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How we could finally pin down flowery audiophile subjective descriptions

MattHooper

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Your entire set of replies to me was just a giant straw man.

Except, you don't explain why. You can make mere assertions, or actually reply to arguments. It's up to you.

As to strawmen, see the following:

There is subjectivity and objectivity. Look them up.

You wanna believe in magic? Fine. But I have bad news for you. You're on the wrong site.

Of course there isn't one single thing in what I've written that suggests I "believe in magic." (In fact I have done plenty of blind testing over the years
of my equipment, and even posted results on the forum. How about you?)

You can either interact honestly with what someone writes..or not. Again..up to you.


The OP asked for universally accepted descriptions, and ASR does it... EVERY TIME Amir shows test results. Specs are universally accepted descriptors for what the amp is doing (ergo what we're hearing) and good specs the definition of high fidelity. FULL STOP.

I was addressing what you wrote, not the OP. You were making poorly constructed arguments.

The rest is just audiophool nonsense. No one will hear what the OP hears because we don't have his brain/bias, his ears, his system, or his room.

When producing a TV series the creatives "don't have the brain/ears/system/room" of every viewer. Does that entail that human perception is so chaotically variable that they may as well give up writing dialogue, music and making sound effects because "who KNOWS what people will hear?"

If you don't think that question is pertinent to what you wrote...think about it again. Or...please explain why it isn't.

There is no point is trying to standardize subjectivity simply because it can't be done. If you need a link to those definition please ask.

Have you ever heard of musical notation? (Ever read a musical score? See any measurements in there?)

In any case, it's a red herring, I was addressing the fact your arguments rely on an indefensible level of hyperbole.
 
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MattHooper

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How do we know what the f*ck people are talking about?

Usually, from context. If as @MattHooper often describes, we work with people, we get to know what they perceive and how they express themselves. In an audiophile context we may become familiar with certain reviewers—music they listen to, room and equipment they use, comparative perceptions of gear we may have/heard etc. We also know that language is fuzzy, not linear-deterministic. We know that words have multiple meanings. We know that words mean different things when grouped with other words, and so on. And we function with it. Some more, some less. Those who cope less with those aspects of language are often attracted to STEM disciplines, for obvious and perfectly good reasons.

(Emphasis mine)

Yes!

This is a point that is continually missed by people demanding glossaries. It's not that glossaries for subjective terms can't or don't exist, or aren't used between groups of people. But there is a deeper issue inherent in all of this. Glossaries in of themselves are not "necessary." Helpful? Yes. Necessary for any communication of our perceptual impressions? No. We are talking about the basics of human communication. We don't have "glossaries" for every single thing we communicate about all day, but we do our best to describe things to each other, and often do this successfully.

Just like if we see something cool and we do our best to put it in to language to communicate with other people, if we hear something we can try to describe what we hear. Audiophiles are often just trying to put in to language what they hear. Whether a glossary exists or not (and there are some common terms), that is a totally legitimate project - we all do it all the time! And we communicate by adding context, or elaboration. (And in all this I am referring to audible differences!)

So for instance, if I hear two different speakers and I say one sounds "darker" than the other, my audiophile pals will tend to know what I'm getting at. But someone might not be familiar with the term and say "darker? what does that mean? How does it make sense sound could be 'dark? That language must be nonsense!"

That's not what you do when you are trying to communicate or understand a term. If you are actually trying to understand, rather than simply dismiss, you ask: "what do you MEAN by describing speaker A as "darker?" Then I can give more context and elaboration.

So for instance: It's using light as an analogy. Take two different TV displays and dial down the brightness/contrast controls on one of them. The high frequencies - bright areas - will be less vivid, the overall picture somewhat darker, and especially as mixed content comes on screen (e.g. night scenes) there will be a sense of less obvious detail in the darker image. This is what I mean to describe in sonic terms about the difference between two speakers, where one has stronger, more vivid high frequency energy, which "brightens" up the sonic 'image,' especially the high end "highlights" like cymbals etc having more pop, and tends to make detail a bit more vivid and discernible, just like brightening up the high frequencies on a TV set.

Now, some audiophiles will have experienced just such impressions with speakers that vary in high frequency character and "get" what I mean. Someone may not have had a similar experience, but say "Ok, but I see what you are trying to get across." And someone else...perhaps someone just too uncomfortable with imprecision...may say "Nope, sorry, don't get it. Put it in numbers please!"

So at one point it becomes a "you can lead a horse to water...." scenario. Some people will not understand, or will refuse to really try to understand, what one is trying to put in to language. Wuddyagonnado? Ok, you reject the language...fair enough I won't direct it at you, I'll just communicate with others who understand it, or who want to understand.

I don't see any problem if, regarding audio, an individual wants to reject imprecise language for his own use, and look to quantified information. The issue comes when such folks use their own rejection as some blanket condemnation, as if it's of no use to ANYONE (and, often, use this to disparage those who accept the use of subjective description even in time when measurements are not given).

As I've pointed out many times, if some people on this site were truly consistent with their allergy to and rejection of imprecise subjective descriptions, we in my business literally could not work with such people. Thanfully, people are not really consistent with this rejection: they actually use and comprehend subjective, imprecise language every day. We don't always need measurements or glossaries to put together words in different ways, use analogies, build impressions in someone else's mind to communicate. I mean it's possible some here actually try to read fiction books and find it impossible to understand what the author is depicting, but I suspect that's generally not the case ;-)
 
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tuga

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Would anyone (even the initiated) come to the same sound description as Amir based on the plots above ?

Was his description based on the plots above?

Or the results of a listening assessment?
 

gavagai

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I'm sorry. I'm taking the risk of inducing lengthy post but it's to irresistible for me.

The high frequencies - bright areas -

Nope. Frequencies are related to colors, not brightness.
So I don't really understand in what way your analogy is an analogy.
Maybe you have an subjective conception of optics, and an subjective conception of the meaning of the word "analogy ?".
If it's true, how many subjective conceptions must pilled up before one is authorized to say : there's no attempt of communication here. Just a shamanic agitation ?
 

solderdude

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Was his description based on the plots above?

Or the results of a listening assessment?

the results of a listening assessment.

In the end that's what the vast majority of people care about.
 

MattHooper

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I'm sorry. I'm taking the risk of inducing lengthy post but it's to irresistible for me.



Nope. Frequencies are related to colors, not brightness.

You are right, I wrote too fast there, thinking of the brighter white areas (equal proportion of color frequencies). Referring to frequencies would be confusing. Thanks.

Just substitute "brightness" or "luminance." You know what it looks like when a display image is brighter vs darker, or what it looks like when you adjust a TV image brighter vs darker (presumably).


So I don't really understand in what way your analogy is an analogy.
Maybe you have an subjective conception of optics, and an subjective conception of the meaning of the word "analogy ?".
If it's true, how many subjective conceptions must pilled up before one is authorized to say : there's no attempt of communication here. Just a shamanic agitation ?

See above, hope that clarifies.

(And I hope my response wasn't too long :))
 
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kemmler3D

kemmler3D

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I'm sorry. I'm taking the risk of inducing lengthy post but it's to irresistible for me.



Nope. Frequencies are related to colors, not brightness.
So I don't really understand in what way your analogy is an analogy.
Maybe you have an subjective conception of optics, and an subjective conception of the meaning of the word "analogy ?".
If it's true, how many subjective conceptions must pilled up before one is authorized to say : there's no attempt of communication here. Just a shamanic agitation ?

So you're saying you don't or can't understand what someone means when they say "this speaker is too bright"? Or you're saying that this usage is too annoying for you to acknowledge? Or what?

It's still an analogy, by the way, even if wavelength is mapped to intensity when you make the basic mistake of taking the analogy completely literally.

If I say "It's like trying to explain math to spiders" about this thread, will you object because you have 2 legs and not 8?
 

Jim Shaw

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Where would civilization be today if dictionaries were never written, never trusted, never consulted, or outlawed?
Better off?
Further ahead?
Less famine and disease?
Able to communicate across different languages and dialects?

Audiophiles could go to an audio show and just point, gesture, mumble, and grunt.
"Me like this."
"grunt"
[babble]
[rub belly and point to ass...]
[headshake]

Instead of
"This box with holes has a hint of lettuce and old goat milk with a gooey feel and a kick drum aftertaste..."
:)
 

Curvature

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Firstly, he didn't say one cannot speak.
"7. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."

Literal.

We should defer to measurements when performance assessment is the goal. A lot can be done outside of that to speak better, to be more informative, but the object of description is phantasmagorical. It asks for precision and study. It resists casualness.
 

MattHooper

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(Putting aside the implied strawman...I clearly wasn't arguing against glossaries, much less all word definitions, but pointing out we don't *necessarily* need to have specialized glossaries ALREADY in place for everything we want to describe, since we can put together words we already understand to describe something, or we can introduce NEW terms and explain what we mean by the term.)

Where would civilization be today if dictionaries were never written, never trusted, never consulted, or outlawed?

Curious: How do you think words get in to dictionaries in the first place?

There is some phenomenon, and we attempt to put that phenomenon in to words, right? Like: "Here's something we can perceive, we have to use language to describe it, and I'm using this term to refer to that thing. And here are the reasons why this term makes sense."

Exactly what I was attempting when explaining the use of "dark" for an audio description, right? We can make up new words, or we can re-purpose existing terms, or use them in analogies, for our use.

And does some level of imprecision render words useless?

"smooth" "sharp" "dull" "sweet" "bitter" and on and on?

Would you plead ignorance if anyone used such terms...or any of countless such examples...because those words are not measurements, or don't come with measurements, and un-quantified language represents such a subjective morass it's just useless?

How many measurements do you see in dictionary definitions?
 
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kemmler3D

kemmler3D

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But I am. I addressed it in a recent post:

You can't standardize subjectivity, so this is a pointless exercise.


The idea is to measure how often people (in general, large groups of people, not individuals) use subjective terms in relation to specific objective measurements, so that when someone can't or won't refer to measurements, (which is very often, as you know) we could still make a probabilistic / educated guess as to what they actually heard.

What's the problem with that?
 

MattHooper

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You can't standardize subjectivity, so this is a pointless exercise.

Dictionaries would like a word with you...

Look up: "Bitter" "Sweet" "sour" "savory"...

(Oh, I'm sure there are a few more words in the Dictionary showing our standard terms that arose from how things cause different subjective perceptions).
 
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kemmler3D

kemmler3D

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Well, look at it like this. Currently we have lots of people out there listening to speakers and delivering nothing but subjective reviews, including a good handful of "professionals". Year in, year out, we get reviews of potentially interesting speakers with no objective data. It feels like a big waste.

I think most of the people in this thread would agree that these subjective reviews are worthless or nearly so. However, sometimes the only reviews available for a given piece of equipment are subjective.

So, we do this: We take everything a certain reviewer has ever written about speakers, and correlate the language they use to objective measurements where available.

This would yield a model where if said reviewer uses the term (say) "strident", we could (for example) correlate that with a 92% probability that there is excess energy in the 7-9khz range.

Such a tool could also be used to evaluate the credibility of subjective reviewers. If the ML model finds that their use of terms is very consistent across speakers (for example, they always use the words "buttery", "smooth", or "round" to describe bass boost of +2dB or more in the 55-80hz region), we can then put more stock in those reviews, since we will know that their use of certain words consistently refers to real, specific variations in performance.

Conversely, it could be used to discredit reviewers who just make s*** up for their reviews. If their use of language correlates poorly or not at all to objective measurements, we can show (objectively) that their reviews are meaningless.

To me, this would be a little bit useful and very interesting. I'm not really proposing more than that, a mostly-just-interesting study.

It seems that people in this thread are arguing such a tool or study would be worse than nothing, which is odd to me, but I'm still considering the possibility I haven't made the concept clear.

You could also use this technique to find trends in how people in general use these words, but maybe that's less interesting or useful. I think it would work for any corpus where there is enough use of flowery language. That could be "people in general" or for long-standing reviewers, it could be one person.
 
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kemmler3D

kemmler3D

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I simply doubt that you could get any reasonably useful percentage of correlation (much less something in the 90-ish category)
If so, then so much the better, we would have data showing that subjective reviews are unreliable, and HOW unreliable they are.

this whole idea seems to be a crutch that would, for many, many people, destroy any interest or reliance on measurements.
I don't know, it doesn't work at all without the objective measurements, so you could just as well argue that this could be the final subjugation of subjectivity to objectivity! Just think - people would skip reading the review and just wait for the "ML scoring model summary" of the review to come out on ASR. Then if the scores look good, they petition Amir to measure the device for confirmation.

In retaliation, the subjective reviewers would either start publishing measurements to stay in the game, or double down and switch up their vocabulary to throw off the model, which would backfire and kill off their remaining traffic / readership.

At that point, everyone is either publishing measurements, or has become irrelevant once and for all.

Since this site is pretty objectivist-supremacist, I think this idea should be very popular, actually! ;)
 

Galliardist

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Yes, I would limit this to descriptions of speakers, to at least avoid measuring known-zero differences...
But are they zero differences?
I can think of a few things that can cause a difference to be described, and I'll list some scenarios:

1) A difference is audible, but not the difference the reviewer believes they are describing
2) A difference is not audible, but described - the reviewer "hears" and describes the effect of non-audible changes as an audible one
3) A difference is audible, but the reviewer describes it incorrectly, maybe because a non-audible feature is registered as the reason by an uncertain brain
Conversely, it could be used to discredit reviewers who just make s*** up for their reviews. If their use of language correlates poorly or not at all to objective measurements, we can show (objectively) that their reviews are meaningless.
How many reviewers do that though? Their brain processed the input from the ears, along with whatever other inputs there are and whatever experience was deemed relevant - and across several centres in the brain working on different aspects of the music, by current accounts, and created the experience that is described as "hearing" particular aspects of the "sound".

Then again, is the review necessarily meaningless even then? We keep concentrating on the soundwaves. But maybe the bigger speaker, or the one with the traditional look, or the famous brand name, is seen as better but it comes out as a difference in the sound once the brain's finished its processing.

The thing is, this subjective model has been put to the test, albeit informally, by hundreds of thousands of readers down the years. Sure, for some readers it has failed, and these days those people may turn up here. But there must be a lot of cases where the reviewer's opinion has more or less matched that of a lot of readers that have auditioned and bought the same product.

So the subjective model is doing something. Maybe it would be more scientific to understand what it is doing, than to condemn it for not matching up with objective measurements (if indeed it doesn't, for whatever boundaries we put around what the sound waves are doing).
 
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kemmler3D

kemmler3D

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How many reviewers do that though?
Quite a few if you ask the typical ASR poster.

Maybe 'make stuff up' isn't quite right, but the people who are constantly hearing major improvements from using different cables or ethernet switches are definitely just reporting on their subjective experience of placebo effect, not actual audible changes in their system's output. For some product categories, there is simply no doubt to give the benefit of.

Expectation bias has a very well known and understood effect on hearing. Fancy cables, ethernet switches, and random blocks of wood have no measurable effect on audio in general. And for this idea, if it's not measurable, it's not usable as input, even if we wanted to.
But maybe the bigger speaker, or the one with the traditional look, or the famous brand name, is seen as better but it comes out as a difference in the sound once the brain's finished its processing.
Certainly, and actually I would not argue that subjective reviews that are technically about nothing more than the look of the equipment are worthless. They enable people to enjoy music (even if it's on a questionable basis) and it keeps hifi manufacturers in business. "But they're WRONG!!" is a common feeling around here, but at the end of the day, homeopathic audio solutions aren't just fraud, they're effective placebos. If you hear an improvement that isn't actually there, well, you still hear it, and that's what counts.

However, I'm more interested in whether there is any objective insight to be gained from a subjective review.
So the subjective model is doing something. Maybe it would be more scientific to understand what it is doing,
Indeed, that's the real goal of this proposed idea. To brute-force a link between measurable performance and subjective description.
condemn it for not matching up with objective measurements (if indeed it doesn't, for whatever boundaries we put around what the sound waves are doing).
If there are any objective correlations between the actual measured sound and what people say, then we can be comforted in the fact that there is real value in these reviews.

If the terms used in reviews turn out to be indistinguishable from random, we have 2 possibilities left:

1) The reviews are hogwash and should be ignored, unless you want someone to talk you into buying gear for no reason whatsoever

2) The reviewers are actually hearing something that is not measured. We could infer this by finding that two or more subjective reviewers' terminology matches closely, but doesn't correlate with measurements. So either they are collaborating (not unlikely) or they're actually hearing something we don't measure. (much less likely).

Both outcomes would be valuable info, I think!
 

Galliardist

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If there are any objective correlations between the actual measured sound and what people say, then we can be comforted in the fact that there is real value in these reviews.

If the terms used in reviews turn out to be indistinguishable from random, we have 2 possibilities left:

1) The reviews are hogwash and should be ignored, unless you want someone to talk you into buying gear for no reason whatsoever

2) The reviewers are actually hearing something that is not measured. We could infer this by finding that two or more subjective reviewers' terminology matches closely, but doesn't correlate with measurements. So either they are collaborating (not unlikely) or they're actually hearing something we don't measure. (much less likely).

Both outcomes would be valuable info, I think!
There's a third option at least. The reviewers are reacting to some other feature of their experience of the system. For example, the name on the boxes.

And a fourth. A reviewer may be confused about the experience, decide that something is a bit different in some way, and rationalise it. Yes, that is "make stuff up", but what editor will let a reviewer come to the conclusion "haven't the faintest".. so a conscious conclusion based on what might be expected will fit the bill.
 
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kemmler3D

kemmler3D

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There's a third option at least. The reviewers are reacting to some other feature of their experience of the system. For example, the name on the boxes.

And a fourth. A reviewer may be confused about the experience, decide that something is a bit different in some way, and rationalise it. Yes, that is "make stuff up", but what editor will let a reviewer come to the conclusion "haven't the faintest".. so a conscious conclusion based on what might be expected will fit the bill.

If there is no correlation between the gear itself (I guess brand could be used as an input variable, why not) then it's hogwash. I would definitely expect a correlation between brand and subjective impressions though, you're right.

Post-hoc rationalization of random placebo-type impressions won't show up in a statistical analysis though, so I don't think there is a real option 4.
 
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