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Message to golden-eared audiophiles posting at ASR for the first time...

BDWoody

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pkane

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A classic logic fallacy. You have a bias with no knowledge of my experience but insist I am wrong. The proper response to being skeptical is, "I have not experienced that"

Your experience, whatever it might be, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that everything you've posted so far is not scientific evidence in any sense of the word. Repeating anecdotes over and over again doesn't magically turn them into evidence, it just makes it plainly obvious that you don't understand how science is done.

Oh, and just because someone claims the experience of running a two minute mile doesn't stop me from knowing that it's BS, even if I have not experienced it myself.
 

SIY

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Just to make clear, you're saying you know which amp levimax used in the DBT or which one is designed properly and doesn't distort?
I can't make that out of your post.
I answered the question you asked.
 

BDWoody

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You have a belief the current limited measurements are somehow comprehensive.

You keep throwing that out as if that's what anyone is saying. It's not.

What is limited is the 'evidence' being provided that counters the base of understanding of what *should* be potentially audible.

Asking for evidence of the unlikely shouldn't be a surprise, nor should it be offensive.

When you can provide more support, please do so. Otherwise, repeating the same unsupported claims isn't going to advance anything but the number of reports I get.
 

Killingbeans

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A classic logic fallacy. You have a bias with no knowledge of my experience but insist I am wrong.

No. We are insisting that non of us (including you) can know for sure. Not until the experience is repeated/descibed in a way that filters out any bias. Both yours and ours.

The proper response to being skeptical is, "I have not experienced that"

What? Are you sceptical of anything you haven't experienced yourself? I've never been to Ayers Rock, but I'm not skeptical about a huge sandstone formation existing in the middle of Australia ;)
 

Grumple

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Hi,

After reading the latest posts, the conclusion is quite simple. There are a lot of people having time to waste...
110 pages of posts that can be summed up in a few lines that would go like this more or less :

"I like this device but I do not like this other one.
- They both have the same measures.
- I know, but I hear differences.
- That cannot be.
- Maybe, but I hear a difference between those devices.
- Then your ears need to be siringed.
- Yes but I hear a difference.
- Then your testing has not been done properley.
- Yes, but I hear a difference.
- You are not a scientist.
- Do I need to be scientist to hear a difference ?
- You need to give proof that you hear a difference.
- Simple. Here is proof : I hear a difference.
- That's only proof you're stupid because you believe in things that do not exist".

Did I forget something ?
You haven't forgotten anything because you have misconstrued what people are saying. Nobody (well nobody who should be taken seriously) is saying that person X does not hear a difference. We can all "hear" a difference. The point is your, mine, their hearing is flawed and easily mistaken. So "hearing" a difference is no proof of a difference existing.
 

DanielT

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killdozzer

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A fascinating read! I'm almost amazed it went on for 69 pages. To be fair, not all the questions in the first post hit the spot. It's not like if you prove some are well designed, all of a sudden those poorly designed become a black swan, I mean there are quite a few. Who knows, maybe an average audiophile would even recognize those properly designed as "not the real deal and a suck up to the modern times". ;)

Anyway, the thread just made me have more confidence in the friend who first told me this, which is always nice. It again boils down to properly designed + properly used. Even if you push a properly designed one to its upper limits it might start to "sound" and not necessarily in a way that'll immediately make you wanna turn the volume down.

Another thing, from what I read, obviously a speaker can make the tube amp "sound" (implying a bad match, meaning that neither will "sound" on its own, but they will in a match), right?

LE: oh, sorry for off topic, I'll stop with it.
 

Spkrdctr

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I have stated in my experience that most recordings do not cause this adverse sound.
I have not seen that in your posts before, but that is just me. Since it is obvious on a few recordings and not others, that pretty much tells you that it is the recording causing the problem. UNLESS, you have an intermittent problem somewhere in your equipment. If a piece of equipment is putting out a boosted 3khz signal, it should do it all the time if not broken. I think you have figured out in a rough way that it is the recordings.

Now, why do you have some that do that and others don't? Heck if I know, recording engineers do whatever they want and we are usually none the wiser. But, I have to say good catch! I would steer away from those few recordings as something was intentionally done or accidently done and it went all the way to the final customer with no one catching it, unless it was on purpose.
 
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levimax

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You got my interest. In your opinion, how do you explain the fact that 60yo tube didn't sound different? Were the tubes themselves 60yo? Did you have means to measure how much power was "demanded" from the amps?

Tubes supposedly have a certain sound (although a good friend of mine told me this could be avoided if implemented properly, he said you COULD make a tube amp with no sound signature), so I guess my next question is, if you don't mind disclosing, what was the brand and make of the tube amp?
It was the Dynaco ST 70 tested by Amir, you can find the test on this site. I used the "good channel" (driver tube was weak in one channel which I discovered after Amir sent it back) which had SINAD of 63 with fairly flat FR (-0.5 db @ 20 Khz). The SS amp was a Neurochrome Mod 86 with SINAD > 100. The amps sounded quite different to me until level matched at which point all the differences disappeared.

In my opinion I could not hear a differences because unlike some "effects box" tube amps with very high distortion and very high internal resistance the Dynaco ST 70 was designed to be a "Hi-Fi" amp and with 0.7 ohm internal resistance, flat frequency response, and distortion of less than 0.1% it is pretty much transparent to me at the listening position. Where it did fall down was "noise" which I could hear a difference if I put my ear next to the drivers but not at the listening position.
 

5-pot-fan

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Response to tvrgeek post #2101 and subsequent - and with some trepidation!

I am new to this forum, but have read many of the posts on it during the last 8 weeks and have had some of my previously-held opinions confirmed/changed/queried. All to the good!
I accept it's ethos and views, and will be using the information provided by many posters about the relative importance of the room and it's treatment as I attempt to improve my own system (hardware+software+room).
To emphasize – this is the most useful forum about hifi that I have found and I hope to continue learning from it.

BUT: - and I have given this some consideration before posting-

Tvrgeek posted about his own experiences (post #2101 and later) and I can understand the approach taken by subsequent replies, that (as I understand it) if you can't measure it, it does not exist outside one's own head.
It seems to me that he asked whether there might be some additional measurements, of some additional factors, so far unimagined (I assume) that we should be considering when making decisions based to a significant extent on the types of measurement undertaken and discussed in this forum.

Yes, I accept that if 1 item such as a DAC is indistinguishable from another one in the lab, and that the energy reaching the loudspeaker is the same between 2 such bits of kit, then the loudspeaker should behave identically, given no change in the surroundings.

Yes, I accept the current position regarding psychoacoustics and I have experienced some such effects myself (with due embarrasment).

Not much more than 100 years ago we knew nothing about quantum effects, it is less than 100 years since we knew anything about other galaxies, and even less since dark matter/energy became a scientifically acceptable subject. Is it inconceivable that we have more to discover about sound and how we perceive it?

Are double-blind tests the only way we can proceed to examine this issue? The expense and practicalities make it (almost) too easy to avoid by both sides of the argument.

Can tvrgeek offer any practical suggestions?

Can anyone propose a way of using something like REW + a specific microphone, with other stipulated parameters, to record the sound? For example, someone states they hear a harshness when DAC A is in use which appears not to be there when DAC B is in use - so record it.
If a recording were made of these 2 circumstances, within a set of accepted parameters, could anything useful be learned?
Has this approach already been tried, on a wide enough basis (and found wanting)?
Has the question been authoritatively answered, or, perhaps, debated to death elsewhere?

Not too many brickbats, please, but if any of the questions above are worth answering fire away!
 

killdozzer

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It was the Dynaco ST 70 tested by Amir, you can find the test on this site. I used the "good channel" (driver tube was weak in one channel which I discovered after Amir sent it back) which had SINAD of 63 with fairly flat FR (-0.5 db @ 20 Khz). The SS amp was a Neurochrome Mod 86 with SINAD > 100. The amps sounded quite different to me until level matched at which point all the differences disappeared.

In my opinion I could not hear a differences because unlike some "effects box" tube amps with very high distortion and very high internal resistance the Dynaco ST 70 was designed to be a "Hi-Fi" amp and with 0.7 ohm internal resistance, flat frequency response, and distortion of less than 0.1% it is pretty much transparent to me at the listening position. Where it did fall down was "noise" which I could hear a difference if I put my ear next to the drivers but not at the listening position.
Thank you. BD linked it, I'm going through the whole thread. It's interesting. I'm trying to find what would happen if the tube amp is flat and a good design, but you have some old speakers with big impedance swings, but you're not pushing the amp to its limits. Would output still tend to follow the impedance curve?
 

levimax

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Thank you. BD linked it, I'm going through the whole thread. It's interesting. I'm trying to find what would happen if the tube amp is flat and a good design, but you have some old speakers with big impedance swings, but you're not pushing the amp to its limits. Would output still tend to follow the impedance curve?
The higher the internal resistance the more the FR will change with speaker impedance swings, this is independent of amp output. Some no feedback SET tube amps have 5 ohms of internal resistance which will definitely have more FR variation than a push pull feedback design like the ST 70 with ~0.7 ohms. Most SS amps have vanishingly low internal resistance.
 

rdenney

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Be skeptical. That is a good thing, but that is not what you are doing. All you are doing is trying to prove your bias by making demands you know damn well are impossible. A classic logic fallacy. You have a bias with no knowledge of my experience but insist I am wrong. The proper response to being skeptical is, "I have not experienced that"

I gave you data. Specifics:
I have offered several suggestions of measurements that could be made. Relevant or not I do not know.
I have identified the frequency range were the differences I am hearing show up. If you do some research, that band is discussed a lot by recording engineers. It happens to coincide with our hearing sensitivity curves. There may be others or not, this is the one that bothers me. It also bothers my wife.
I have identified specific recordings where I hear the differences. Maybe you should listen the them. You may discover something yourself.
I have stated in my experience that most recordings do not cause this adverse sound.

You have a belief the current limited measurements are somehow comprehensive. If you wish to believe the world is flat, that is your choice.
I am interested in moving the science forward.
It seems to me you are asking this entire forum to be skeptical of conclusions most here have drawn on the basis of conducted experiments, while you are unwilling to be skeptical of your own sighted and uncontrolled test. This has been said to you without the slightest acknowledge so many times that I conclude you are arguing in bad faith, and simply trying to cause trouble.

Lots of people here own the Topping DAC you complain about, yet they do not have those complaints and report different experience. Somebody's wrong. By "wrong", I don't mean dishonest (though have my doubts, given your obstinance and unwillingness to listen to what people are saying), I mean something wrong with your setup (with "wrong" being outside the intended operational enveloped of the device) or with the device you bought. It is arrogant and unscientific of you to assume everyone else is guilty of what you accuse them of being when you demonstrate no willingness to dig into the situation to explain your perceptions, rather than expecting others to do it for you.

If you can identify the frequency range causing problems, then measure the frequency response and report findings. I've already pointed you to a low-cost way of doing that. REW will sweep it and report a range of useful measurements. If those don't identify a problem, then you should be even more skeptical of your own perceptions. REW is free, and even the sound card interface in a laptop would be good enough to measure a fault as big and obvious as you describe. I used a similar setup to perform a range of testing on a tape deck, so I'm not talking out of my posterior.

Rick "seeing no interest in data at all" Denney
 

rdenney

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...Tvrgeek posted about his own experiences (post #2101 and later) and I can understand the approach taken by subsequent replies, that (as I understand it) if you can't measure it, it probably does not exist outside one's own head.
...
Fixed that for you. When something has a high probability of being true based on extensive past measurements and wide experience, the person claiming the opposite carries the burden of evidence.

It's not that hard with DACs to conduct blind testing. As mentioned above, one can simply feed a signal from the DAC's output into an ADC to redigitized it, and then compared the resulting recordings to identify differences. One can also do a loopback test of the DAC and ADC using REW, trying different DACs with the same ADC to look for differences. The better the ADC, the lower the distortion/noise threshold in the DAC that will be detected, but if something makes one's ears hurt in the next room, there must be a severe fault. One can compare the DAC that causes the problem with one that doesn't using the troublesome recording, and identify what is different.

Rick "for posterity; coming to the conclusion that TVRGeek is just trying to make trouble" Denney
 

JRS

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Response to tvrgeek post #2101 and subsequent - and with some trepidation!

I am new to this forum, but have read many of the posts on it during the last 8 weeks and have had some of my previously-held opinions confirmed/changed/queried. All to the good!
I accept it's ethos and views, and will be using the information provided by many posters about the relative importance of the room and it's treatment as I attempt to improve my own system (hardware+software+room).
To emphasize – this is the most useful forum about hifi that I have found and I hope to continue learning from it.

BUT: - and I have given this some consideration before posting-

Tvrgeek posted about his own experiences (post #2101 and later) and I can understand the approach taken by subsequent replies, that (as I understand it) if you can't measure it, it does not exist outside one's own head.
It seems to me that he asked whether there might be some additional measurements, of some additional factors, so far unimagined (I assume) that we should be considering when making decisions based to a significant extent on the types of measurement undertaken and discussed in this forum.

Yes, I accept that if 1 item such as a DAC is indistinguishable from another one in the lab, and that the energy reaching the loudspeaker is the same between 2 such bits of kit, then the loudspeaker should behave identically, given no change in the surroundings.

Yes, I accept the current position regarding psychoacoustics and I have experienced some such effects myself (with due embarrasment).

Not much more than 100 years ago we knew nothing about quantum effects, it is less than 100 years since we knew anything about other galaxies, and even less since dark matter/energy became a scientifically acceptable subject. Is it inconceivable that we have more to discover about sound and how we perceive it?

Are double-blind tests the only way we can proceed to examine this issue? The expense and practicalities make it (almost) too easy to avoid by both sides of the argument.

Can tvrgeek offer any practical suggestions?

Can anyone propose a way of using something like REW + a specific microphone, with other stipulated parameters, to record the sound? For example, someone states they hear a harshness when DAC A is in use which appears not to be there when DAC B is in use - so record it.
If a recording were made of these 2 circumstances, within a set of accepted parameters, could anything useful be learned?
Has this approach already been tried, on a wide enough basis (and found wanting)?
Has the question been authoritatively answered, or, perhaps, debated to death elsewhere?

Not too many brickbats, please, but if any of the questions above are worth answering fire away!
You raise some interesting points, chiefly that the usual measurements of THD, IM and perhaps a few more esoteric forms such as TIM may not completely explain the story, insofar as it relies on the assumption that systems are mostly linear, and the most significant errors can be captured in frequency and phase deviations occurring in amplification and transduction, the latter being moving energy from electrical to mechanical forms in speakers and phonograph cartridges (IMO transduction could also embrace conversion not just in energy but also in forms of information, that is from digital to analog waveforms).

The non-linear errors that introduce new waveforms are assumed to consist entirely of IM and THD, which can be easily measured. That they may not tell the entire story is the consistent observation that we are not annoyed by levels as high as several percent in the case of THD, and even higher when the music is loud. But there are some irritating exceptions as postulated by Geddes in this paper and tested in this one. A forum discussion can be found here and more papers on his website at this link.

I'm not at all qualified to comment on the accuracy of these claims, but they are interesting and curiously largely ignored. Whether that is because subsequent research has shown them to be of trivial magnitude and therefore inconsequential, or whether they are an inconvenient truth I can't say. I just mention this in passing as your comments stimulated my recollection of the debate, but it may be worth pursuing in your quest to identify the "missing" measurements. So have a look at Geddes papers, in particular Part 2 which discusses the GedLee (the two authors, Geddes and Lee combined) metric.
 

killdozzer

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I don't think he's out to make trouble. I think he's just taking the scepticism personally. Seeing accusations and obstinance where there is non.
Not only that, but these forum debates where you go against the tide (which is not always desirable) tend to look like playing a tennis match with you on one side of the court with your one racket and 50 people on the other side with 50 balls and 50 rackets. Even if they throw you soft balls, you'll go mad after awhile.
 
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