After 6 months has the forum evolved to plan?

[Thomas savage]

This is one of our members keeping upto date with ASR on her mobile...

 

[Don Hills]

I would see an issue in that there is a general resistance by many members to accepting that more needs to be known about what allows sound reproduction to be satisfying or not, for various people. An air of "we know it all, already!" comes through - and that would stop many people participating; and many posts are never made, because it would stir up too much antagonism.

Rather than saying "we know it all, already!", we should be saying "You could be right. If you just want to express your opinion, fine. But if you want us to believe you, provide some proof other than your say-so. Telling us to "just listen for ouselves" is not proof."

Here's a job for you Frank...
You have a system that is not satisfying in some way.
You make a change that improves your satisfaction.
Now provide evidence (measurement) that this satisfaction improvement was due to a change in the sound waveform presented to your ears. It's OK if the difference is somewhat smaller than generally accepted audible thresholds. A change that makes no difference at all is still worth doing if it reliably provides a satisfaction improvement for people who try it. I'm pretty sure that most people would be more satisfied when listening to speakers finished in a high gloss piano lacquer finish than ones left unpainted.

The larger project here is to find ways to reliably identify and quantify (measure) any real differences that cause you to believe one system sounds different to / better than another. For example, there's an insistence in some quarters that bit identical files created by ripping using different quality power supplies (or copied from place to place using different methods) sound different when reproduced. No-one has yet produced physical results showing any actual differences. Either we aren't making the right measurements or the differences don't really exist. We need a measurement process that will reliably identify if any difference at all exists, measured as close to our ears as possible. (The subjective effect of any measured difference is a harder problem to solve.) This process needs to be sensitive, repeatable and have no methodological flaws. As Amir has shown, this is harder than it appears. I doubt that even such proof will satisfy a hard-core believer, but at least we'll be setting a bar to be met.

 

[fas42]

The larger project here is to find ways to reliably identify and quantify (measure) any real differences that cause you to believe one system sounds different to / better than another. For example, there's an insistence in some quarters that bit identical files created by ripping using different quality power supplies (or copied from place to place using different methods) sound different when reproduced. No-one has yet produced physical results showing any actual differences. Either we aren't making the right measurements or the differences don't really exist. We need a measurement process that will reliably identify if any difference at all exists, measured as close to our ears as possible. (The subjective effect of any measured difference is a harder problem to solve.) This process needs to be sensitive, repeatable and have no methodological flaws. As Amir has shown, this is harder than it appears. I doubt that even such proof will satisfy a hard-core believer, but at least we'll be setting a bar to be met.

This is the key - I haven't made the sort of measurements you mentioned earlier in your post, because it would be hard to extract, point to the precise areas in the waveform where the difference makes all the difference ; it would be in the resolution of the fine detail within the waveform, especially where the peaks of the main envelope are quite strong.

Something like the program DiffMaker would be perfect, but unfortunately that single implementation is far too unfinished, it has severe bugs and just doesn't work the way it should - the concept is excellent; but I tried feeding it waveforms which I had distorted in a very precise way, and its analysis was completely wrong. An incompetent tool is worse than useless - someone needs to do a better version ...

 

[amirm]

Diffmaker is indeed badly broken. Wish someone would take on updating and supporting it.

 

[krabapple]

I was thinking it was a bit quiet on the technical front.

LOL.

 

[krabapple]

I looked up evolution just now.

The consensus seems to be that evolution has no plan at its core, it just goes with whatever mutants survive.

"Gravity has no plan at its core, it just goes with whatever has more mass. "

That's what happens when you anthropomorphize natural phenomena.

Anyway , fun fact: on some branches of the tree of life, evolution has resulted in loss of function. Maybe that's what's happening here.

 

[krabapple]

(It started going downhill when you fired AJ)

 

[Thomas savage]

"Gravity has no plan at its core, it just goes with whatever has more mass. "

That's what happens when you anthropomorphize natural phenomena.

Anyway , fun fact: on some branches of the tree of life, evolution has resulted in loss of function. Maybe that's what's happening here.

#qualityhate

 

[Thomas savage]

(It started going downhill when you fired AJ)

He's PPv now...,

 

[amirm]

(It started going downhill when you fired AJ)

Rolling downhill takes a lot more energy than the other way around! So nothing wrong with that.

 

[NorthSky]

 

[fas42]

Plus, Steve just had a dig at the place ...

 

[Thomas savage]

Plus, Steve just had a dig at the place ...

Steve who??

 

[fas42]

The other founder of the other place ...

 

[NorthSky]

Yeah Thomas; you're a disaster.

 

[Thomas savage]

Yeah Thomas; you're a disaster.

I have dished out a few tremors in my time

 

[NorthSky]

I was just kidding.

 

[dallasjustice]

Steve says our forum is a "dismal failure."
http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...g-to-yourself!&p=413883&viewfull=1#post413883

 

[RayDunzl]

Steve says our forum is a "dismal failure."

I saw that.

What's the metric?

 

[dallasjustice]

I saw that.

What's the metric?

Just trust your ears. That's all you need.