Audio Science Review = Rebuttal and Further Thoughts

@djones51 
Maybe there were in two minds about what to recommend?

Actually I am moving it onto the bicycle shortly.
 

The McIntosh house was located in Bradbury, an equestrian city where an old Budweiser commercial was made in a barn that looked from the outside like a gigantic mansion

Maybe that town was not named after Ray Bradbury…

prof if this is a rant, we are used to your rants by now. If this is a discussion please post your system photos, components, and measurements in your profile.

Well @kota1 you actually have measurements in your profile.
So I guess there is some part of science and measurements that you abide.

So where is the hostility tied to?
It is not like you took the measurements and decided to chuck them out n favour of listening.

Where do you post these? I can’t see anything separate (from regular posts) in the way of profile posts when I go to your profile, for example, but I may be missing something or looking in the wrong place.

@axo1989  under systems, which seems never to be easy to find.

holmz , I thought everyone here knew how the virtual systems page works, my bad :).

It’s OK - I believe that it works different on an iPad than a computer browser.

As for measurements, I am not against measurements, I thought posting them would be interesting if we are discussing measurements any way right.

Correct.

I found Amir’s many considered comments very informative and valuable. And now they are all forever gone at the whim of AG.

This has happened many times before on this forum.

…

Yep - It is hard to see and witness thoughtful threads, albeit with some divisiveness, get deleted out of hand… seemingly on a whim.

Utterly disrespectful and unethical.

It is a forum that is a business, so it is not an enterprise rooted in, or devoted to, ethics.

Unless you are a libertarian, neo-liberal or similar, ethics can be applied to business dealings: "rooted in" or "devoted to" is a bit of a straw man wrt @noske’s post. People have different ethics of course, so there’s room for debate there.

I suppose so.
But AG is a business, and they can run it and their forum any way that they see fit.

if it was a forum with the stated purpose of audio with fair and varied representation, then they would not likely trim the outline voices.

As it is a business that owns the forum, they are more driven by capitalist theories than libertarian, communist or socialist perspectives. (IME)
Of course I could be wrong, but that is my impression.

@jerryg123 - which one are you referring to as the nasty little bugger?

I am somewhat perplexed as to how another forum can generate such vexation.

@jerryg123 - well @noske did not overtly call Americans idiots… it was a nuanced comment.

There is something that I find off putting with having a laugh track to tell one when the funny parts happened.

The movie Kenny, about a fellow working for the porta-potty company “Spash Down”, is a good example of nuanced humour.

holmz I have moved on, have you?

Yeah literally we have moved on!

@noske is about 9 hours ahead of your time zone, and I am an even 1/2 day ahead.

We buy hifi for several reasons, what it sounds like, what it looks like, what it feels like and for some how it measures. Most use a combination with one factor often taking precedence.

Or just to lord it over others… to be used as a social signalling tool.

laoman ​​​​@holmz Unfortunately, this is sometimes true. As a commercial real estate appraiser, I was chosen to appraise high value homes in 1986-7 in Malibu, Rolling Hills Estates, Beverly Hills, Bradbury, etc

They probably should have consider naming Malibu after the Bradbury book F451…

Usually when I see the blue VUs it is a statement peice.

And a TT and tube amps are also what people used before FB in order to signal that they had reached a level of disposable income.

TV shows and movies often show this, and it speaks volumes.

Fleschler I find that sad

Sad or not, it is a fact. People like to signal to others.

And it is easy with some gear to do that pretty effectively.

A stack of grey NAD gear can sound pretty good, but it doesn’t have the pull that high $ gear does for making a statement.

ARC also makes a pretty strong statement… but it generally sounds good.

Cable risers also make a statement, but I would personally avoid them in my system.

I haven’t read any of Lewis’ work.

When someone is seated at the piano, we are generally not debating whether person A is hearing a piano and person B is hearing an organ or a flute. There is little debate and imagination as to a piano being a real thing, and its sound being a real thing.

They do imagine it. Our senses are imaginary at a very basic level. That’s why a machine doesn’t replicate what we “hear.

And hence the measurements tell us how closely a playback of say a piano sounds like, say… a real piano.

We do not care whether person B hears a piano sounding like flute, we only care that it is replicated correctly.

To talk about brains and personal experiences is delving into psychology and neuroscience, whereas the playback system is electromechanical. We have to draw the line somewhere.

To talk about subjective differences in hearing, is burying one’s head in the sand as to the reality of what is happening.
That thinking belongs in a course on philosophy and not in engineering or physics, and hence it belongs in a coffee house and not in an audio shop or engineering laboratory.

if you need measurements to tell a piano from a flute, then I don’t know what to tell you… Maybe take on another hobby?

Sorry @thyname but I am person A in the above scenario. so I cannot speak to what the person B’s hearing.

Maybe take it up with @prof  or @cd318 
I think they both were responding to your posts earlier, and my comments stemmed from those.

This one of their’s was a pearler.

Now it would appear as if all of those differences were largely in our imaginations and have now become as irrelevant as the use of leeches has in healing the sick.

again - I don’t care how you hear, or what you hear… I just want whatever I play to sound like the recorded sound. 

Peter Comeau of IAG says that he begins with the science (flat frequency response etc) and then finishes by fine tuning by ear.

@cd318 yeah I guess that is mirrored on the consumer end with me using the measurements to weed out things.
If the cabinet resonates, or the distortion is high, or it compresses, or it has a bad pattern, then there is not a great reason to seek out listening.

I liked the part where he talked about getting rid if the things that are wrong.

@djones51 

Definition of transparent

 

1a(1): having the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are seen clearly : PELLUCID

(2): allowing the passage of a specified form of radiation (such as X-rays or ultraviolet light)

b: fine or sheer enough to be seen through : DIAPHANOUS

2a: free from pretense or deceit : FRANK

b: easily detected or seen through : OBVIOUS

c: readily understood

d: characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices

@thyname what do the $1k, $10k, more $k do extra?

It is possible that there are things like pre ringing that may be happening which help the SINAD, but makes transient response differ.

So if that is happening, then a different test than what is done on ASR would be needed. Or the cheap ones and costly ones are the same, but we think that they are not.
We sort of need a way to determine:

1. whether they output the same, or if the output differs
2. and then one can discuss which sounds better.

We have not seemed to pass step #1 so far.
If we believe that step #2 is true, then figuring step #1 is still of some value (IMO).

@thyname a DAC needs a DAC chip and a few other chips, case, power, etc.

The cost of gasoline and DAC chips seem to have tracked in price increases over the last couple of years. As well as food and valve/tube prices.

Yeah @djones51 speakers usually seem to make more of a difference than the DAC for me.
Maybe my ears are not so good as the DACs and CD players all seem to sound similar… whereas the volume knob and the speakers do more.

Hmmmm….. show me YOUR room treatment and I will never argue with you again 

Today.

… What exactly are Amir's instruments incapable of measuring that you can hear?

I can picture some of the filter roll off and preringing in a DAC might be something that’s not covered in a SINAD of a tone, or 2 tone measurement.

prof  soundstage, imaging, and note decay, and that's just off the top of my head.

Decay is likely rolled up in impulse response.
Sound stage (left/right) might be rolled up on crosstalk.
Fore/aft is probably wrapped up in Klipple measurements for speakers.

But imaging is something that happens in the head.

Yup. Stare on those graphs, and you will know exactly how it will sound. This way, one can “audition” and compare dozens of DACs from the comfort of their home without lifting a finger or spending any money 🙄🤦‍♂️

Pretty much… if we see a spray of harmonics it tells us a lot.
We may not know how good it will sound, but it can certainly tell us how bad it should sound.

Do you find it perplexing that most of the equipment that many seem to like listening to have a similar harmonic structure, and that the harmonics are generally low… and that they also measure pretty good?

Or why is there a correlation?

Is it just luck?

@thyname We can compare this to praying, versus going to the doctor.
Most people still go to the doctor… so maybe the lord works in mysterious ways both in medicine as well as in electronics.

It is not like the sound comes from magic. There is some engineering that people have done to reveal the things we call refer to secularly as theory.

It is not a parallel universe, or tribal thing, unless we make it so. The science and the listening pleasure seem largely correlated and causal.

But there is also the psychological element of knowing that <high buck item> should sound better than some other <low buck> item.

Not understanding graphs and measurement is OK. One can avoid them, and there is no reason to hate them or find contempt/disgust in people that find them useful.

the funniest ASR guys are the ones who love vinyl but feel the need to qualify every statement about records or turntables with "look, i know it's not as good as digital, yes i understand that objectively i deserve to be criticized for it, but..." because they're scared of being cyberbullied by computer nerds. no self respect 😂

LPs make for a circular argument then.

Oh gawd… not again.

You did not discuss about my point on how the sound travels through our ears canals, to the cochlea and finally to the brain which analyzes it - which we define as music or sound. Now if you could explain that process and how it is similar in all human beings - we all will stand to gain a lot. Please go ahead with your explanation - I am all ears.

You could take a hundred people and probably throw some dogs.cats, a few bats and an elephant, and maybe even a cobra in. And no matter their ear structure they would be listening to the same thing, and those that can communicate would know it as the same song.
Even the cobra knows the Indian flute, and does not come out of the basket to the sound heavy metal or dub step.

One pretty much can use a microphone to evaluate the sound pressure field, much the same way that they are used to get the sounds onto the LP or CD in the first place.

holmz : why do you ask? What are you trying to convey?

 

I have no turntable. Clearly stated under my system here. Pictures, descriptions and all. What about yours? The only thing I see in your picture is you proudly displaying lump cords

@thyname most of posts have a repetition to them that make them sound like a broken record.

I am wondering how you arrived there without having the opportunity to know what a broken record sounds like? 😂

@thyname don’t worry, let’s just skip it.

I hit the sofa after the bike ride.
And I’ll get back on the bike saddle again today.