Subjective measures to me is only useful as long as it could be controlled, could be reliably repeated, and could have statistics applied. Otherwise it would amount to anecdotes, and then whether or not your experiences align with them becomes a crapshoot. It's also worth mentioning that this criteria doesn't necessarily get applied equally to every situation. Whether a doctor likes a particular color is quite a different thing than if he/she thinks a drug is improving a patient's quality of life.
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Can useful knowledge be gained via subjectivity?
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English is my primary language. German is my secondary. My wife's primary is Mandarin (not much good as a proofreader). Maybe I need to show it to someone I know. It will be a few days before that can happen.
I worked for the ARMY but somehow ended up spending 17 years at sea on NAVY ships. So, I learned those to. But the best thing I learned from that extended experience was Never Again Volunteer Yourself.My first language is Navy Slang, my second is Shore leave Bar slang, my third is Navy Brig moaning and groaning.
dougi
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Exactly! Which is why my post discussed it's benefits for psych0-acoustic research, which can then give us what the limits for objective measurements could be for audibility (and under what conditions).
For hating the place so much you sure post a lot…Toxic, Cult and Extremists no hyperbole in that assessment. Keep it up and you will get what you wish for.
Well, its toxic but entertaining at the same time......lol....
Holmz
Major Contributor
^hence^ my question earlier…
One can often see how this could play out.
It could be that they were being helpful, or maybe not. But the expectation that they were not sort of loads the deck for perception.
Like a dose of salts?… This is why in many cases we let the thread run their course of course.
I learned that language by osmosis.
Holmz
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Weeb Labs
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I have not read this thread in its entirety but it seems to me that most often, those who espouse the importance of subjective experience as it pertains to the evaluation of audio performance are either dishonestly or unintentionally muddying the waters.
Double-blind and ABX testing are both examples of scenarios in which preference or difference are determined in a purely subjective manner but this is clearly not the subjectivity to which most audiophiles refer when making arguments such as those found in the first post. Their notion of subjective evaluation is an uncontrolled, sighted comparison of $50,000 RCA cables with twenty minutes in between switches.
Subjective evaluation is the means by which we have arrived at all existing preference curves and thresholds. It works exceptionally well but only when we carefully control what is being evaluated. It is uncontrolled subjective evaluation that holds no value.
Double-blind and ABX testing are both examples of scenarios in which preference or difference are determined in a purely subjective manner but this is clearly not the subjectivity to which most audiophiles refer when making arguments such as those found in the first post. Their notion of subjective evaluation is an uncontrolled, sighted comparison of $50,000 RCA cables with twenty minutes in between switches.
Subjective evaluation is the means by which we have arrived at all existing preference curves and thresholds. It works exceptionally well but only when we carefully control what is being evaluated. It is uncontrolled subjective evaluation that holds no value.
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Thanks for the reply.... And NO, I am not even talking about "resistor sound".
I am talking about how properties like tolerance and temp. coefficient (Even inductance since normal wirewound resistors have inductance). Obviously, changes in resistance values will have an effect on the audio signals and hence the sound.
IF an equipment has symmetrical layout for both L/R channels, differences to high loose tolerance is going to have an effect as well.
For speakers (eg. tweeter resistor), changes in the resistance esp. due to temperature will affect the signal amplitude. This is not "resistor sound".
Btw, resistors have 'noise' as well. So, tell me, do you think all resistors are the same? Some folks here are so adamdant that they are all the same.....
Resistor Noise | Resistor Fundamentals | Resistor Guide
What is Resistor Noise? Noise is an unwanted phenomenon for resistors. For some applications the noise properties are important. Examples are high gain amplifiers, charge amplifiers, and low-level…
eepower.com
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MattHooper
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In the interest of good faith discussions...and getting all geeky/philosophical...
First, as it's often been acknowledged, pretty much no one here thinks subjectivity is irrelevant. The outlook of a site like this is trying to correlate measurements to subjective perception in a reliable fashion. So with that out of the way, I'm presuming the real meat of the question is whether *purely* subjective experience - that is without appeal to measurements, and perhaps without even controls for bias - can be a source of useful knowledge.
Broadly speaking: of course. Essentially all our empirical inferences come to us through our subjective experience and perception. When I went to leave my house yesterday I was stopped by a some netting and signs from walking down my steps. The steps were gone. Our contractor, building us new steps, took them away and put up a warning. I gained knowledge of this via my subjective perception, and if I simply ignored it I could have broken a bone stepping off the porch with no steps.
That may seem like an obvious thing to point out about the use of our subjective perception, but it's actually something that I find starts to get obscured sometimes in conversations even about audio gear when purely subjective impressions and reports are dismissed as wholly useless.
I think there's lots of room for nuance and "it depends" and precisely what a person may define as their goal.
For audio as in anything else: There certainly is a sense in which purely subjective impressions are "useless." IF what you desire is a scientific level of confidence, where correlating measurements, controlling for variables like bias etc can result in justifiable confidence levels in a conclusion (e.g. what may be audible or not, or what may be predictably preferred by a percentage of listeners etc) then anything offered that lacks in that method is indeed useless. What some audiophile says he "heard" just isn't going to meet that bill. And that is of course, in many instances, a totally reasonable goal or criteria to have.
But having that criteria doesn't automatically entail that we can't have some sense where exchanging purely subjective accounts is, to some degree, reasonable and useful. After all, every day we navigate the world mostly successfully by intersubjective engagement. I reported my perception of the stairs being gone from our porch to my wife, so she wouldn't try going out the front door. Did we need to do a study on the phenomenon of our porch, and the reliability of our perception, in order for it to be reasonable to exchange information this way? That would be untenable.
So while it's true that purely subjective reports are subject to error and hence a "scientific" approach is going to be obviously more reliable, it's also the case that our perception seems reliable enough to get us through the day, and in exchanging lots of intersubjective information, and so when we want to totally dismiss subjective perception as "useless" we should be ready to examine just how far we want to take it, and why.
For instance: should people refrain from discussing things like the sound of different mastering jobs on various albums, simply from having listened to them? Or even the different production method and sound of different recordings? If so...where does this almost Cartesian skepticism of purely subjective impressions stop and why, and how do you make life tenable?
If we rejected every subjective perception that wasn't scientifically vetted, life would be impossible.
But if it IS reasonable under many circumstances to exchange subjective impressions as relatively informative, e.g. discussions of different record masters or recording techniques etc, WITHOUT requiring a truly rigorous scientific account for our every impression - what could justify this?
I've argued that the simple heuristic that we all naturally carry around with us: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," helps us navigate this space. (Thanks Carl Sagan!)
If someone where I live tells me he saw a racoon in his backyard last night, it may not be a scientific account - and he could have been wrong, seeing things, been mistaken etc - but it remains reasonable for me to accept the account, provisionally, because of it's plausibility. If he had reported his perception that he saw Big Foot or a T-Rex stomping around the yard, then it's more reasonable to say "Gonna need some more rigorous evidence for that."
I take the same approach to discussions of the sound of albums, mastering, speakers etc. If someone tells me he came from a speaker audition and found the speaker to sound very thin in the midrange, or boomy and unbalanced in the bass etc, I can accept his report, provisionally, given that it's entirely plausible that a speaker could sound like that. Whereas if he reported the same thing for exchanging an audiophile Ethernet cable for a regular functioning Ethernet cable, that goes in to "extraordinary claim" in terms of it's technical plausibility, and I'll want more rigorous evidence.
It's true that even when there are audible differences (e.g. speakers), just like when there are objective differences in what we are seeing, our perception can still be affected by bias. Error is always hovering over our perceptions. But that doesn't mean it isn't reasonable to provisionally accept subjective reports, although with an accompanying lowered confidence level.
So using subjective impressions of speakers as an example: If I see a certain audiophile on a forum, or a certain audio reviewer, seems to be noting some of the things I really care about in reproduced sound, that gets my attention. After all, speakers quite plausibly sound different. And especially if I have found this person's reports on other speakers I've heard seem to coincide with my own impressions, that further suggests we are impressed with the same things. I have been led to some very happy speaker purchases via the combined reports of some audiophiles and reviewers, when I saw they seemed to care about what I cared about, and converged identifying it in a product. Where I have found the product to have just those characteristics reported by others. So the purely subjective reports of other listeners have indeed been "useful" for me. The reverse has been true, where others have said they found my descriptions of speakers very useful - they heard what I described once they had a chance to hear the same speakers.
(And as I've pointed out before, I've also found that other people's, or a reviewer's, subjective reports matched my own impressions even when I heard a speaker first, and read the reports afterward).
So my view is that to some degree, the usefulness of swapping purely subjective reports is going to depend to some degree on the person.
In some cases, something is only "useful" if you care to use it.
If someone is entirely dismissive of subjective descriptions of sound, and instead educates himself on speaker measurements to the point he can predict what he'll like from measurements and only wants the reliability that comes from listening tests controlling for bias..then that person will rightly have no use for purely subjective reports.
But that person is also the least likely to find use in subjective descriptions, even if there is any use (as we see many audiophile descriptors are waved away as mere fantasy).
So having the goal of the most reliable method of inference doesn't mean intersubjective "knowledge," exchanging purely subjective perceptions, is wholly without worth or useless.
Again, the more skepticism you cast on subjective perception - in audio or anywhere else! - the more you take on the burden of answering when and why it's ever a reasonable way to exchange information subjectively. (And I've yet to see how you get out of this slippery slope of skepticism without appealing to essentially the heuristic "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and it's obverse "ordinary claims only require ordinary evidence" I have mentioned).
First, as it's often been acknowledged, pretty much no one here thinks subjectivity is irrelevant. The outlook of a site like this is trying to correlate measurements to subjective perception in a reliable fashion. So with that out of the way, I'm presuming the real meat of the question is whether *purely* subjective experience - that is without appeal to measurements, and perhaps without even controls for bias - can be a source of useful knowledge.
Can useful knowledge be gained via subjectivity?
Broadly speaking: of course. Essentially all our empirical inferences come to us through our subjective experience and perception. When I went to leave my house yesterday I was stopped by a some netting and signs from walking down my steps. The steps were gone. Our contractor, building us new steps, took them away and put up a warning. I gained knowledge of this via my subjective perception, and if I simply ignored it I could have broken a bone stepping off the porch with no steps.
That may seem like an obvious thing to point out about the use of our subjective perception, but it's actually something that I find starts to get obscured sometimes in conversations even about audio gear when purely subjective impressions and reports are dismissed as wholly useless.
I think there's lots of room for nuance and "it depends" and precisely what a person may define as their goal.
For audio as in anything else: There certainly is a sense in which purely subjective impressions are "useless." IF what you desire is a scientific level of confidence, where correlating measurements, controlling for variables like bias etc can result in justifiable confidence levels in a conclusion (e.g. what may be audible or not, or what may be predictably preferred by a percentage of listeners etc) then anything offered that lacks in that method is indeed useless. What some audiophile says he "heard" just isn't going to meet that bill. And that is of course, in many instances, a totally reasonable goal or criteria to have.
But having that criteria doesn't automatically entail that we can't have some sense where exchanging purely subjective accounts is, to some degree, reasonable and useful. After all, every day we navigate the world mostly successfully by intersubjective engagement. I reported my perception of the stairs being gone from our porch to my wife, so she wouldn't try going out the front door. Did we need to do a study on the phenomenon of our porch, and the reliability of our perception, in order for it to be reasonable to exchange information this way? That would be untenable.
So while it's true that purely subjective reports are subject to error and hence a "scientific" approach is going to be obviously more reliable, it's also the case that our perception seems reliable enough to get us through the day, and in exchanging lots of intersubjective information, and so when we want to totally dismiss subjective perception as "useless" we should be ready to examine just how far we want to take it, and why.
For instance: should people refrain from discussing things like the sound of different mastering jobs on various albums, simply from having listened to them? Or even the different production method and sound of different recordings? If so...where does this almost Cartesian skepticism of purely subjective impressions stop and why, and how do you make life tenable?
If we rejected every subjective perception that wasn't scientifically vetted, life would be impossible.
But if it IS reasonable under many circumstances to exchange subjective impressions as relatively informative, e.g. discussions of different record masters or recording techniques etc, WITHOUT requiring a truly rigorous scientific account for our every impression - what could justify this?
I've argued that the simple heuristic that we all naturally carry around with us: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," helps us navigate this space. (Thanks Carl Sagan!)
If someone where I live tells me he saw a racoon in his backyard last night, it may not be a scientific account - and he could have been wrong, seeing things, been mistaken etc - but it remains reasonable for me to accept the account, provisionally, because of it's plausibility. If he had reported his perception that he saw Big Foot or a T-Rex stomping around the yard, then it's more reasonable to say "Gonna need some more rigorous evidence for that."
I take the same approach to discussions of the sound of albums, mastering, speakers etc. If someone tells me he came from a speaker audition and found the speaker to sound very thin in the midrange, or boomy and unbalanced in the bass etc, I can accept his report, provisionally, given that it's entirely plausible that a speaker could sound like that. Whereas if he reported the same thing for exchanging an audiophile Ethernet cable for a regular functioning Ethernet cable, that goes in to "extraordinary claim" in terms of it's technical plausibility, and I'll want more rigorous evidence.
It's true that even when there are audible differences (e.g. speakers), just like when there are objective differences in what we are seeing, our perception can still be affected by bias. Error is always hovering over our perceptions. But that doesn't mean it isn't reasonable to provisionally accept subjective reports, although with an accompanying lowered confidence level.
So using subjective impressions of speakers as an example: If I see a certain audiophile on a forum, or a certain audio reviewer, seems to be noting some of the things I really care about in reproduced sound, that gets my attention. After all, speakers quite plausibly sound different. And especially if I have found this person's reports on other speakers I've heard seem to coincide with my own impressions, that further suggests we are impressed with the same things. I have been led to some very happy speaker purchases via the combined reports of some audiophiles and reviewers, when I saw they seemed to care about what I cared about, and converged identifying it in a product. Where I have found the product to have just those characteristics reported by others. So the purely subjective reports of other listeners have indeed been "useful" for me. The reverse has been true, where others have said they found my descriptions of speakers very useful - they heard what I described once they had a chance to hear the same speakers.
(And as I've pointed out before, I've also found that other people's, or a reviewer's, subjective reports matched my own impressions even when I heard a speaker first, and read the reports afterward).
So my view is that to some degree, the usefulness of swapping purely subjective reports is going to depend to some degree on the person.
In some cases, something is only "useful" if you care to use it.
If someone is entirely dismissive of subjective descriptions of sound, and instead educates himself on speaker measurements to the point he can predict what he'll like from measurements and only wants the reliability that comes from listening tests controlling for bias..then that person will rightly have no use for purely subjective reports.
But that person is also the least likely to find use in subjective descriptions, even if there is any use (as we see many audiophile descriptors are waved away as mere fantasy).
So having the goal of the most reliable method of inference doesn't mean intersubjective "knowledge," exchanging purely subjective perceptions, is wholly without worth or useless.
Again, the more skepticism you cast on subjective perception - in audio or anywhere else! - the more you take on the burden of answering when and why it's ever a reasonable way to exchange information subjectively. (And I've yet to see how you get out of this slippery slope of skepticism without appealing to essentially the heuristic "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and it's obverse "ordinary claims only require ordinary evidence" I have mentioned).
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Why not deconvolve it?
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Disagree.
Audio remains a huge market. Apple and Samsung and Sony and Dolby invest a great deal in things like spatial audio. Look what Apple rolled out this year: I don't think they see it as niche. Audio for VR is huge and emergent, and IMHO sure to come to music playback, as a huge market.
Additionally, audio research is still extremely active. Just browse the 2021 publications in AES. This month alone titles include:-
- 3D Microphone Array Comparison
- First-Order Loudspeaker Design and an Experimental Application on Sound Field Reproduction
- Influence of the Listening Environment on Recognition of Immersive Reproduction of Orchestral Music Sound Scenes
- Quality, Emotion, and Machines
- Sound Level Monitoring at Live Events, Part 1--Live Dynamic Range
In which case, too true. And I hope that doesn't change.
Do you think there is any scientific method to objectively measure how good or bad is a piece of song/music?
IMHO, there isn't. Only way is to let people listen to it and gather feedback from them.
So, my point is that there are a whole lot of things (not just audio) which cannot be objectively measured by any scientific means. Most of the things which involved human feeling/perception/behaviour cannot be measured objectively.
MattHooper
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Sure.
At least in principle. You first just have to define "good" or "bad" in a way that makes it testable.
I'd first ask you to define what you mean by "good." If your definition is mushy or ambiguous, then I don't see why even you would know what you mean by the term. But if you could put it in to specific characteristics, it could in principle be testable.
For instance we could define a "good" piece of music as that which would please a certain majority of listeners. Then you could test for that. (Similar phenomena is tested in consumer research all the time).
I sort of come from a long background of being in the "skeptical community" (by which I mean taking a critical look at fringe/extraordinary/non-scientific claims). One of the most common refrains by people pushing nonsense is that it is "not scientifically testable" (and yet they know it to be true). The first thing is that when you push such claims, you'll find they are so mushy and ill-defined or unfalsifiable, they themselves don't really have a justification for their belief. Second, many people are just unaware of how much IS testable scientifically, and that part of the story of science is just how inventive scientists have been in finding ways to test what may have seemed "untestable" before. So I have an immediate suspicion of whenever someone starts claiming something is inherently "not testable." Often it's because they haven't really thought through the mushiness and ambiguity in the very thing they are claiming. Not saying that's the case for you, just explaining my reaction.
No reason that can't be done in a reliable, rigorous manner, if one chose to pursue it.
See above.
As you can see from what I wrote, I've pointed out the implications of the fact that most of what we do and infer day to day is not, and can not in practical terms, be vetted to a scientific level of confidence. But that's entirely different from saying it can not be studied scientifically. I have a hard time thinking of anything EMPIRICAL that can't, in principle, be studied scientifically, so long as the terms are defined specifically enough.
(Except perhaps for some first principles of reason, that are necessary for justifying the scientific process in the first place).
OK, regarding the music, what I am saying is that it cannot be measured objectively (favourite word in the forum). Eg. THD, SINAD etc... they are measured using equipment and it return certain values. We can't measure music that way. Maybe the better word to use is genre. Whether the person enjoy listening to the music/song is entirely up to the person's own experience and preferences. This is where its entirely subjective.
Holmz
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It appears like it largely so, and the formula is used in the majority of more modern music.
MattHooper
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When anyone says "X can't be studied scientifically" there will often be scientists already out there saying: "Hold My Beer..."
Holmz
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Yeah… but please don’t touch your lips to bottle, before you pass it over... That is all I ask.
coonmanx
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Why is it that whenever someone puts something new into a system, the results are always that "the soundstage opened up and disappeared to beyond the speakers... It was like a blanket was lifted"? Why is that always what happens? LOL. It's called expectation bias frankly...
I just got to the end of Paul McGowan's book "99% True" for the second time. And when he starts blathering on about subjectivity and not being able to measure certain things I think he is truly peddling in snake oil. In fact he pretty much said exactly what I put in those quotes in the previous paragraph. Go figure...
I just got to the end of Paul McGowan's book "99% True" for the second time. And when he starts blathering on about subjectivity and not being able to measure certain things I think he is truly peddling in snake oil. In fact he pretty much said exactly what I put in those quotes in the previous paragraph. Go figure...
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