You missed the point. All you need to do for better enjoyment is to listen to something you like, with good friends, a beer, that sort of thing. Best enjoyment ever.
Jan
No, you don't have any obligation to try it or to spend money (if it is a waste, one can't know for sure).
But if you talk about the missing science/explanation/whatever, you should be aware of the fact that ruling out the existence of a real audible difference based on ethernet/OSI layer arguments is "no science" too.
Further it is a diyaudioforum, so I'd guess that you can't demand the same evidence from everyone.
Wintermute already mentioned it, measurements carry a subjective element too; it's about what to measure, which way to measure, about the uncertainty one is willing to accept as being sufficiently low, and not the least about the conclusions to draw from measured numbers wrt human perception.
Even flawed hearing can be trustworthy once bias is controlled. All hearing, even all senses, are subject to bias that has been proven to completely skew the results of a comparative test. Two choices, identical in every way, can be presented with one choice being surrounded with some form of bias that suggests the choice is in some way different, usually better, and that choice will be favored. Welcome to wine tasting, where the participants are always told, in great detail and with conviction, what a wine will taste like before it is tasted.
This does not mean senses are flawed, it means they are easily influenced by expectation bias. That includes all forms of illogical expectation.
Remove the bias, what you have left is the senses true ability to discern a difference in stimulus.
A sort of "subliminal message"of sorts...... eh?
To quote:
A subliminal message is a technique used in marketing and other media to influence people without their being aware of what the messenger is doing. This may involve the use of split second flashes of text, hidden images, or subtle cues that affect the audience at a level below conscious awareness.
So to mention my previous post, when I threw the switches to select the tube amp or the solid state one, the audible "snap" of the switches heard by my neighbor assumed I had switched the amps, even though the "dummy switch" didn't change anything......YET, he insisted that the amp was changed.
As I've always said.... it's all in your mind.
I don't think there is anything subliminal about what he's saying, as an audio example, ask planet10 about the sound of a particular speaker he's heard and see what happens.
Removing the bias is far easier to demand than to realize in practice. "Blinding" is just one of many countermeasure but unfortuately the one most often mentioned .
Why i am eagerly awaiting the day that in a blind test we can bypass the hearing to verbalisation conversion step (full of potential holes) and directly measure what the brain is doing. We are getting close.
dave
The same thing was said of those that complained about the sound of CDs before they discovered that these guys were picking up on jitter.
dave
Nonsense. They did NOT pick up on jitter. They came with all kinds of stories that digital audio caused inability to keep one's arms stretched out, that it caused stress levels to rise, even insomnia. That's humbug and all completely debunked.
Jitter was picked up by the guys measuring and discovering something they hadn't realized before. That's engineering.
Jan
Jitter was picked up by the guys measuring and discovering something they hadn't realized before. That's engineering.
Jan
Actually they did in a related story. Remember how horrible most CDRs sounded even though they were bit identical?
Not saying jitter is involved here, far from it.
I might have agreed with the above, but,
If you take the precise definition of "subliminal":
"(of a stimulus or mental process) below the threshold of sensation or consciousness; perceived by or affecting someone's mind without their being aware of it."
..then yeah, that's pretty much what expectation bias is, regardless if intentional (i.e. imposed by marketing) or unintentional.
Unfortunately, some anti-DBT folk think that expectation bias means we think they're being "fooled", which is not actually the case. Expectation bias can actually be positive reinforcement. I don't look at it as being fooled, it's simply recognizing that the total picture of perception involves more than direct response to stimulus.
In the classic audio ABX/DBT, the results do not require verbalization at all. The process is to listen to two choices, become familiar with them, then match an unknown X choice to either choice A or B. The results can (and should) be tabulated non-verbally. Determining the presence of a reliably differentiated difference is the desired result, determining preference or positive benefit is much more involved, and often never attempted based on the results of the first level ABX/DBT.
ABX testing is statistical analysis of subjective testing, the results being objectively oriented. Pure subjective (sighted A/B) testing is where we run into uncontrolled bias, which just results in very low accuracy in the data, often resulting an an analysis of the bias rather than the stimulus.
Yuck. Frustrating.
Just to back up, "Subjective" means human judgement is involved. "Objective" means measurements are involved. Since human perception is the end goal, the ABX/DBT becomes a very useful, if cumbersome and prohibitively expensive, tool.
Got to be very careful here. Jitter is not an audible/not audible thing. It's far more complex. There is a spectral density, level and bandwidth, of the jitter products which cannot be simply expressed with a number. Masking is also involved. It's not easy stuff, but generally not nearly as audible as many think, certainly should not be blamed for all manner of perceived digital problems. There were, historically, some causes for audible jitter which should by now be history.
But remember, there's "jitter" in analog recording too! It's caused by anything that frequency modulates the audio, such as scrape flutter in tape transports. And it's actually far more audible than any digital jitter when it occurs because of the modulating frequencies involved (all in-band). The basic modulation is the same in either domain (FM), the resulting modulation products are somewhat different, but we've had it a long time, perhaps long enough to become deaf to it.
Digital jitter is also very easy to cure. There were several digital format converters made by Behringer that effectively eliminated jitter. They are no longer available, being there is really no market for them.
It does require a hearing to motor response converstion step. There is cognition there and that is what needs to be removed.
A good DBT is way harder to do well then most think.
ABX is particuallarily bad with a ton of gotchas, and really only the power to conclud \e that things sound different. Any other resut is statistacally meaningless (because of the beta error?). Am ABX test can be used to prove that 2 things sound different. Nothing else.
dave
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