The latter indeed is the way industry works, in collusion with vested scientific interests.
They organize Personal listening in a structured way, so that personal listening experiences may be correlated with factors relating to sound quality. In the most profit grabbing companies, information thus gathered will give engineers clear directions for their next design job, with as only motive to conquer a larger piece of the marketplace.
This entire approach is based on cold rationality, and it requires both DBT and measurements, because otherwise, what to correlate and to draw conclusions from?
I admire your courage to denounce this abject philosophy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso
On the contrary, distortions are multiplicative. It is only because they are small that they superficially appear to be additive. Noise is additive (mainly).bear said:
Perhaps.
If you knew exactly what distortions were introduced by the first lens then you could (in principle, at least) undo them in the second lens. In audio we don't know, so generally we hope that the distortions were sufficiently small that we don't need to undo them.
So seeking to correlate listening with measurements in order to improve audio products is some sort of evil conspiracy against the public? Are you suggesting that audio companies should just listen to their favourite guru and reject all supported facts in favour of unsupported conjecture?vacuphile said:
Or shall we just overthrow capitalism? Let me pause for a moment: which political/economic system has delivered all the components which we DIYers use?
I have a poor memory for who on here generally talks sense and who talks nonsense, so I can't always tell the difference between nonsense and humour.
Yes if the test equipment peeks it might change it's readings. And don't forget that it should be experienced test gear also.
Listening enjoyment is of course not easy to correlate with audible transparency and a completely different question.
I admire your audacity to make such an absurd generalization.
Let's get specific.
You do/do not agree that a Bose Wave Radio is the equal of a "high-quality" (you define that for yourself) component "style" hi-fi?
THEY say it is the equal. So their "organization of structured listening" produced accurate results that brought forth this inexorable conclusion? That's what happened?
And, the topic is not the way the "industry works" as they are only interested in capturing the largest market, making the most profit with the lowest costs and widest margin, right?
What in the world does this have to do with the way Kirchoff picked his headphones, or how an opamp sounds or does not, or how you choose your gear? Or what is SOTA performance, and can it be heard, and do opamps produce SOTA performance?? Nothing.
On the other hand, and somewhat off topic, things like preprint 2822 with the Gerzon-Craven noise shaping theorem also never made it to the journal, even though it is one of the most important papers ever published about noise shaping.
In general I definitely like the preprints more than the journal, and I've seen enough nonsense in papers with and without peer review not to care much whether something is peer reviewed.
Trampling enjoyment in the name of transparency ain't gonna sell more "high end" stuff any time soon.
I stand corrected.
So all the more so - multiplied distortions, especially from cascaded devices that produce the same distortion spectra and type will balloon...
This would be true in some cases - but in cases where information was removed (filtered out) or sufficiently distorted, especially in a non-linear way, or where non-linear artifacts are added in, the process of correction becomes problematic. For optical things we're into "image processing", which can do some amazing things, but it still falls short of restoring a 1:1 correspondence with an original source given the above issues.
In audio, we more or less try to do things in "real time".
Perhaps an area to be looked into is a slow processing of source "data" to do what is the equivalent of "image processing"? Might be interesting.
Anyhow, I agree, one hopes that the distortions are/were sufficiently small so that they do not need to be removed (or otherwise corrected). Unfortunately, I don't think this is the case far too often. Some here obviously do. Hope springs eternal.
Yo - you rabid DBT/measurement types - if you read back several posts I OFFERED to collaborate on some suitable hardware for doing DBTs on opamps. Don't see my PM box filling up! So let's put this nonsense about people who "think they hear stuff" not being willing to test/measure/or do DBTs to bed. Ok?
Yeh it's obviously a huge secret conspiracy, audio electronics is really an art form, just stick a resistor here and a capacitor there and your good to go as long as the colours don't clash.
The numbers are just there to fool the buyers and annoy the unbelievers
The numbers are just there to fool the buyers and annoy the unbelievers
The odd thing about the high end is that the more you spend often the worse the performance*, but the idiot reviewers still give it awards. Some things are really badly flawed. High end is not about performance its about selling a dream. Certainly not high fidelity. Which is fine if that is what people want. I want a transparent amplification chain so I can hear the music as recorded to the best of the compromises I have to make.
But I am not either buying or selling 'high end stuff'.
*There are notable exceptions, but sadly these are few in the melee of snake oil marketing.
But I am not either buying or selling 'high end stuff'.
*There are notable exceptions, but sadly these are few in the melee of snake oil marketing.
So it's a crap shoot and we have to decide for ourselves, you do make a good point maybe we should question the peers? A fundamental work on something important falling through the cracks should not happen, politics?
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The gaincard is a con, but you can get stellar performance out of the LM3886, if of course that is what you want.
My post crossed over with scott wurcer's, didn't make sense anymore so i deleted it. I think the gaincard is a good example of high end snake oil product. My-Ref makes a decent job of the 3886, good enough for me anyway.
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