For people who living in Jakarta, room temperature about 22 degree Celsius considered as "cold". But for people who living in 4 seasons, considered as "hot".
For people who living in country side (Indonesia), walking at 5 km is "near", but people who living at big city, it is "far".
Measurement and human perception is different. Culture, habit, mindset can influence to the perception.
What do you think?
Can it happen in audio?
For people who living in country side (Indonesia), walking at 5 km is "near", but people who living at big city, it is "far".
Measurement and human perception is different. Culture, habit, mindset can influence to the perception.
What do you think?
Can it happen in audio?
Almost everything is based on perception, measurements as well.
If 2 measurements are the same, there's no problem. When they are slightly different and you'd have to choose which one's better, you need to interpret the values and make a decision.
Listening can help making that decision, but is easy to get wrong for many reasons e.g. on too small loudspeakers one shouldn't really make an opinion about bass performance since some octaves can't even be heard or felt on those systems.
Apart from that I guess knowing how certain instruments should sound is the best way to get unreliable, personal preference out of the way.
Selamat jalan ya!
If 2 measurements are the same, there's no problem. When they are slightly different and you'd have to choose which one's better, you need to interpret the values and make a decision.
Listening can help making that decision, but is easy to get wrong for many reasons e.g. on too small loudspeakers one shouldn't really make an opinion about bass performance since some octaves can't even be heard or felt on those systems.
Apart from that I guess knowing how certain instruments should sound is the best way to get unreliable, personal preference out of the way.
Selamat jalan ya!
Of course. As with your earlier analogy, for younger people who have only heard downloaded MP3 music through ear buds or cheap headphones, a mid-range stereo system through decent speakers is "awesome." To these people the difference between a mid-range stereo and an audiophile grade system is often imperceptible, unless there is a big difference in the bass impact.
To someone who like myself who has been building their own stuff for over 50 years, an MP3 player is a "noise source." To me the difference between a $20 MP3 player and a pricey iPod (or high end smartphone) is nearly imperceptible.
A lot of this does depend on the choice of music played through these systems. Most of what I put on my grandkid's MP3 players has a dynamic range of about 15 dB and sounds worse on a good stereo.....but pushes the subwoofer around on the floor.
In audio, too many measurement to describe the quality. Designer can have different point of view which one most important and which one less important.
What is your point of view about this?
Interesting discussion. When I was 17 I lived in big (1 million people) city. I got drafted into the military and ended up in the desert for one year on the opposite side of the country.
I remember coming back home after a year and thinking how small the city (Durban) looked. The reason of course was that my perception of space had been completely altered by being in a flat, open and completely empty place for 12 months. Same thing with colours -the greens were 'hyper' green and literally popped for the first day or two until I got used to them again.
I think the same thing happens in audio. Your perception of what is/sounds good changes. That's why people say 'after it had burnt in for a week it sounded wonderful'. Of course it did. Your brain almost certainly 'tuned' the sound to what it expected to hear.
A good test of this idea is headphones. I have a pair of ATH 900 'Air' that cost me about $350 in 2010 when I lived in Japan. About a year ago I went into the local city here in the UK with $1000 burning a hole in my pocket to buy a new pair of headphones. Luckily I took my old phones with me. I bought nothing. They all sounded boxy, or too bassy or too hissy.
Some of these phones had very good reviews. What was wrong? I hadn't given my brain time to tune to the new sound - the headphones were all ok. I'll only buy new ones when these ones finally konk out. I decided no need to put my ears through a recalibration at this stage of life
I remember coming back home after a year and thinking how small the city (Durban) looked. The reason of course was that my perception of space had been completely altered by being in a flat, open and completely empty place for 12 months. Same thing with colours -the greens were 'hyper' green and literally popped for the first day or two until I got used to them again.
I think the same thing happens in audio. Your perception of what is/sounds good changes. That's why people say 'after it had burnt in for a week it sounded wonderful'. Of course it did. Your brain almost certainly 'tuned' the sound to what it expected to hear.
A good test of this idea is headphones. I have a pair of ATH 900 'Air' that cost me about $350 in 2010 when I lived in Japan. About a year ago I went into the local city here in the UK with $1000 burning a hole in my pocket to buy a new pair of headphones. Luckily I took my old phones with me. I bought nothing. They all sounded boxy, or too bassy or too hissy.
Some of these phones had very good reviews. What was wrong? I hadn't given my brain time to tune to the new sound - the headphones were all ok. I'll only buy new ones when these ones finally konk out. I decided no need to put my ears through a recalibration at this stage of life
As with any other business involving money, audio is polluted with all kinds of scams causing confusion in one's mind. If you have financial problems, then you will not easily become a victim of it.
It depends strongly on the objective, this changes per device.
For a DA converter, signal to noise, ENOB, thd, sinad etc might be the basic objectives, while for e.g. speakers it might be bandwith, phase response, directivity or max spl and for a single ended tube amp the objective might be bandwith, hum / noise and durability.
Sometimes it's also up to the marketing department, if you're trying to claim something is the best, the financial perspective might drive the need for a certain set of measurement specifications.
For DIY it's easier though. You can choose to keep optimizing by measurements untill you hear no improvement anymore. If there isn't an improvement by ear, I would stick to the version with better measurement results.
In theory it also works the other way around, you can keep tweaking by ear and see if you can understand the measurements taken from those. Since tweaking by ear sometimes means that you don't know what you're changing (where in the measurements should be looked at), it's easy to get lost in what the measurements mean, yet one could argue that also is possible by having excellent measurement results as the goal.
Hey Bonsai,
Good story. To pick up on your comments about how things seemed different, when I was studying "experimental" music, one of the things our teacher did was to have everyone be completely quiet - don't make a sound. So, there we were, about 8 of us, being as quiet as we could for about 15 minutes. THAT was an interesting and ear-opening experience.
Good story. To pick up on your comments about how things seemed different, when I was studying "experimental" music, one of the things our teacher did was to have everyone be completely quiet - don't make a sound. So, there we were, about 8 of us, being as quiet as we could for about 15 minutes. THAT was an interesting and ear-opening experience.
Interesting discussion. When I was 17 I lived in big (1 million people) city. I got drafted into the military and ended up in the desert for one year on the opposite side of the country.
I remember coming back home after a year and thinking how small the city (Durban) looked. The reason of course was that my perception of space had been completely altered by being in a flat, open and completely empty place for 12 months. Same thing with colours -the greens were 'hyper' green and literally popped for the first day or two until I got used to them again.
I think the same thing happens in audio. Your perception of what is/sounds good changes. That's why people say 'after it had burnt in for a week it sounded wonderful'. Of course it did. Your brain almost certainly 'tuned' the sound to what it expected to hear.
A good test of this idea is headphones. I have a pair of ATH 900 'Air' that cost me about $350 in 2010 when I lived in Japan. About a year ago I went into the local city here in the UK with $1000 burning a hole in my pocket to buy a new pair of headphones. Luckily I took my old phones with me. I bought nothing. They all sounded boxy, or too bassy or too hissy.
Some of these phones had very good reviews. What was wrong? I hadn't given my brain time to tune to the new sound - the headphones were all ok. I'll only buy new ones when these ones finally konk out. I decided no need to put my ears through a recalibration at this stage of life
The difference is that in the desert there were no green colors, while with the headphones, you experienced live sound every single day.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this.
You'te sure nothing else was wrong? Maybe wrong amp for difficult to drive headphones or something?
No. My headphones are c. 32 Ohms, all the others as well, driven from a decent headphone amp. I tried AKG, Sennheiser, B&W, one or two other high end brands.
My son will bring his new AKG's when he comes to visit next time (lockdown's etc permitting) and we will compare notes.
It is exactly as I said it was: there will be some differences, but if you let you brain tune in, you quickly adapt to the sound and it becomes your reference so to speak.
I'll give you another great example: single driver horn speakers. Walk into most demo rooms at hifi shows where these are playing, and if you are used to conventional speakers, you grit your teeth, take a listen and walk out. Unless your ear<>brain tunes, they often sound like they're being played through a pipe - boxy, no bottom or top end etc.
Those that own them can't say enough good about them. YMMV.
My son will bring his new AKG's when he comes to visit next time (lockdown's etc permitting) and we will compare notes.
It is exactly as I said it was: there will be some differences, but if you let you brain tune in, you quickly adapt to the sound and it becomes your reference so to speak.
I'll give you another great example: single driver horn speakers. Walk into most demo rooms at hifi shows where these are playing, and if you are used to conventional speakers, you grit your teeth, take a listen and walk out. Unless your ear<>brain tunes, they often sound like they're being played through a pipe - boxy, no bottom or top end etc.
Those that own them can't say enough good about them. YMMV.
But then the business shills try to spread FUD with phony claims like your hearing isn't good enough or similar pollution.
It's known that certain types of distortion, namely 2nd harmonic, can have a pleasing effect to many listener's brains / perceptions. "Sweeter" and "more dynamic" - so much so that some designs deliberately exploit the phenomena.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to visit relatives in NJ. Sometimes we'd go to a large dept store, where I recall fascination with the sound of certain radios of German manufacture. 15 - 20 years later, I had the opportunity to take such a radio apart and found it full of WIMA caps, as - logically - WIMA was a local capacitor manufacturer.
As everyone knows today, sound perception extends to even the components used to construct a device. You can even read about all kinds of effort to measure different capacitors, in an attempt to suss out why they sound different. Same with every other component comprising a system.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to visit relatives in NJ. Sometimes we'd go to a large dept store, where I recall fascination with the sound of certain radios of German manufacture. 15 - 20 years later, I had the opportunity to take such a radio apart and found it full of WIMA caps, as - logically - WIMA was a local capacitor manufacturer.
As everyone knows today, sound perception extends to even the components used to construct a device. You can even read about all kinds of effort to measure different capacitors, in an attempt to suss out why they sound different. Same with every other component comprising a system.
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.