/5a from the same manufacturer KEF. The cross over was 2nd order Bessel LP with phase and frequency control using the the same class A amps in bridge mode. They naturally melted into the LS3/5a creating a coherent smooth frequency response from about 19 Hz up to where the T27 could go. Since then, I listen to the music I loved from years ago. I am absolutely blown away every day I listen to my music and probably be happy for the rest of my life. If it was not for Siegfried and the BBC, I would probably still be looking for speakers. My system has never changed since I developed my amplifiers in 1982 - or 42 years.
The question that Logon posed becomes a little irrelevant since I do not know how to listen to equipment only in the last 42 years of listening on what I would call my reference system (the only one I had) that ticks all the measurement boxes with regard amplification probably the speakers would be close to as good as one can get. I believe from what I read that the BBC spect around GBP 500K and used all the equipment to their disposal to develop the audiophile reference LS3/5a studio monitors. I am not sure where LINN is in today's standards but they seem pretty well regarded. I forgot to say I use a WADIA6 CD player, which also at the time I bought it, was pretty well respected amongst the audio community.
Also in the interim I designed and built Isobaric Transmission line speakers which was way to large and way to big sounding for my liking, they sounded great, but it was a tiring speaker, it just offered way too much in sound that it overwelmed you. You felt anxious each time you turn the volume up worrying that the windows will shatter or ornaments will fall of tables,
I tuned the to 5Hz and should not have. I eventually gave them to a youngster that could become a party conversation. I then built a speaker, relatively small and revealed a mellow very posh sound, but this lasted fir only a few months until it was discarded. You can mess with these speaker CAD packages like WinISD and land on a totally unacceptable result sounding dull and uninteresting and discard tendull or shouting. KEF always at the forefront of design and measurement was my go to drivers and I know their strengths and weaknesses
My system in todays value I would calculate ion these online calculators is probably valued as GBP 30 000 and probably at the bottom of high-end but serves me totally, It never sounds restrained or compressed, I get full dynamic presentation with no restraint, I cannot hear any artefacts playing either loud or soft zero fatigue and absolutely enjoyable.
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