More important is what they are testing. Olive does invaluable work but it's ultimately limited to preference, not accuracy. Had the accident of history resulted in panel electrostatics or omnidirectional radiators finding universal adoption instead of box direct radiators it's reasonable to suggest his results would be very different.
Cognitive dissonance - Wikipedia
"According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent."
Check.
Stop thinking you know better than the experts.
"According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent."
Check.
Stop thinking you know better than the experts.
Yet, be very careful not to mischaracterize what the experts actually know. EEs are used to knowing things with much more certainty than social scientists are usually able to do, for example.
BBC's TV ?
If I remember correctly this study was made not with cheap copy but they took some stradis, very good reknewed nowadays violin maker and one made of transparent acrylic for the said damping properties according the maker. The acrylic was often the first from experts abx tests (same musician each time behind a curtain), there was no consistency saying the very brandnew good one (and not cheap) was differet to the stradis !
I assume tests where made with the same fiddlestick, horsehair and colophans amount 🙄... cause some says the fiddlestick gives the sound to the violin and should be the expensive part of the combo... (makers are not the same sometimes) : Bow (music - Wikipedia)
I'm wondering, if or when the time comes where a blind test of an audiophile phenomena is beaten, how much folks will believe in it anyway. You can't argue with a flat earther.
Expectation bias is multiway really. Believing that buying a fancy cable will improve the sound of your system is not really different than strongly believing that achieving good numbers at specific electrical measurements will do the same.
How does one believe in the claims of a TV emission is beyond my understanding.
Expectation bias is multiway really. Believing that buying a fancy cable will improve the sound of your system is not really different than strongly believing that achieving good numbers at specific electrical measurements will do the same.
How does one believe in the claims of a TV emission is beyond my understanding.
Last edited:
Do we beleive it ? Some know it's all about to sell washing machin powders or to have audiance ! But if the scientifical method is maybe poor that does not say there is a plot behind it ( commendited by stradis assurance company or a BBC's friend from the acrylic violin maker ???? Who knows, I'm agree to be prudent about conclusions"
Flat earthers' are from a different league, same as creationist growed from youth by stupid families... you can't compare... or they are more clever than you and I and just try to have a free ticket from Space-X to check 😉...
edit : iirc the musician behind the curtain has mask to blink his eyes and was also asked after : no concistency in the answers with what he believed to have in the hands...
Flat earthers' are from a different league, same as creationist growed from youth by stupid families... you can't compare... or they are more clever than you and I and just try to have a free ticket from Space-X to check 😉...
edit : iirc the musician behind the curtain has mask to blink his eyes and was also asked after : no concistency in the answers with what he believed to have in the hands...
Last edited:
A few years ago I looked into making a commercial tube-hybrid phono preamplifier, I had a hard time getting under per $350USD part cost.
It's the chassis, silkscreened faceplates, custom circuit boards, and the power transformer that eats up the most of the dollars. And the shipping from all the various sites that carry the parts - there isn't one-stop shopping for making tube preamps. If you're making thousands of them, you can start getting significant cuts to the parts cost but small runs? The costs really add up - good RCA jacks, feet, circuit board standoffs, quality tubes that won't be noisy, and that doesn't even include (my "free") labor cost for assembly. Or advertising or shipping.
Needless to say I gave up my dreams of making a budget $595 tube phono preamp.
I have a friend with the EAR 834P and he's extremely happy with it. It works every time he fires it up, there hasn't been any hiccups or DIY weirdness. Stuff that I could deal with but not him.
It's the chassis, silkscreened faceplates, custom circuit boards, and the power transformer that eats up the most of the dollars. And the shipping from all the various sites that carry the parts - there isn't one-stop shopping for making tube preamps. If you're making thousands of them, you can start getting significant cuts to the parts cost but small runs? The costs really add up - good RCA jacks, feet, circuit board standoffs, quality tubes that won't be noisy, and that doesn't even include (my "free") labor cost for assembly. Or advertising or shipping.
Needless to say I gave up my dreams of making a budget $595 tube phono preamp.
I have a friend with the EAR 834P and he's extremely happy with it. It works every time he fires it up, there hasn't been any hiccups or DIY weirdness. Stuff that I could deal with but not him.
It would be hard to set up a true ABX test. There have been several tests of "modern" violins VS Stradivarius over the past 20 years. I remember a test of a Chinese copy VS an old Strad, but I can't find it now. Google does however return plenty of tests though. There are also plenty of tests of relatively cheap Chinese guitars VS high prices Gibsons and Fenders too.
Million-dollar Strads fall to modern violins in blind ‘sound check’ | Science | AAAS
Violinists can’t tell the difference between Stradivarius violins and new ones | Discover Magazine
There is junk and good stuff produced in various countries all over the world, including the USA. I have never owned a US made guitar. They are not in my price range. The Strat that I sold to pay for the three Chinese guitars was made in Indonesia. The build quality of any of the Chinese guitars is better than the Indonesian made guitar.
I will likely be there too, if the event is held. The state of Ohio has already declared a health emergency and there is talk of restricting or prohibiting large public gatherings on our local (Steubenville Ohio) TV station.
Yes cognitive dissonance is difficult to deal with, but some just adopt an illusion to present apparent concordance to themselves - comfort zone.
Cheap electric guitars can often compete with expensive ones IME, particularly so if well set up.
Acoustic guitars are a different matter, again IME. I compared several guitars once at a high end music store. The lower cost ones maybe have a nice resonant top. The better ones tended to be lighter weight with all parts of the body vibrating musically and emitting a substantial part of the overall sound.
In a room, the difference is that room reflections from all the sound emitting surfaces of a good guitar fill the room space in a way that sounds very nice to the ears. Plug one ear with a finger and a lot of that musical sound effect diminishes. Hence, I could imagine putting guitars behind a curtain or in another environment might change what makes the guitar sound different and better from low cost guitars in a more ideal, say, recording or other intimate/reverberant sounding room.
Acoustic guitars are a different matter, again IME. I compared several guitars once at a high end music store. The lower cost ones maybe have a nice resonant top. The better ones tended to be lighter weight with all parts of the body vibrating musically and emitting a substantial part of the overall sound.
In a room, the difference is that room reflections from all the sound emitting surfaces of a good guitar fill the room space in a way that sounds very nice to the ears. Plug one ear with a finger and a lot of that musical sound effect diminishes. Hence, I could imagine putting guitars behind a curtain or in another environment might change what makes the guitar sound different and better from low cost guitars in a more ideal, say, recording or other intimate/reverberant sounding room.
Last edited:
Especially the second one is a good example how misleading a headline can be, as of course the violonists could tell the difference between the various violins ....
The people around Fritz and Curtin did several different studies to assess the myth that every old italian violin (like the Strad, Guarneri del Gesu) would be preferrable over any modern violin of high quality (words to that effect), despite all efforts to find out what the secret of the old ones is.
It seems my ongoing thread about bloated prices and hyped audio products has morphed into musical instruments now, something I know nothing about.
And also something else where personal preference, bias, and prior experience caries a lot of weight....more so than real published specifications, if there are any.
Why, why not, why doesn't it - these are questions one should ask when it doesn't work. Let's suppose there are in fact audible differences, but during the test everything rumbles. We need a scientific approach here, to analyze what probably goes wrong.
A lot of expensive electrics are built cheaply. Best example were Gibsons made in the last 20 (?) or so years. They had a lot of different lines but even the higher price ones didn't have their necks set in properly but had an intentional gap to set the roughly cut neck and body together that was then filled with glue.
A different story with choosing a guitar is that in my experience they do change after being played for a few hours so if you compare brand new guitars it's listening for potential and also electrics can differ a lot, the easiest to recognice sustain and presence.