Another Opinion on Why Vinyl is Better.

[amirm]

Er, no, it's not. I'm asking whether a 'criticism' is an 'opinion'. NorthSky, in the riposte you seemed to find brilliant, suggests they are mutually exclusive. I disagree, don't you?

And do you think fas's 'opinions' about CD audio, and power supplies, being routinely and audibly bad unless one has a 'pristine' setup, and NorthSky's beliefs about the superior 'timing' of vinyl, hold water....scientifically speaking?

I am not playing word games with you Steven. It is proper protocol in forums for new members to contribute before complaining. You have not done that. Until you do, I am not interested in what you like or don't like, who you want to criticize, etc.

If you are only here to have a fight with people, your time here will be short.

 

[fas42]

Fascinating. Do you think Dr. Toole (whom I've seen championed by Amir quite a bit lately) would be interested in your remarkable recommendation?

I have had a quick look through his book, and note that he is far less hard ball about his ideas and conclusions then a lot of people who quote his work - in the key studies done to get the results he then puts forward I continually note a lack of rigour about the whole experimental setup - far too many possible confounders are not addressed, so I don't have much confidence in the conclusions.

So, you use nonmusical test signals in your DBTs? That's fine, but how do you map your results onto actual music listening? Because , as I'm sure you must know, there are differences that are perfectly ABX-able using test tones, that are quite nicely and utterly masked in actual music listening.

No, I use music to test, without DBT, and only listen for flaws, distortion artifacts in the sound. If I can hear an incorrectness in the sound that means that there is something to be fixed. I just keep repeating this until no issues can be heard, and IME the result is then that all music listened to is fully satisfying. I'm not interested in whether that system is "better" than another one, merely whether I can play any recording on it that I want to without being disturbed by audible misbehaviour.

 

[Sal1950]

No, I use music to test, without DBT, and only listen for flaws, distortion artifacts in the sound. If I can hear an incorrectness in the sound that means that there is something to be fixed. I just keep repeating this until no issues can be heard, and IME the result is then that all music listened to is fully satisfying. I'm not interested in whether that system is "better" than another one, merely whether I can play any recording on it that I want to without being disturbed by audible misbehaviour.

Frank, so then you have no real interest in High Fidelity or making any real advances on the SOTA. You just create one big parametric eq and say, "sounds good to me".
No real progress being made there of value to others.

 

[Thomas savage]

Frank, so then you have no real interest in High Fidelity or making any real advances on the SOTA. You just create one big parametric eq and say, "sounds good to me".
No real progress being made there of value to others.

What frank does is perfectly valid for him, his methods and reasoning may translate to others when he visits them, maybe! But certainly does not translate in any meaningful way in this arena.

It's simply not communicable. Efforts to communicate seem to come across as nonsense, I don't see any serious members indulging his methodology though, it holds no weight and gains no traction here. This being so it's not a relevant measure of our forums ethos nor is northskys ( bobs) posts.

Why they are singled out then by mr krapaple as some defining content that dams our existence as a serious audio forum is beyond me. Seems his core sense of reason and logic are way off to the point of being quite ridiculous.

For Our content to achieve a meaningful degree of relevancy to the wider audiophile audience, to impact in a positive way what we all see as a deeply flawed way of thinking and reasoning we must include people.

Why bother doing this you ask? Simple we want people to achieve better and more enjoyable reproduced music at home though knowledge and understanding rather than being sucked in by trickery and the mythology of the Hi end hifi brigade.

Doing this will result in better quality and more enjoyable audio for people most likely saving them money too and will support the companies doing things the right way as we see it.

Non of those core objectives can be accomplished by us being a secular forum. There is nothing that meaningful about a small group of guys arguing amongst themselves all be it in a strictly logical and and reasoned way. This already exists, and is purely self serving and rather inane in the scheme of things.

 

[fas42]

Frank, so then you have no real interest in High Fidelity or making any real advances on the SOTA. You just create one big parametric eq and say, "sounds good to me".
No real progress being made there of value to others.

Most assuredly I'm interested in high fidelity - but I'm not interested in High End bling, nor room adjustments to try and compensate for defects in the sound. The SOTA doesn't work as a concept currently, because people don't know how to listen to sound reproduction with the intention of hearing problems - hence most systems fail to convince.

Very simple test: are your speakers completely invisible at all times? If yes, a big tick - that's high fidelity; if not, then audible artifacts are too strongly present ...

 

[AJ Soundfield]

I ended up horribly confused

Yes, that condition persists. External treatment is the best course of action here, not magical self healing.

DBTs work well with sound snippets

Yes they do, which is which is why they are the defacto standard of audio science as well as other perceptual sciences, physics, etc etc.
As I pointed out numerous times in the ASA thread, as both you and John seemed to have "missed". Inmates should never self diagnose, leave that up to the educated staff of the institutions Frank.

ASA makes very clear - the mind quite happily manufactures the content that's not really there

Frank, we adults haven't needed ASA to know that, since the days of Oskar Pfungst.
None of the this will be comprehensible to you as a believer, but that is of zero relevance on a science forum. For you, your daydream fantasies are physical reality. For adults, like Santa Claus tales....not so much. Funny though. Very funny.
Unfortunately, daydream fantasies add zero to audio science discussions, except for noise. If this was a mental health forum, that would be a different story.
Now again, back to vinyl. How did you hook up a turntable to your HTIB?

 

[fas42]

Frank, we adults haven't needed ASA to know that, since the days of Oskar Pfungst.
None of the this will be comprehensible to you as a believer, but that is of zero relevance on a science forum. For you, your daydream fantasies are physical reality. For adults, like Santa Claus tales....not so much. Funny though. Very funny.

AJ, you're still trapped in the normal ways of assessing sound, which is whether something sounds better than something else - you haven't learned to listen with the specific intent of detecting flaws - a far more effective method. An analogy would be that you compare the engine note of a Ferrari and Lamborghini to decide which is preferable; I'm the garage mechanic who has a high performance vehicle brought to him, and hears a significant noise in the engine that shouldn't be there, and locates the cause of that abberation. Our foci completely differ, you want something that's impressive, I want something that has no problems - very different agenda.

 

[AJ Soundfield]

AJ, you're still trapped in the normal ways of assessing sound

A consequence of living in the real world with good mental health.

you haven't learned to listen with the specific intent of detecting flaws

Actually I have, via the Klippel, Harman, Linkwitz, Phillips etc. training. But more importantly I can demonstrate my abilities via those repeatable test results.
You believers can't.
You can claim to run faster than Bolt, leap tall buildings and hear Intonas, etc...but you can't provide any evidence of anything. Zero. Nothing. Like a child claiming to hear Santa.

 

[fas42]

A consequence of living in the real world with good mental health.

Okay, let's put it this way - I want the experience of listening to a system to match that of hearing a live event; if I can detect that it's an audio setup pretending to do that job then it's a fail. Now, I can't get into your head and determine if you register those two types of situations in a similar way to me or not - but for myself the audio "faking it" has all sorts of characteristic, signature elements to the sound, which are lacking in live music. This makes the job quite simple - do I hear a giveaway, or don't I?

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Just got back from a week at the beach. Far too mellow for this thread...

Tim

 

[AJ Soundfield]

Okay, let's put it this way - I want

We don't care what you want Frank. Your lot can either demonstrate that you can hear this that and the other "artifacts"...or you're that frog.
Let's face it Frank, you're that frog.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

No, I use music to test, without DBT, and only listen for flaws, distortion artifacts in the sound. If I can hear an incorrectness in the sound that means that there is something to be fixed. I just keep repeating this until no issues can be heard, and IME the result is then that all music listened to is fully satisfying. I'm not interested in whether that system is "better" than another one, merely whether I can play any recording on it that I want to without being disturbed by audible misbehaviour.

OK, so I just got back from vacation. While I was perfectly satisfied not to watch TV at the beach, I was pretty anxious to see the episode of Game of Thrones I'd missed, when I got home yesterday. As usual, the sound was very good, in spite of the sins of streaming. Human voices were clear and natural. Whispers whispered, shouts shouted. No noticeable sibilance or other upper midrange honk. Then I watched the post-game commentary show, After the Thrones. This is three people in the studio, talking about the most recent episode, playing some clips. The clips sounded good, as they did when watching the show itself. The people talking in the studio sounded trebly, slightly distorted, pushed forward. Not natural.

An "incorrectness." "Something to be fixed." How, specifically, would you go about finding the source of the distortion in this audio and fix it, without "fixing" the good audio from the original programming? The problem seem to be in the specific recording, but you consistently claim that there are no recording problems, that any recording can be made to sound natural by system tweaking. What are you going to tweak to address this problem in the post-game show systemically, without creating problems in the GOT audio?

Tim

 

[TBone]

He says he reversed dynamic *de*compression....so I guess he just applied compression? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

OK ... still not certain on de-exactly what, why, how, and purpose ... I'll simply add that confusion to the "vinyl has better timing, just listen on youtube" tray.

Just to be clear, perhaps the single most evident characteristic I've seen (and heard) with many vinyl rips for (over a decades worth), irregardless of eq. cost, are timing related issues. The entire concept of "PR&T" was based entirely on the many inherited problems concerning vinyl reproduction, well prior to digital.

I can debate certain vinyl pros till the cows come home, udder than timing ...

 

[JoeWhip]

OK, so I just got back from vacation. While I was perfectly satisfied not to watch TV at the beach, I was pretty anxious to see the episode of Game of Thrones I'd missed, when I got home yesterday. As usual, the sound was very good, in spite of the sins of streaming. Human voices were clear and natural. Whispers whispered, shouts shouted. No noticeable sibilance or other upper midrange honk. Then I watched the post-game commentary show, After the Thrones. This is three people in the studio, talking about the most recent episode, playing some clips. The clips sounded good, as they did when watching the show itself. The people talking in the studio sounded trebly, slightly distorted, pushed forward. Not natural.

An "incorrectness." "Something to be fixed." How, specifically, would you go about finding the source of the distortion in this audio and fix it, without "fixing" the good audio from the original programming? The problem seem to be in the specific recording, but you consistently claim that there are no recording problems, that any recording can be made to sound natural by system tweaking. What are you going to tweak to address this problem in the post-game show systemically, without creating problems in the GOT audio?

Tim

Sounds like the engineer in the live post show show screwed things up. Probably an easy fix.

 

[tomelex]

Okay, let's put it this way - I want the experience of listening to a system to match that of hearing a live event; if I can detect that it's an audio setup pretending to do that job then it's a fail. Now, I can't get into your head and determine if you register those two types of situations in a similar way to me or not - but for myself the audio "faking it" has all sorts of characteristic, signature elements to the sound, which are lacking in live music. This makes the job quite simple - do I hear a giveaway, or don't I?

Frank, ignoring your "experience of listening" for one moment, do you understand that two channel stereo can only reproduce some very low level facsimile of a live event and thus you should never expect it to technically produce the soundfield as the live event (unless of course that live event started with the sound of two speakers making the sound, then you can come much closer with stereo at home). If a recording of a live unamplified event ever sounds correct to you, its because your ear/brain accepts it within its limitations, it is never but a weak facsimile of the original event, and if you have that ability then that's a big plus for you in your own world, but many of us are not convinced so are more interested in the recordings qualities that we like.

In regards to vinyl, there are certain properties of that recording and playback channel that allow two channel stereo to sound better in the soundstage and that's what folks like, its a processor more than a straight reproduction chain. In fact, vinyl images better than tape in many circumstances due to how it plays with phasing, crosstalk, etc, let alone that it is harder to compress it (but plenty of compressed vinyl out there)

 

[krabapple]

I am not playing word games with you Steven. It is proper protocol in forums for new members to contribute before complaining. You have not done that. Until you do, I am not interested in what you like or don't like, who you want to criticize, etc.

If you are only here to have a fight with people, your time here will be short.

In fact, just in the last *day*, I've contributed a suggestion (with link) for better DBT to fas, and a link to a highly educational Floyd Toole talk. Or does 'contribute' here mean, post subjective blather couched in pseudoscientific language, about probably inaudible stuff that I 'hear'?

 

[krabapple]

I have had a quick look through his book

Maybe take a longer one. For one thing, 'his' conclusions in his book are often the conclusions of others' work that he's summarizing.

No, I use music to test, without DBT,

IIRC from that video, Toole refers to your method as...'useless'. I'm inclined to agree.

 

[amirm]

In fact, just in the last *day*, I've contributed a suggestion (with link) for better DBT to fas, and a link to a highly educational Floyd Toole talk. Or does 'contribute' here mean, post subjective blather couched in pseudoscientific language, about probably inaudible stuff that I 'hear'?

No, the type of contribution is in our mission statement at the heading here. It is to have fun and contribute to science and learning. Whatever those two posts were are lost in the rest of personal remarks including the one I am responding to.

When someone says "pseudoscientific" things, you have two choices: ignore them or bring science to explain it. Beating the person doesn't accomplish anything. Worry first about what you do, before worrying about what others do.

 

[krabapple]

No, the type of contribution is in our mission statement at the heading here. It is to have fun and contribute to science and learning. Whatever those two posts were are lost in the rest of personal remarks including the one I am responding to.

'Lost'? Says you. Others, who are willing to click a link or two, might disagree.

When someone says "pseudoscientific" things, you have two choices: ignore them or bring science to explain it. Beating the person doesn't accomplish anything. Worry first about what you do, before worrying about what others do.

First, are there no rules about posting pseudoscientific claptrap here in the first place? Why should I or any other member have to police it? That's your job.

Second, if I had to personally walk through the science refuting their bollocks to every booby who posted bollocks, it would be a long day indeed. Hence, I'll usually post links to others who 'bring science'. If they did a good job of it, why should I re-invent the wheel?

Amir, the claims fas and Northy made fail on a fundamental basis before any of their technical claims even needs to be addressed. They fail on basic methodological grounds. As you well know. And as others here have since noted.

 

[krabapple]

In regards to vinyl, there are certain properties of that recording and playback channel that allow two channel stereo to sound better in the soundstage and that's what folks like, its a processor more than a straight reproduction chain. In fact, vinyl images better than tape in many circumstances due to how it plays with phasing, crosstalk, etc, let alone that it is harder to compress it (but plenty of compressed vinyl out there)

They don't image 'better' in the sense of being more accurate ; they simply create a pleasing (to some) illusion -- a euphonic distortion, actually. I do it with DPL II, which has the virtue of being more consistent and sophisticated...and being defeatable if I don't like the effect.