Well having done series testing of the Spectral, way back when I had hearing to around 17 khz, it was simply straightwire with gain. No one I knew could hear me switch it in and out. I would argue it was totally transparent SOTA or not. Audibly it was SOTA. As the current saying goes.....fight me on that!
But the specs he showed are not transparent, nor SOTA. And THAT is the point! That the amp is perfectly fine is really immaterial. In fact, all of the spec fluff in the first half of the paper is immaterial.
Is it immaterial? If you cannot hear it, how is it a problem? I can assure you that you cannot hear it. Would I swap it for a Purifi? Sure, would be a better choice, but it was a respected old brand that is audibly un-hearable. BTW, the one I tested was actually the original DMA-50 with slightly lesser specs. Lots of other A or A/B class amps couldn't really keep the FR flat like the Spectral could. DC-to-1 mhz. Several other SS amps were audible in my testing.
The problem is not the amp, nor its performance. The point is that for experiments his claim is that one should use equipment:
The specs he gives for his amp certainly do not qualify, yet he sees no problem there? What gives?
No, you can't, obviously, That's precisely why is immaterial. Nowhere in the paper does he prove that his so-called high-end system is actually necessary to get these test results.
Sorry Voodooless, I believe that in the case of the study that is the subject of this thread, Professor Kunhur is obviously mistaken, and that is a quite common exemple of tunnel vision and I am glad that it is flagged as it should be. I do however don't find the measurments addition to the state of the knowledge useless, they may have an interest altough It is obvious that they have nothing to do with audibility and I do hope that maybe an analysis like Amir has done trigger some more from the AES or other influencial people in the field of Audio engineering and research, it is an analysis that is definitely flawed, but not fully useless in the long term,I think, because when someone can take someone work, and analyse it and find problem with it, generally speaking, the knowledge advance. It is no excuse to make false claim. Just saying that understanding why some metric don't matter, is also knowledge as understanding why some metric matter, and I may sound like I defend this paper, I wish it don't come across that way but I do think there is positive that can come out of it if as it is being done here, knowledgeable people take the time to analyze and counterprove. It still was measurement based and it is to me not completely uninteresting to know that these measured differences exist even if it's falsely claim it has an impact on audibility. Now to Y'all opinions may differ on this and it's OK.Has anyone read his latest paper: http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~kunchur/papers/Stereo-height--Kunchur.pdf ?
High-end Amplifier with 80 SINAD and 97dB SNR? Really? That is hardly transparent, nor SOTO.
Edit: to be fair, the Spectral also specs better numbers than 0.01%. But that's not the point. The point is that he thinks these numbers are fine for a high-end amplifier.
The citation goes to the very paper the video is about, so total bullshit
uhuh...
The DAC used is a:
If the review of the series 1 is anything to go by, this thing is also not very transparent...
Speakers are not super special
Stereophile measured the D2R, which looks similar. Horizontal off-axis is okay, vertical though is a total mess.
kudos for some room treatment.
So why then use sub-par components?
So like 99% of all recorded music...? And I'm pretty sure the high-end folk will still make the exact same claims with those recordings.
Okay, now to the important part:
Well duh! A trumpet is a handheld device that you blow into. Usually, people that play the trumpet are standing up. Just by the fact that I hear I trumpet, my mind already knows that the sound is coming from higher up
No, it proves absolutely nothing! At best it proved that in general people know where certain sounds come from. I don't even need a so called high-end playback system for any of this.
For this experiment to be actually useful, you would need to record these instruments at actual different places, so also places where the listener would not expect the sound to be. Only then you can start to make some decent conclusions.
This man is a disgrace to science!
Whether I believe it or not the designer of the DMA50, Demian Martin, a member here, said the high bandwidth wasn't a design goal. He said a design goal was that an amp needed to let go of a signal as quickly as it created it. Not all designs did at the time. I don't know how they determined that in those days, but he said they found the high bandwidth aided in that aspect. It became part of the marketing of Spectral of course. Maybe nothing to it. In any case their gear was utterly transparent to the human listener. An amp need do nothing more.
To tell the truth I played around with Distort and my Audeze's and I had to get down to 75 SINAD to tell a big degrading difference.
That paper is the basis of the premise that a high-end system is needed to hear height in a 2 way speaker system, so if the paper of the video is non-sense, the premise in this paper is as well.
What knowledge does he add that was not known before with this paper?
I am. So what? It's a scientific paper, backed by a university. It should not have these obvious errors.
I did not make the claim that is was. He made that claim. In fact half of the paper talks about how good your system must be in order to do this experiment. Not a single shred of evidence was given for any of it.
I said they were fine.. It was an observation, not a rejection.
Are you kidding me? This thing is so full of logical errors, fallacies, and leaps of faith that it's not even funny.
You're totally missing the point. This is not about the perception of height, and if it actually exists or not. It's about the method he used to reach the conclusion that it does. It's totally invalid. You just can't come to that conclusion based on the experiments he did. It's totally obvoius (well, not to you evidently).
You should not be this wrong as somebody in that capacity. Sorry, that just doesn't fly...
OK, I guess I don't put the same amount of importance on things like that. Comon, he says you need a good system to hear that, he shows that he has a good system, Now you need "evidence and proof" That you need a good system? An get all inflamed that he dare say something like that without proving it? please, if it's not nitpicking I don't know what it is. Try to portray a 3D mix on your Bluetooth beach speakers...
Things like what?
Yes! How is that even a discussion point? What constitutes a "good" system? What parameters are important? Why is that? When becomes a system good enough?
That's obviously a mono setup. The premise was about a 2-speaker setup.
No, I don't think it's the most important thing that I want to know, so we disagree and it's ok. If by reading this paper what you where looking for as a conclusion was system buying recommendations, I fully understand that it offers very little. I feel the weight you put in the system in use in the whole paper is not what I get from this.
Because while you will hear something different at different heights in the recording they don't translate at all into how our ears hear height. For every accidental modification that might sound a different height are several more that don't or that sound opposite of reality. We hear height based upon modification of FR versus straight ahead hearing. With a microphone setup using two microphones at the same level no such info gets encoded. It is not there to hear. Some odd frequency aberrations might sound like a height difference, but their relationship with reality is random.
So what's the most important thing to you?
Well, all of those You-tubers and reviewers citing these so-called papers use them as buying recommendations...
It's his claim that it's important! Not mine. You can't just make such a claim without any evidence.
Unless the microphones have ears, perhaps
e.g. the KU-100, but I did not find much of it actually making it thru on recordings done with it tho due to how generic the HRTFs are. But if you listen to such recordings on a set of speakers in the near field it turns the soundstage into a psychedelic funhouse mirror due to one‘s own HRTFs. Maybe thats what you would hear if you fell into a black hole listening to music. But it brings up the question if one could even get true height out of a two-channel speaker system? I presume if one had XTC and the proper convolution filters in place one could. Still to see such a thing researched with a run of the mill 2-channel setup sans any real controls just shows how little he really understands audio, or experiments for that matter. Now whether that is a bug or a feature is another question.
I think my points where clear enough as they are. Have a good day, I am starting mine.
