It is, but if someone always says 'I expect to be able to tell the difference' then they are biased even if subconsciously. Like your amazing distortion measuring ears.
Works both ways. ("nobody will be able to tell the difference")
A lot of people are obviously perfect fine with sighted listening (peeking at max) provided the result is "no difference" .
Apparenty under the misguided impression that the validity of a research approach depends on the result.
It is, but if someone always says 'I expect to be able to tell the difference' then they are biased even if subconsciously. Like your amazing distortion measuring ears.
Actually, I didn't expect to hear any distortion. I bought my first personal mic preamps and A/D based on specs alone. The sound was very disappointing, to sum it up in one word, I would say "muffled."
Also, now that I have thought about it some more, I think as far as my hearing goes I would not expect to be able to hear less than .1% distortion in an analog system. Certainly not just softly clipping the top off a sine wave. Other than boxes designed to be colored, I have only heard things I don't like when digital is involved. And most of it was high frequency stuff that sounded bad to me. Some people have used the word "grainy" as a descriptor. I guess the word fits for the sound of some digital as I hear it. With DACs, the effect is most apparent with cymbals, and that seems to be the easiest thing for most people to hear, particularly if they expend the effort to listen carefully, as one has to do when mixing (if they want to ever be asked to do it again, that is).
The other thing about digital is with stereo imaging. Localization sounds more widely smeared out between the speakers with some converters, and much more clearly localized with other converters. When trying to pan channels in a mix, its much easier with the latter type of converters.
OTOH we put 2 halves of a magnum in a DBT and most scored them almost randomly. These included experienced wine buyers.
It does. And I am guilty of assuming on occasion that, because of the last 50 years of research we will never find a golden ear.
I watched a blind wine taste recently, with some respected tasters. They were fairly random in their results - except the cheapo supermarket one thrown in to, to be an easy pick, which came out top! (Price of wines from £4.50 to £150).
... and as Bill said earlier, as long as you don't tell, a blender is an excellent fast aerator!
Ok, so you hold the position - correct me if I misunderstand - that ANY amplifier below "0.01%" THD will be both "sufficient" and also indistinguishable from any other amplifier below that threshold? Yes?
No. You left out a whole bunch of important engineering specs, but I'm sure that was accidental, right?
The nastiest trick pulled on me and another taster was to put the same mediocre wine in two different bottles and ask us to compare them. This was quite early on in my life as a wine lover, and was instructive, once I got over wanting to kill the host.
This reminds me of the story Hugh Johnson tells about a famous wine buyer, I believe it was Ronald Avery, who was asked if he ever mistook a white wine for a red. "Not since lunch" he replied.
One of the problems with assessing wine is the aging factor. Wine vinified to be ready to drink young can outpoint more "serious" wines, and properly so if the sole characteristic is being enjoyable at the moment of tasting. One of the last tastings I attended was something of a free-for-all with noisy drunks, and the most expensive wine served (sighted of course) was a 1975 Mouton. It was, as the saying goes, hard as nails at the age of about four years after harvest. A much less exalted wine, I think it was Ch. Grand Barrail Lamarzelle Figeac, was much more enjoyable, but most of the drunks raved about the Mouton.
If you are really a serious and competent taster, you should be able to navigate around these factors and pronounce on the overall quality, while assessing the likely time required to maturity. This takes a lot of practice, and even the best can falter sometimes.
Every experienced wine taster has stories of getting fooled. But I have never had any pro argue that he should be able to peek because of test pressure, or confusion, or that's not the way we drink for enjoyment, or that taste/aroma-only mysteriously removes the ability to discriminate, or any of the other lame excuses used by audio hucksters.
And everybody is fooled by optical illusions too, don't forget that one (as we go down the list of all the different ways people can be fooled).
How about, Newtonian physics has been proven right for 50 years (insert your preferred number here). "There can't possibly be anything we haven't already found out about and completely understood." People did actually fool themselves this way too, so let's add it to the list and keep going.
From time to time someone says something like "They (that is, the evil science/engineering hegemony) thought that Newton was right, but he was wrong. Therefore they don't know anything; therefore audio amplifiers may damage sound in ways they don't know about." There are so many mistakes in this line of argument that it is surprising when someone who appears to be intelligent seems to employ it.
Welcome Markw4 to the world of 'trusting your ears'. This happens all the time with audio designers, as well as just listeners. We make something to the standard that we think is appropriate, measure it carefully, then (hopefully) we listen to it ourselves, or trusted colleagues, before we release it to the general public. This is where Quad did it differently. They ONLY believed in double blind tests where just about every audio electrical component will pass, and put out the QUAD 405 to the public. John Atkinson, formerly editor of HFN in England, and now editor of Stereophile participated in one of these Quad double blind tests and actually bought the product. However, on further listening, he found the Quad not to the standard of many other amps, and he replaced it. You can look this up if you wish. John Atkinson has a degree in Physics, just as I do, and Charles Hansen has, (what a coincidence) and he has decades of both listening and measuring experience with the best test equipment available. I personally use John Atkinson's measurements of my own designs as my personal reference, as mine are less complete.
Markw4, many here just don't believe that there are any real differences, unless you can easily measure it.
Markw4, many here just don't believe that there are any real differences, unless you can easily measure it.
It's not at the same time. I walk in the room first looking at the walls or the floor. I listen for a bit THEN look at the gear. Usually at first glance it's hard to tell exactly what is going on anyway.
I am surprised, but I still think he had a bit of a devil's advocate side. Why would that be?
What seems to be missed by so many are all the con-founders that must be weighed when we talk about how all amplifiers should sound the same. While some just look at the THD and someone else clues in on IMd it is the balance of all the factors that it seems make one amplifier sound different than another.
Though you may find two amplifiers that have the same basic distortion numbers that does not mean that overall they are really that similar. Now how you balance the absolute distortion numbers with things like the order and level of higher order harmonic distortions and the side products of IMD and slew rate limitations and all the other factors and how you weight those I just can't answer. At the same time I think this is why most of use feel that though many amplifiers on a purely technical basis should sound the same they actually don't, these other factors skew our final audio opinions, we can and do hear some kind of differences between different amplifiers. blind testing would bring out these small differences, now whether one is better than the other is always a personal choice in the end. If you can hear the difference between two amplifiers in a blind test is the question, if you can't then they are equivalent at some level, but it you can truly pick out differences enough to tell they sound different statistically then there is an argument to be made that not all well designed amplifiers necessarily are interchangeable.
Though you may find two amplifiers that have the same basic distortion numbers that does not mean that overall they are really that similar. Now how you balance the absolute distortion numbers with things like the order and level of higher order harmonic distortions and the side products of IMD and slew rate limitations and all the other factors and how you weight those I just can't answer. At the same time I think this is why most of use feel that though many amplifiers on a purely technical basis should sound the same they actually don't, these other factors skew our final audio opinions, we can and do hear some kind of differences between different amplifiers. blind testing would bring out these small differences, now whether one is better than the other is always a personal choice in the end. If you can hear the difference between two amplifiers in a blind test is the question, if you can't then they are equivalent at some level, but it you can truly pick out differences enough to tell they sound different statistically then there is an argument to be made that not all well designed amplifiers necessarily are interchangeable.
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