What were you trying to say that negates the need for you to publish your results for peer review?
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Amir vs. Abyss: The Battle We Need
- Thread starter danielmiessler
- Start date
That dCS Vivaldi DAC in Canada is $55,650.00 and in the USA $35,999.00
The Focal Sopra No.2 speakers are $18,990.00 USD.
My suggestion is reducing the DAC budget by ~$34K and spending more on the speakers.
Helicopter
Major Contributor
I'd reduce the Amp budget by whatever you save by getting a pair of AHB2s instead of Dan D.
Helicopter
Major Contributor
Just get the brown / walnut Sopras, a couple subs, some DSP, an RME, a couple AHB2s and call it good. If you have a big enough room, get the no. 3.
That dCS Vivaldi DAC in Canada is $55,650.00 and in the USA $35,999.00
The Focal Sopra No.2 speakers are $18,990.00 USD.
My suggestion is reducing the DAC budget by ~$34K and spending more on the speakers.
You could take half of the $70K and get Kii3 with BXT, or Genelec 8351b with the W371A woofer. Maybe I'm just cheap.
Coach_Kaarlo
Active Member
https://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400
Do you think everything peer reviewed is scientifically supported by measurements or findings? Or just mostly? How do you spot the junk science? Do you have professionally recognised qualifications in a relevant field that can determine when information is being manipulated? Do you understand how much of our modern scientific endeavours are funded?
Another test: the Bill Gates foundation actually funded research which ""showed"" that forcing students to show their working and assessing their answers as correct or wrong was a kind of racial oppression by whites......
Now before you look it up - what was your first thought (true or false)? Notice how hard it is to let go of that first thought even once you find the answer? Bet you experienced an immediate thought when I described my example of amp testing - were you aware of it or did you just type out the standard response and hit reply?
Try thinking harder about what I said.
The fact that most claimed differences in properly-designed electronics are simply not in the audible domain in no way implies or requires that we can measure everything that exists or that measurements explain everything. Nor is anyone making that claim. This argument appears to be a straw man.
A process of scientific inquiry absolutely involves both measurements and experiments that may falsify, or point out the deficiencies of, our measurements. That's why blind tests are important - they help us sort out what we might still need to measure to describe the actual signal/sound's role in the listener's experience, and engineer new equipment to that end. The weight of the evidence - even if we stipulated your own test had been properly executed - is that expensive electronics (presuming volume-leveling, sufficient power, within-threshold component measurements, etc.) don't affect the listener experience at all when the listener doesn't know which component is playing.
Helicopter
Major Contributor
Who else here thinks $9 Sony headphones are better than Abyss?
I was after some evidence of your findings. If you'd like to share this then great. I'm sceptical but interested. Do you have any evidence? Testing methodology? Conditions? I'm not really interested in your analysis of my motivations, just your conclusions and whether or not they stand up to external analysis.
It's not without flaws, but it is part of the evaluation of evidence.
Lol, indeed
In theory, it helps support common practices for experiment design, and making research transparently reproducible. In practice, it often does not live up to those aspirations. And it certainly does nothing to prevent other people from drawing incorrect or exaggerated conclusions from the same research (see the internet and journalism, every day).
Sorry, do you genuinely think that peer review has no place in what we're discussing?
I agree. As I've stated, it's only part of the process.
Just because something is flawed doesn't mean that it lacks value. In the absence of peer review, how do we evaluate presented scientific research?
I would start by eliminating review processes that are knowingly flawed. . .
I don't think anybody denies the following things:
1. There's room for individual preference. The Harman curve is just an average of listener preferences. Nobody (or... almost nobody) will have preferences that align exactly with this response curve.
2. Nobody's hearing or listening environments are the same. Even if you and I had the exact same preference, we'd need our systems tweaked a little differently to achieve that. For example, my high-frequency hearing is a bit shit, so I'm going to need some extra energy in the upper treble range.
3. Some kinds of distortion are euphonic, at least to some people, like even-order harmonic distortion.
I'll also add a fourth one that many would disagree with:
4. We massively overvalue the importance of distortion outside the vocal range. It matters, but it's vastly less important. Perhaps by an order of magnitude. This is one reason (of many) why some gear might "measure poorly" and sound "good" or vice versa.
Engineering matters, data matters. Through research and experience we know that what's going to sound the best to the most people for the most listening material is, essentially, a faithful reproduction of the input signal that the producer/artist/engineers wanted you to hear.
To put it another way: this industry's over a century old. Wouldn't it be crazy if we didn't know what sounded good? Imagine if TV worked that way, and TV companies all had their own ideas and made crazy weird custom distortions to the pictures on their TVs.
I am an objectivist, but it is also my opinion that of course measurements and our understanding of how they correlate to enjoyment are not perfect.
I have some speakers that measure poorly and I enjoy them anyway. Still, discussing hard data is a lot better than subjectivist audio circles that rely solely on vague "wine-tasting" terms to describe audio, IMO. I find that kind of talk completely useless. Maybe it accurately describes some type of way a person feels about a particular sound but wtf do they actually mean?
OP
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Great question. The short answer is triangulation. These items had the most people saying good things and the fewest people saying bad things within a particular price range.
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