If you’re referring to Erin’s pink noise comparisons of speakers’ tonal balance then I think this is one of the best things a YouTube reviewer has ever done. In no way does the audio compression undermine the validity of the comparison. The compression is an experimental constant not a variable, no?
Disagreed. Absolutely dumb like a rock. How do you know if his room acoustics didn't throw off the tonal balance with standing waves and reverberations? What mic did he used, was it calibrated religiously? What if I am listening on a pair of speakers that aren't neutral, possibly with a hump on the frequency spectrum that the speakers he was recording that had a suck out?
To me, it's a ceteris paribus situation: All other things being equal, I will always prefer the component with the lowest measured noise and distortion. Thing is, for stuff like DACS and Amps most them are highly similar: Same form factor, same power output, same approximate price, same inputs and output. Given that, why agonize about what one's hearing threshold for noise and distortion are? Just pick the component that's lowest and have done with it.
www.audiosciencereview.com
Hopefully you weren’t calling me dumb like a rock?!
No, absolutely not. I am calling the idea of recording something and giving the content to users to play back for evaluation dumb like a rock and I stand by that statement and going to double down.
And so? What if I played it back on this speaker? All bets are off.
That's even a worse idea, the best science on headphone FR is based on the Harman curve which is a completely subjective reporting by test subjects and if I recalled, on a recent Soundstage podcast, a manufacturer is already disputing the validity of the Harman curve.
The point I am making is that it doesn’t matter what you playback the test on because the comparison is relative not absolute.
I go back to one of my previous point, if I was playing it back on a speaker that had a suck out say at 1kHz of 5dB and the speakers being recorded had a bump of 5dB at 1kHz. Then what would you hear? The frequency would be neutral at 1kHz. So even if relative, it's utterly flawed.
I think Erin is just trying different things to increase viewership, but this is utterly flawed, worse, it's misleading.
You hear an error as soon as the sound clip switches from the standard pink noise. You just need to know that the standard pink noise is correct and the convolved noise has relative errors.
While no doubt an offensive practice, but hey, at least Erin's pink noise demo is less offensive than some of other idiots on YouTube like Ted Denney and Techno Dad to name a couple.
Think of amplifier distortion like engine vibrations in a car. If the vibrations are bad, they obviously hurt track performance. But once vibrations are low enough that you barely notice them, they stop being the limiting factor. From there, what really determines how fast the car is on track is downforce and horsepower/torque(dynamic range, how loud the system can go) In the same way, once amplifier distortion is already very low, overall performance is mostly about frequency response rather than distortion.
Car analogies rarely work.
