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Can we trust our ears?

Julf

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What about Grado labs?, there stuff is pure subjective and in objective terms mesure like crap even there GS2000e has very high THD. Yet they have a quite a fanbase.

I think popular culture has shown us that a large fan base is no guarantee of quality. :)
 

anmpr1

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Also, I do believe that magazines like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound do a great service for the audio community in general because it creates a sense of romanticism for the hobby. This is supposed to be a fun journey...
Well, if one's notion of 'fun' and having a good time is going to the circus and watching a carny bark for the bearded lady, then I guess. That's about the level of Stereophile's 'journalism'. I have more respect for pro-wrestling. At least Vince came out and admitted his show was bogus, and he had the decency to invent the term 'sports entertainment'. If Atkinson, or whomever is running the show over there would do the same, I could at least take them a little more seriously--simply as a choreographed attempt to provide an entertaining pastime to either gullable readers, or readers who are smart, and choose to suspend a very big disbelief.
 

anmpr1

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What about Grado labs?, there stuff is pure subjective and in objective terms mesure like crap even there GS2000e has very high THD. Yet they have a quite a fanbase.
The high end Grado products seem to be more in the 'luxury' mold. Fancy woods and choice leathers. I understand their entry level products are well received at the price point, although I admit to never hearing a Grado headphone.

But however it is, I am happy to give Grado a pass, given that (as far as I know) the organization is the only remaining family owned company, hailing from the early days of hi-fi when patriarch Joe was hand building phonograph cartridges of various designs. There is something to be said for that kind of family oriented business tradition. I don't think I am being too sentimental in this regard.
 

kach22i

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I have not read the papers but the low bit rate relates to long term retention as the brain throws out most of it hears. It will remember a violin a year from now, not some "micro dynamics" in a song. The bit rates for short term memory are quite high and hence the reason it is more valid than long term.
That is an interesting observation/comment.

Perhaps related, it is claimed that very young children see and hear more than adults.

If I am recalling correctly; in adults the brain relies on past experiences to complete the picture so it only processes about 20% of intake and uses 80% of past experiences to fill in the rest.

In very young children they are taking in everything for the first time and focus on every nuance as there is no past experience to fill in the rest. They tend to be totally focused, which to an adult used to multitasking looks like the infants/toddlers are distracted (they are not).

Perhaps when an adult focuses their attention to take in more content they have turned this "new experience" switch on.

In the audio hobby this is called critical listening (active concentration), verses just enjoying the music and letting your brain fill in the rest passively.
 

kach22i

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In a sidebar topic of "Can We Trust Our Ears"..........................

Seems a small study group experimenting with surround surround front speaker, side speaker and rear speaker volume on variable loudness and reverb delay in general liked more rear sound than a opera hall would naturally have but in real time, not delayed as much as in real hall.

PDF describing AWS verses LEV and more.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjANegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw1StYt9-Dla6uIKcT80DUpn

We cannot trust our ears because we would rather be in the band on stage and not in the audience, we want to be participants and not voyeurs?
 

anmpr1

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A) If I am recalling correctly; in adults the brain relies on past experiences to complete the picture so it only processes about 20% of intake and uses 80% of past experiences to fill in the rest. In very young children they are taking in everything for the first time and focus on every nuance as there is no past experience to fill in the rest. Perhaps when an adult focuses their attention to take in more content they have turned this "new experience" switch on.

B) In the audio hobby this is called critical listening (active concentration), verses just enjoying the music and letting your brain fill in the rest passively.

A) You find this in reading. When learning to read you take each individual word, sound it out, then integrate word-meanings syntactically into a meaningful sentence. Once you learn how to read, you 'scan' or 'glimpse' the entire sentence. This leads to misunderstandings when the word you expect (i.e. the word you 'fill in') turns out not to be the actual printed word. I do that all the time when reading headlines which are written to condense meaning. I substitute for the printed word what I expect to find, making me have to go back and actually reread the headline in order to discover its true meaning. Sometimes with hilarious results.

B) However, in a 'critical' listening test one would expect that the listener would be taking their time, actually concentrating on the task, and hence open to nuances within the recorded passage. That this sort of critical listening cannot demonstrate 'differences' in level matched components argues against the 'fill in the blank' theory of casual listening. Subjectivists tend to use the casual method in order to discern all the fine distinctions among gear, but cannot do it whenever they concentrate their attention on finding differences.

One would in fact expect it to be the other way around. The fact that it isn't leads me to believe that their casual 'method' is simply imagination--substituting what they expect to be there for what actually is.
 

kach22i

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A) You find this in reading. .........
Great example, I have found myself typing in large case for the word NOT, simply because I'm either absentmindedly leaving it out of a sentence or reading right over it when in small case.

That is NOT what I want to do. ;)
 

krabapple

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Unless differences are perceptually 'large', no, you can't trust your ears unless you have truly used only your ears. And even then, when your ears are telling you correctly that two things sound different, your preference for one or the other can be grossly biased by non-audible factors. These are the very reasons blind protocols are used in psychoacoustics. As for this test, 'audiophiles' who claim that 'lossy' or 'mp3' (used as a blanket term) is immediately, obviously, reliably discernible to them (or their wives), without specifying codecs or bitrates or test samples, are deluded. (I'm not saying that's happening here; it's common in many audio forums, consumer and professional)
 

audiophile

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I have not read the papers but...

I live this every day as I evaluate audio. There is no way, no how longer term listening is useful for hearing critical differences.
The paper does not contradict your listening experience. The authors classify what you do as "trained listening", which is one of the categories they suggested, depending on the goals of a subjective listening test. Other categories include "easy listening" and "slow listening".

Excerpt from the paper:

With regard to subjective testing, pre-qualification must ensure subjects are entirely familiar with artifacts to be detected and reported when testing is based on immediate conscious responding; but it is indicated to generally be highly aware of:

- Listener experience,
- Listener attention,
- Listening duration.

Experience includes intimate familiarity with the features tested and the listening environment. Attention means allocating perceptual bandwidth fully to hearing and focused listening, or less.

Time means enough to satisfy every experience / learning / fatigue-probing criteria, or less. The time required could depend on whether or not the subject is multilingual or a musician, on his or her age, sound pressure level, etc., but three practical categories are suggested: Easy listening, trained listening, and slow listening.


Easy Listening for investigation of topics people should generally be able to evaluate. For instance, if sound is too loud, voice is intelligible, or reproduction is flat or immersive. Besides from understanding a language, there is no need to invoke temporal grey-zone skills.

Trained Listening when investigating topics that require conscious listening with attention, for instance relating to the temporal grey-zone (short duration sounds), dynamic balance, spectral balance, assessment of imaging, etc.


Because experience plays such a fundamental role for our starting point when subjected to sensory stimuli, listeners should either use a room and equipment they know intimately, or have plenty of time to get to know an acoustic environment before any tests are performed. Based on a limited perceptual bandwidth and eight hours of dedicated listening per day, getting to know a room and equipment in any detail would take at least a week but assuming years would be safer.

Trained listening has been emphasized in literature, for instance [13], but we might still underestimate the time required for pre and post listening learning and fatigue assessment, or at least do not observe the importance of the various temporal elements strongly enough.

Slow Listening is used for investigating audio questions of possible long-term influence, where all four quadrants of Fig. 2 have to be considered.

Slow listening should at least employ the time an experienced listener needs to potentially quantify fatigue, i.e., typically hours under completely known and controlled conditions; including listening level. In case what is tested for is unfamiliar, slow listening could take as long as it would for the subject to learn a new language, maybe more.

When reaching out, we first need to know of what to reach for; so subjective tests, even producing repeatable results, may have little long-term relevance if too confined in time.
 

Julf

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audiophile

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Thanks for referencing that “double-blind triple-stimulus with hidden reference” methodology. I haven't seen this paper before, but had read about its spectacular failure in a test conducted by Swedish Radio when a single person immediately identified a 1.5kHz artefact, that wasn't revealed in an extensive listening test (based on this ITU standard), with over 20,000 separate trials and 60 "expert listeners". This case only confirms what the guys at Genelec are suggesting: if you don't know what to look for you might not notice it in a quick listening test.
 

Julf

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Thanks for referencing that “double-blind triple-stimulus with hidden reference” methodology. I haven't seen this paper before, but had read about its spectacular failure in a test conducted by Swedish Radio when a single person immediately identified a 1.5kHz artefact, that wasn't revealed in an extensive listening test (based on this ITU standard), with over 20,000 separate trials and 60 "expert listeners".

Any links/references?
 

Julf

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I read about it here and on some other sources. It references this paper describing the test, which I haven't read since it is behind a paywall.
As far as I understand the comments on the 1.5kHz artifact were made by Bart Locanthi after the paper was published.

Interesting, considering the ITU standard I linked to is from 2015 and the AES paper that Stereophile refers to is from 1991.

Anyway, based on the paper, it is unclear if the artifact was actually in the samples used in the test, or just the DAT tape they sent to Locanthi.
 

audiophile

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Interesting, considering the ITU standard I linked to is from 2015 and the AES paper that Stereophile refers to is from 1991.
Perhaps it was updated since then, I recognized it by the name: “double-blind triple-stimulus with hidden reference”.
 

Julf

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MUSHRA (MUltiple Stimuli with Hidden Reference and Anchor) is actually a pretty general concept.
 

Martin

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The high end Grado products seem to be more in the 'luxury' mold. Fancy woods and choice leathers. I understand their entry level products are well received at the price point, although I admit to never hearing a Grado headphone.

But however it is, I am happy to give Grado a pass, given that (as far as I know) the organization is the only remaining family owned company, hailing from the early days of hi-fi when patriarch Joe was hand building phonograph cartridges of various designs. There is something to be said for that kind of family oriented business tradition. I don't think I am being too sentimental in this regard.

I love the sound of Grado cartridges. I just upgraded my Reference Sonata to a Reference Sonata 2 via their stylus replacement trade-in program. I don’t care how they measure. I like their sound. I like listening to vinyl. I know my flac CD rips playing through my Topping DX7s measure better but I sometimes prefer listening to vinyl.

I trust my ears far enough to know what I like.

Martin
 

Julf

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krabapple

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The paper does not contradict your listening experience. The authors classify what you do as "trained listening", which is one of the categories they suggested, depending on the goals of a subjective listening test. Other categories include "easy listening" and "slow listening".

Excerpt from the paper:

With regard to subjective testing, pre-qualification must ensure subjects are entirely familiar with artifacts to be detected and reported when testing is based on immediate conscious responding; but it is indicated to generally be highly aware of:

- Listener experience,
- Listener attention,
- Listening duration.

Experience includes intimate familiarity with the features tested and the listening environment. Attention means allocating perceptual bandwidth fully to hearing and focused listening, or less.


yes, yes, but the real impetus behind this is encapsulated in a true (under)statement that appears a bit earlier in the paper:

"Using traditional subjective testing, it has proven difficult to argue clearly in favor of higher data-rates than 48 kHz/24 bit linear PCM per channel [12]. "

Certain people (including Thomas Lund) has been pushing the idea that we can 'hear' hi rez, for years. Since the experimental data in support of that have been so very sparse, hard-won, and disputable at best, now we get this review to prop the window open.

But this tack, as always, ignores the elephant in the room: people who tend to say they 'hear' the benefits of hi rez, tend to say they 'hear' it without *ANY* of the elaborate training protocols this review proposes, including extended listening. So, are they 'really' hearing it, or not?Should we believe what such self-professed 'golden ears' (including hi rez cheerleaders in industry, in media...let's call them 'influencers') say about their (sighted, always sighted) perceptions?

Here's a radical idea: The way to test their claim is not to 'train' them (or worse, train someone other then them) to hear artifacts, etc. That's unnecessary. They already hear it, right? The thing to do is to get *them* to take a DBT using their own usual listening conditions and musical choices...you know, the ones they claim are good enough to let them hear the difference 'just like that', and 'so do my wife/kids/neighbors who drop by'. The only difference being, now they don't know in advance whether A or B is hi rez.

Testing whether it's possible to *ever* hear 'hi rez' -- basically, finding conditions that reveal the true outer limits of human hearing -- is a *different thing* and it is the thing that psychoacoustics is actually interested in. But that's not quite the same as testing golden ear claims. Which is why even if Lund, Stuart, et al. finally, at long last, eked out solid positive results for such as test as theirs, it *still* wouldn't demonstrate that 'golden ears' are to be believed by default. Because the data *will* have to be 'eaked out'. Because from all the data we have, and are likely to ever have, hi rez, if it can be heard at all, is at best *hard to hear*.
 
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