“This might be an example meant to illustrate adverse conditioning, an example of the so called nocebo effect. Let me comment on the work "should". You also might have chosen "might" instead of "should". Because not all persons will be specifically responsive to this kind of experimental setup. And even ... certainly there are some people around for which adding Hitler on theirs boxes will improve the listening experience. Conditional stimuli may induce completely different results. In this logic, your "should" is an expectation of yours, or in other words a reference to your individual reality.”
Fair enough, how about woulda, shoulda, coulda?
Fair enough, how about woulda, shoulda, coulda?
I don't want to go through all of your post; there's good and bad in it. Reading a study and quoting parts and interpreting what you *think * it means is dangerous if your not a specilist in the field.
Nobody questions that sound localisation is a real process going on in your head. But the output, the localisation of, say, the position of a vocalist somewhere on the baseline of your speakers, is totally illusory simply because there is no singer! You are imagining it, making it up. Stereo is a hoax if there ever was one!
Jan
Is this a correct summary?
- You didn't notice anything you could put your finger on, but you felt something was "wrong".
- Neither you nor they were sure what it was, so you went looking for what was "wrong".
- Your method of evaluation was to listen to a track or tracks with which you were both familiar back to back with another amplifier, both knowing when the changes occurred.
- You still could not discern / identify specifically, nor articulate clearly what was "wrong".
- Your friend remembered / "stated from memory" a list.
- Then after being told by your friend, you agreed that you had noticed the "exact" same things.
My current opinion is - Choosing audio gear for whatever reason one may, is fine, but your repeated attempts to walk the line between science and your subjectivist viewpoint is entertaining at best and intentionally misleading at worst. With that said, I hope whatever it is that you're working on in retirement as a tool to measure and evaluate what people hear / prefer (or whatever) is successful. What I mean by successful is that it does that and stands up to scientific scrutiny. I truly hope it "works". Someone earlier (I think it was Jan) said that they wished they had a similar tool. I agree. It would be marvelous. I am not in any way trying to troll you. My odd thoughts sometimes go toward things like "Wouldn't it be magnificent if budget and desire would allow the cognitive neuroscientists to measure our responses"?...
Clearly stated, I am a subjectivist. Pure and simple. I have no illusions that I (nor anyone that I know) can present a set of measurements that I can understand that will completely inform me about my enjoyment of an amplifier. I look at certain specifications to see if an amplifier will likely be fit for purpose, but then I just put it in and listen. It is a hobby for me. People that sell and/or design audio gear for market have different motivations. Sometimes my motivations and theirs conflict, and sometimes they align. My choices are not founded in science. I am biased, and I am easily influenced.
I do, however, 100% believe that an amplifier by itself can be measured using today's tech and knowledge to determine if it will have an effect on anything the vast majority of humans could audibly discern (when used as intended and within a controlled environment). Once you take that amplifier and add other equipment, put that equipment in rooms of varying characteristics, and humans listen to the results, all bets are off. My room looks nothing like rooms used in controlled studies, so... the way I look at it... I want to see what amplifier I enjoy the most with my gear in my room with my ears... Part of what I enjoy could be just that it's another amplifier. 🙂 Speakers would likely be the better choice of things to fool with, as would room acoustics... but I, like many, like to fool with building amplifiers. It's more fun to solder than move acoustic panels around. Plus... I'm lazy, and my wife hates the look of panels. Putting up bass traps was a hard no.
As I learn more, I hope to alter my opinions / beliefs (and more of my gear)...
Who am I kidding, I'm not hear to learn, I'm here to feed my addiction and find another excuse to build more gear.
DIY Crowd - This one measures phenomenally well!
Me - OK, added to build list.
DIY Crowd - OMG! I could hear the slightly out of tune beat note on a piano with this one!
Me - OK, added to the build list.
PS - I have no credibility in audio at all, but I'm fascinated. A while ago, part of my previous work and part of a thesis I wrote was to evaluate the "hand" of fabrics. There was/is a set of measurement gear designed by Kawabata that can measure a number of physical characteristics of fabrics. While I (nor they at the time) was ever able to predict with reasonable confidence a fabric that would have "universal appeal" mathematically to more people... We (and they) could demonstrate with high probability that the measurements could be used to predict a level of preference for some characteristics. It was a blunt instrument, in a manner of speaking, but useful. So, I am always interested in the argument around "are we measuring the right things?", even if it sometimes leads to nowhere re: audio and "preferences" vs. "performance".
<cough> 🙂
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That’s how I figured I cannot tell the difference between 16, 24, 48, 96-bit digital encodings. I still go for 96-bit encodings now, because disc space is no longer a concern.
Flashing pictures of BC cars to anyone from salty Ontario is triggering.
For me it was a mother who bought me Golden Guides at Sentry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Guide
Unless your talking about binaural, with its own suite of problems arising from head and ear anatomical variances between listeners, a two microphone/speaker chain can never fully recreate the acoustic stimuli of being at the original event. A stand mic can't capture the anatomical acoustic shadowing foundational to in-person localization. Speakers further deliver right/left ear information to both ears in a way that never happens in person. It makes a convincing argument that we 'learn to hear' stereo reproduction in a way analogous to toddlers learning to localize sounds. See bobbing heads at hifi shootouts.
Solving all this, determining how to capture adequate HRTF cues in the recording and remove their intra-aural crosstalk in speaker playback, if possible at all, entails math I'll never grasp. Today, for me, experimental mic arrays designed to capture some shadowing and inter-aural delay without auricula info appears to work best with speakers even though it only addresses half the shortcomings. Pure artisan/craftsman stuff though.
I quoted Jakob2, who suggested his hypothesis presumably after much thought and with seriousness. However, it should not be taken as applying to all converts. It was about people who go from one extreme to another extreme. There is no balance somewhere in the middle for them. For those particular people, when in the second extreme stage that Jakob2 described, they disregard/reject/dismiss all evidence that they may have gone too far. They have decided they will not consider any possibility that there are some audible differences that some people can reliably hear, and that some people can reliably do it sighted. Well, I know for a fact there are at least a few people who can do it sighted. There are methods to follow, and it takes a lot of practice.
It can. ABX may not be the best or most sensitive blind protocol, but it can be done. Very few people know how to do it properly though if the aim is to find out what someone can hear under the best of conditions, rather than how hard it can be under the worst conditions.
I will quote a member who has been involved in many such tests and what he had to do to pass:
...for better or worse I have been dragged into hundreds of A/B, ABX/ Random long selection repeats, etc. and in my experience Mark is right, they show excessive negative results, due to lack of training in hearing the difference, as well as the mental confusion of having things switch up. They do show decent correlation for a large number of people for gross differences. Also, IMHO none of these tests do much to eliminate pre-existing biases towards certain SQ contours (the "I'm used to my own speakers" thing).
The only way I have been able to get reliable results and consensus is by weeks of training with specific exaggerated SQ problems (missing bits, odd noise floor contour, mechanical noises on magnetic recordings, etc.) and then reducing them to near-inaudibility. Done this way people train their brains to identify specific sounds.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/the-black-hole.349926/post-7310119
This is exactly why one has to train the fast part of the brain to do the processing. It then only notifies/passes along the limited information which is of interest to conscious awareness. Training the fast system is exactly what was being done in quote contained above in #557
That said, using mindful meditation techniques along with lots of practice, its possible to fill the conscious mind with much more information than it usually receives.
Absolutely not. I said there was a list of specific things we noticed that were missing/gone. Also, our lists were formulated independently, then shared after that. You are confusing the sequence of events.
Thanks for putting some numbers to this Jan. This is exactly the “filtering” (mentioned quite a ways back) that takes place to limit sensory inputs to a rate that can be processed.
When we listen, particularily when we focus on the sound, our attention goes to specific kinds of input.
The first time i heard an EnABLed driver it took me an entire afternoon to tease out what is different. Now it takes a handful or two of seconds. That session, 35 years into the hobby, was a bit of a relevation and caused some evolution in the range of people’s listening experiences. We all gotyta keep learning .
dave
To a large extent that is true, but you can't do it all with an AP machine. Bob Cordell has a whole chapter in his book on advanced sources of distortion. IIRC he does not describe how to measure all of them. There are others problems too, some that nobody knew existed or how to measure until recently. Bruno Putzeys himself described one recently after it he figured out the cause. The reason he went looking for a problem in the first place was because of complaints from a very small number of customers who reported hearing a particular effect. Most people never noticed it.
https://purifi-audio.com/blog/tech-notes-1/this-thing-we-have-about-hysteresis-distortion-3
Lar Risbo (a PhD EE with dozens of patents), and Bruno's partner at Purifi, said in an interview he suspects there may still be audible problems they haven't yet identified.
EDIT: Moreover, a slide from an AES presentation by Bill Whitlock is shown below:
How many people even know if they have a problem with a "veiled" quality to their audio? Or how to measure for it? IME many if not most systems have some of it, which often arises from EMI/RFI carried by inadvertent ground loops. IOW, I agree with Whitlock when he says, " Most equipment today has poor immunity."
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Mark please, when you are quoting other's posts, do it properly. Provide the link to the post, so members are aware of the context.
Actually this is forum's Rule #12
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/help/terms/
George
Fair. Could you point me to where you said that? I quoted one entire post, which contained only this relevant piece:
"After that my friend stated from memory a list of thing that sounded wrong or missing with AHB2. Since I was familiar with the music too, I also noticed the exact same things."
You made no mention of a list you had created. If I misconstrued some other wording, or if I missed another post I'm happy to acknowledge.
Either way, I hope you can understand how I might be confused. If you'd like please elaborate further or correct what happened and how you drew the conclusion. I'll take you at your word that the lists were formulated independently, but even so...
I'll agree wholeheartedly with something akin to "We both chose to keep (some amp) in the system because we liked it more", but I lend no credence to it having anything to do with a meaningful scientific comparison. If it wasn't your intention to present it as anything other than... something akin to "We both like this amp", then I also misinterpreted your intention.
I also don't want you to think I have anything AT ALL against choosing an amplifier by listening. I just don't think your results have anything to do with whether we can measure how you both reacted to your choice between the amplifiers. I think you were a victim to bias and improper testing which is likely not reasonably repeatable in proper studies. I may be completely wrong, and I'll continue to read your posts to see what you come up with.
BTW - Had an 8008BB in the past, and I just got my first 2004 back. It's awaiting some TLC. I'm certainly not a fanboy of Benchmark nor a hater of Aragon.
Cheers,
Patrick
Have to see if I can find it. I keep quotes of interest in text files, usually with a link to the post. Most of the old links broke when the forum software was updated.
Found the link to that one at: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...designing-yet-another-dac.351495/post-6133569
Another related quote at: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...rch-preamplifier-part-iii.318975/post-5595129
Otoh one could state that quite often self-converted "ex golden ears" tend to be the most dogmatic in believing in conspiracy theories and seem to be unable to assume being in error about that. It seems to be more easy to believe in being a victim of a world wide network of dishonest manufacturers, reviewers and selfdeluding listeners, than to believe that one has just fooled himself.
(SY) belongs to this group and is imo quite blind to his own bias.
Money might be a strong driving force to favour certain opinions but ego surely can be a equally strong driving force as well.
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