OP
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- #61
What would you accept as evidence of it being totally junk?
What percentage of such reports do you consider reliable evidence of audibility?
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Can You Trust Your Ears? By Tom Nousaine
- Thread starter amirm
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What percentage of such reports do you consider reliable evidence of audibility?
This is a very narrow definition of qualitative approaches. I do qualitative social science work, and I identify very strongly with a neo-positivist tradition. Jakob1863 is right: qualitative research is often about exploring what people think and experience, in more depth than quantitative research is able to do. This doesn't need to entail a relativist view of truth.
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Well that is exactly my problem with it. What little I have been involved with using such information, which is not much and it is not an area I work in, it does become a relativist approach without solid yardsticks. Engineers can deal with some relativism. No part is perfectly made with zero tolerance zero variation. No machine performs perfectly according to theory. One must have priorities in any design. There is a solid yardstick to gage the differences however. So yes I picked the narrow definition out of a 69 page document because it concisely typified what I see as a problem with that approach when it is used.
Hmmm... I am an engineer, and some say a pretty good one, but I do not think I have seen as much talk about philosophical stuff and engineers since college days of post-bar-closing early morning drink-a-thons after a big test or finals. Pretty sure most of us do not think about "neo-positivist tradition" and such when doing our designs. A cross section of audio theory both technical and practical should include some background on hearing and perception, but at the end of the day I'm likely to be working from a data sheet to realize a design, then don't get close to the whole "how do we hear" debate until listening tests and tweaks driven as much or more by listening panels and marketing than engineering.
Anyway, this one's over my head and beyond the ken of my little pea brain, have at it! - Don
Anyway, this one's over my head and beyond the ken of my little pea brain, have at it! - Don
Hehe, good point Don
The whole point of these philosophical discussions are actually about the limits of our knowledge. Nobody claims you need philosophy to design stuff. The question is whether there are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" in audio, to quote the great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld. Even if you design the best DAC known to man, can you be absolutely sure you've understood all there is to understand about DAC technology? No.
No need to be philosophical, IMO. Sound produced by live musicians, using acoustic instruments or amplication which is part of the instrument, has certain qualities which nearly all playback systems fail to achieve. That is, those "untrustworthy" ears have absolutely no problem picking the difference, even in the most casual circumstances - thus the goal, IMO, if there is to be one in the audio field, would be to eliminate that disparity.
IME this is achievable, and one of the features of the quality required is that the speakers become totally invisible, that is, cannot be located using acoustic clues. Then arguments about whether the test is blind or sighted become irrelevant, because simple "mechanical" testing can be used to confirm this quality. The latter may be needed, in fact, because some people's hearing may not work in a way to allow this 'illusion' to manifest.
IME this is achievable, and one of the features of the quality required is that the speakers become totally invisible, that is, cannot be located using acoustic clues. Then arguments about whether the test is blind or sighted become irrelevant, because simple "mechanical" testing can be used to confirm this quality. The latter may be needed, in fact, because some people's hearing may not work in a way to allow this 'illusion' to manifest.
Seems as soon as the word 'trust' is mentioned guys feel the need to endlessly explain themselves
I think there's philosophy all over the place in engineering. For example, if you create a 'fuzzy' neural network-based system, or a system that learns from the real world, you are accepting that it may do things that are not clearly defined. This is a distinct philosophy in comparison to creating systems that can only respond in defined ways. Adding a hardware fail safe limiter outside the fuzzy system, so as to contain the consequences of it 'going mad' is another example of philosophy.
A desirable attribute in electronic engineering would be a circuit that is 'hardened' to survive all external faults, and this would again be an example of a "philosophy". Boutique audio manufacturers who weren't capable of designing such a thing would claim that their "philosophy" was the simplest possible signal path, instead.
You can argue there's philosophy behind everything, and probably make a good case for it, just as a psychiatrist could make a good case that everyone is a little crazy (deviates from societal norms somehow), but as I said it is background, part of experience and the thought process, not something I sit around and discuss or even actively think about when doing a design. No doubt other engineers are more philosophical. Me, I just want to build stuff that works, and works well. Usually under some insane combination of schedule, performance, and cost goals... For years I lived in the worked of bleeding-edge R&D where too often this cliche was reality: "Cost, schedule, performance: pick two, settle for one." I was lucky enough that most of my career focused on performance (currently schedule and cost duke it out, performance is a given, and schedule usually wins).
Philosophy can be fun and interesting but makes my brain hurt.
Me, I just want to build stuff that works, and works well. Usually under some insane combination of schedule, performance, and cost goals... For years I lived in the worked of bleeding-edge R&D where too often this cliche was reality: "Cost, schedule, performance: pick two, settle for one." I was lucky enough that most of my career focused on performance (currently schedule and cost duke it out, performance is a given, and schedule usually wins).Philosophy can be fun and interesting but makes my brain hurt.
Jakob1863
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As the assertion is contrary to my own experience - not only in doing "blind" controlled listening tests myself but also from conducting tests with other people, i can´t accept that _it_ _is_ "totally junk" .
Otoh, as empirical results are just probabilities i have to accept that it nevertheless could be "totally junk" although it is highly unlikely that my/our results were all due to chance.
There can´t be a serious estimation on that number; based on my experience i know, that people are very different in their ability and in their self description.
It´s the same with other parts of life, if i know about people and think i can have some confidence in what they are telling, i am more willing to give it a try. That i beliefe them (or their description as a correct attribution of cause and effect) right from the beginning is quite rare.
OP
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- #71
Well, I have tested that ability professionally. When I was at Microsoft I thought we as audiophiles must have better ability to hear compression artifacts than general population. We did a large scale test and found that self-selected audiophiles were no better than the general public. Artifacts that I and our other trained listeners could hear was not audible to them. We were desperate to find more testers through them to help advance our audio technology but the conclusions were quite strong: audiophiles could not hear these non-linear and small artifacts.
Similar data is confirmed by Harman which showed audiophiles, reviewers, sales people, etc. while having similar preference to trained listeners, are quite unreliable in their voting/detecting linear artifacts (frequency response deviations). When I attended a similar test at Harman with a group of audio dealers, they all failed the test at very high levels of impairments. I did much better but Dr. Olive did far better than me. It is clear that audiophiles and their dealers simply don't know how to search, find and identify artifacts properly.
Yes, there is an occasional audiophile that has good ability here but it simply is not the norm.
All of the above listening tests used stimulus that had provable audible impairments. So imagine what I think of the performance of audiophiles when such provable distortions are not there, i.e. cables, power conditions, etc. To the extent they fail the tests I mention yet declare all audio tweaks as night and day, veils removed, etc. tells me that they can't possibly be right. Such differences if audible, will be incredibly subtle. No such description will come from it.
There has also been rare situations where these audiophiles were subjected to modicum of control, e.g. single blind testing, and they all fail and fail catastrophically. The moment they close their eyelids, all of the differences that they say were night and day disappear. I have been in the same boat and know the feeling of being so wrong.
It is on the basis of nearly two decades of experience that I say the outcomes reported in these specific areas is 100% unreliable. Junk if you will. It is not some random hyperbole that I am throwing out there.
Of course I can be swayed to change my opinion. Let's set up a controlled test of the category of devices I mentioned and see the success rate. Folks will bulk and hence the reason I offered my $1,000. In absence of that, I can't give any benefit of doubt here.
OP
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- #72
Here is the data from Harman:
Compare the column for Audio Reviewers to "HAR" trained listeners. Let's look at the speaker "B" in blue. See how audio reviewers gave it much higher scores than the trained listeners (6 vs 2), indicating they were much less sensitive to artifacts in loudspeakers.
Compare the column for Audio Reviewers to "HAR" trained listeners. Let's look at the speaker "B" in blue. See how audio reviewers gave it much higher scores than the trained listeners (6 vs 2), indicating they were much less sensitive to artifacts in loudspeakers.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #73
And this for the overall score:
OP
- Thread Starter
- #74
The above of course is walk in the park compared to hearing the effect of audio tweaks. We are talking about loudspeakers with obvious frequency response deviations. If folks can be so bad there, what hope is there for them hearing such tiny electrical effects as audio tweaks?
The ASA answer is that human hearing can adapt to some imperfections, but not to others. Let's say a speaker has a "perfect" FR, but every now and again a voice coil very slightly rubs where it shouldn't, and a buzz is added to the mix. The latter is distortion, there is something additional to what should be there - yes, you can hear past it; but are you going to be content with the performance of the rig?
Personally, I have zero interest in whether one system, or component is better than another. The only thing that matters is whether I can hear flaws in the reproduction, from whatever cause - which makes the job of picking a winner easy; it's the one with the least number of flaws.
If picking a winner is easy, why after all these years do you still not possess the winner? Wouldn't life be easier if you built a system out of the winners of winners? And then you could put away your Blu-Tack for good...
Every system's a winner. That is, it has the potential to be such; but usually fails because there are still audible flaws that haven't been addressed. The winner of all winners would use the very best loudspeaker components to get the best possible outcome on that side of things, but this would be expensive to try.
My interest is in understanding why a particular system still has audible flaws, and whether those issues can be resolved without going to extreme lengths about it.
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I guarantee I could hear a step change of 3dB in the volume of my amplifier while listening to music. I'm pretty sure I'd notice many 3dB anomalies in frequency response. I guarantee I couldn't hear a change in distortion level from -115dB to -105dB.
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