Your ABX experience regarding some records versus digital is interesting, thanks levimax!
To me what what is most interesting from a science point of view is that despite the many orders of magnitude better measured performance that digital has compared to LP's the actual audible differences are usually subtle.
Which are my impressions as well. I might put it “ often subtle.”
And you bring up a point I and others have made many times. It’s one thing to point to the technical differences and what can be measured. It’s another to scale the relevance of that to what is actually heard. Because we know there are all sorts of other considerations, including masking effects of the music itself, which can lead to lower discrimination than the measurements would seem to suggest. There are studies showing the distortion levels have to be surprisingly high (especially within the context of typical amplifier measurements for instance ) before people notice them or report it as unpleasant.
There was for instance on this forum the comparison of samples from a SET tube amplifier with significant measured distortion, versus a much lower distortion solid state amplifier, in which people found differences were very subtle or even hard to discern.
So you can’t simply leap from “ Look how much better digital measures” to “ therefore the perceived difference when playing a record versus digital is going to be REALLY SIGNIFICANT.
The level of differences vary given the record one is comparing. Evaluating “ how large” or “ significance” the
perceptual effect is of those Sonic differences is of course, going to be subjective. You could in principle collect a whole bunch of impressions in scientifically controlled conditions, rating the reported significance of each vinyl artefact. But I don’t see that anybody has presented any such data. And even if we did have such data, there could remain problems in how it applies to any individual and their record library.
So if somebody else is going to object to what you and I report when comparing vinyl to digital, as if we are “ denying scientific facts” then it is incumbent on them to show specifically what “ facts” we are denying.
In other words, they have to bring more than their own opinion that “ vinyl sounds worse than you describe.” They’d have to bring the type of scientific perceptual studies that I’ve indicated that directly address what you and I report subjectively. And which could be applied directly to our experience.
I’m still waiting on that.
THIS study has been posted before. But it only compared two recordings (and not controlling for listener, playback equipment) and it doesn’t come close to settling the questions I’m talking about.
One reason it seems we do not have such answers is because of the challenges involved. This is not like evaluating claims of fancy AC cables, where electrical theory rules sonic differences to be highly implausible, whatever cable you are using. In other words, you can say to somebody who is reporting a sonic difference “ it is highly unlikely you are actually hearing that.”
And it’s not like evaluating loudspeakers, because in the case of loudspeakers we have lots of data supporting “ best practice measurements” and then if you can find measurements for a speaker, it can be evaluated against those measurements in terms of likely preferences.
When it comes to records, as far as I’m aware we don’t have the type of specific sets of studies that would let us come to similarly confident conclusions, which rule against the type of impressions some of us give for our records. As in “ we have a scientific basis to rule your evaluation of a subtle difference to be false.”
There’s a gazillion records out there, which are going to vary in all sorts of different ways in terms of what artefacts they display and to what degree for each artefact, and to what degree those artefacts are going to bother a listener and impede pleasure. Or appeal to on what scale those artefacts are rated. And one listener may have a collection of records that are higher quality and less artefact ridden than another person. So you can’t just presume what one person is really hearing or not.
It reminds me of when I used to go to movies all the time with my best friend. He became incredibly sensitive to noise made by people in the movie theaters. Somebody opening a package or crunching on popcorn behind us we drive him insane and he’d walk out declaring how “ it was so obnoxious it ruins the movie.” But for me, I barely noticed it, it didn’t bother me at all, and it had virtually no significance in terms of my taking in the movie. Who’s right? It’s a subjective rating, and one person doesn’t have the stance to brow beat another over the subjective assessment. It’s going to be duelling opinions.
We are in a similar situation in discussing the significance of differences we are hearing between digital and vinyl.
When your passion results in comments that belittle other people's choices as being "anti-science" or "snake oil", despite most everyone here being well versed in both the science of and the experience of recorded music playback,
Indeed.
The error often made here is
confusing “
Unscientific” with “
ANTI-Science.”
“ANTI-Science” should be a term reserved for when somebody is actually making claims that DENY known science, or which DENY the relevance of the scientific method.
“ Unscientific” would describe behaviour that simply isn’t engaging in science, or scientific rigour. And that describes the vast majority of human behaviour.
When the scientist leaves his lab, and goes home to cook a new recipe, experimenting by changing ingredients and measures, seeing how the recipe turns out as evaluated by him and his family… his method, like most people cooking, are Unscientific. But this has not made him ANTI-Science. Engaging in cooking does not entail making anti-scientific claims.
To plan your vacation with the informal input of the preferences of your family is NOT to engage in ANTI-Science. It’s just being reasonable and practical under the circumstances.
And that’s another important point: We also have to not confuse “Unscientific” with
“ unreasonable.” There are all sorts of reasonable inferences that can be made in unscientific conditions. If that weren’t the case, we’d be engaging in irrational behaviour all day long.
When we are comparing vinyl and digital in our homes, or exchanging such informal impressions here, we are engaging in Unscientific comparisons and discussion, but not therefore taking an ANTI-Scientific stance!
And further, many comments and impressions within an unscientific context can still be quite reasonable. If someone tells me they ditched a classical piano LP due to the irritating amount of “wow” warbling the sustained piano notes, I don’t need double blind test results to justify (provisionally) accepting that account.