Ethan Winer Builds a Wire Null Tester

[Shazb0t]

He didn't say that Ethan's test is blind. He says that some blind tests (and years of DIY) contradict Ethan's test. Which tests exactly is yet to be seen

Fair enough, but everything I said still holds true. The null test is definitive. I see no honest counter argument from people criticizing this experiment. You could listen to the null signal blind if you wanted to! It would still be silence

 

[MRC01]

Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I think most of us know that ancient Greeks and perhaps even earlier societies knew the Earth was spherical. The ancient Greeks even estimated the size of the Earth with surprisingly good accuracy given their tools. I assumed the "many millenia" comment was about older human societies, like pre-agriculture, before 10,000 BC.

 

[pkane]

I think most of us know that ancient Greeks and perhaps even earlier societies knew the Earth was spherical. The ancient Greeks even estimated the size of the Earth with surprisingly good accuracy given their tools. I assumed the "many millenia" comment was about older human societies, like pre-agriculture, before 10,000 BC.

The Flat Earth.

History of flat earth ideas.

www.lockhaven.edu

 

[Frgirard]

I think most of us know that ancient Greeks and perhaps even earlier societies knew the Earth was spherical. The ancient Greeks even estimated the size of the Earth with surprisingly good accuracy given their tools. I assumed the "many millenia" comment was about older human societies, like pre-agriculture, before 10,000 BC.

Eratosthene de Cyrene.

A child can do the same thing if has trigonometry concepts

 

[maverickronin]

I assumed the "many millenia" comment was about older human societies, like pre-agriculture, before 10,000 BC.

I would not have read it like that since once you go back that far there's not really any evidence of what people would have thought about the shape of the earth one way or the other.

 

[MRC01]

Well, that's the point. The Earth appears (and is) relatively flat locally. If we go back far enough in time, there would no reason or evidence for anyone to assume it is any other shape. It's an assumption on our part, but a reasonable one based on Occam's razor. Otherwise they might as well assume the Earth to be banana-shaped, as Sir Bedevere explained in a famous movie.

 

[maverickronin]

If we go back far enough in time, there would no reason or evidence for anyone to assume it is any other shape.

Not at all. All the evidence you could ever need would have been available to various cultures throughout pre-history.

 

[pkane]

Well, that's the point. The Earth appears (and is) relatively flat locally. If we go back far enough in time, there would no reason or evidence for anyone to assume it is any other shape. It's an assumption on our part, but a reasonable one based on Occam's razor. Otherwise they might as well assume the Earth to be banana-shaped, as Sir Bedevere explained in a famous movie.

The point was there's no reason to believe the flat-earth concept in the presence of modern scientific knowledge and information. Just like there's little reason to believe in "major improvements" in audio caused by expensive power cables or interconnects. Such things may sound reasonable to an audiophile when confined to the "local space" of his listening room, but to the rest of the world, the concept has been proven wrong a long time ago.

 

[MRC01]

Not at all. All the evidence you could ever need would have been available to various cultures throughout pre-history.

1000 years from now, if we Humans are still around, we'll have answered many unsolved/unknown mathematics and physics questions of today. Yet all the evidence we'll ever need to understand those answers already exists today, and has existed for billions of years.

The point was there's no reason to believe the flat-earth concept in the presence of modern scientific knowledge and information. Just like there's little reason to believe in "major improvements" in audio caused by expensive power cables or interconnects. Such things may sound reasonable to an audiophile when confined to the "local space" of his listening room, but to the rest of the world, the concept has been proven wrong a long time ago.

Agreed.

 

[Hans-Wolfgang]

I don't think Ethan's test will do much to change any of the die-hard believer's mind. The mechanism of the test is too complicated for them to grasp what it is demonstrating.

What it is good for is what Ethan says at the start: that is, we say cables make no difference but we don't have good data to point to. In that regard, it provides more evidence for us to be convinced of its truth.

Hello,
I'm sending you this link to a French video that's probably understandable with English subtitles. In my opinion, this young sound engineer gives an excellent demonstration of the absence of any influence of cable quality on digital signal transmission.
I, as a music lover and user of fairly standard HIFI equipment, would be interested in a typical installation at a reasonable cost, and which excludes as far as possible interference from analog streams (RCA, loudspeakers, cable crossovers etc.).
A second question I'm asking myself, like many others, is it "musically" useful to invest in a new streamer to listen in "HIRES" with Qobuz, or is my SONOS connect and Bridge1 module enough?

I really appreciate your work

Sincerely

Hans Wolfgang Spiess/ Rouen France

 

[solderdude]

The electrical signal (that carries the digital information) arguably can be different between different cables.
That, however, is not an issue for transmission of digital data as long as the data, represented by voltages, is not compromised too much for the receiver of that digital data so that it could misinterpret the electrical signal.

This thus depends on:

• The data transmitter
• The cable (yes it could matter)
• The receiver
• The processing of the received data
• The conversion process
• The analog section after the conversion

It also has nothing to do with the analog null tester discussed in this thread

 

[Killingbeans]

Also, when a digital audio transmission get bad enough to become audible, it won't result in the subtle effects people often imagine like "collapsing soundstage", "non-black background" and what have you. It will be more akin to playing a CD that's been used as a beer coasters for decades

I, as a music lover and user of fairly standard HIFI equipment, would be interested in a typical installation at a reasonable cost, and which excludes as far as possible interference from analog streams (RCA, loudspeakers, cable crossovers etc.).

You most likely have no interference worth mentioning in your current setup, and whatever's getting through is either not causing problems and/or those problems gets drowned completely in the residual noise of the system itself.

A second question I'm asking myself, like many others, is it "musically" useful to invest in a new streamer to listen in "HIRES" with Qobuz, or is my SONOS connect and Bridge1 module enough?

Only if those "Hi-Res" files have been compiled from better masters, and that's a bit of a crapshoot. Personally I woudn't bother.

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I just stumbled across it and thought it would be of interest here.

"Why We Believe" by Ethan Winer. I'm not sure when this was written - the copyright notice is 1997, but he mentions an article from 2006, so it must not be too old.

Anyway, food for thought about why some people hear differences in cables etc. The answer is that they do hear differences! Just not for the commonly asserted reasons.

 

[Keith_W]

I don't think Ethan is right about this one. Comb filtering certainly is a thing, and you can certainly measure it with a static microphone. But all you need to do is move the microphone a bit and the comb filtering pattern changes. Your head is not a static microphone, it will "average out" all but the worst comb filtering.

Some time ago I asked JJ about why we can hear a flanger so easily but comb filtering is so difficult to hear. FYI a "flanger" is an effect that can be added digitally or via an analog console that deliberately introduces comb filtering. His reply was that comb filtering introduced by rooms have relatively small delays compared to flangers, so there is less "flanging" going on. If you have the ability to put VST's in your signal path, I suggest you try it. Flanging introduces a nasal or metallic coloration depending on the frequencies involved.

His other reason - poor auditory memory - is by far the more likely reason.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I don't think Ethan is right about this one. Comb filtering certainly is a thing, and you can certainly measure it with a static microphone. But all you need to do is move the microphone a bit and the comb filtering pattern changes. Your head is not a static microphone, it will "average out" all but the worst comb filtering.

I'm with @Keith_W. The graph differences in Ethan's Figure 1 will not be audible with program material.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Keith_W]

By the way, Ethan has claimed in the past that as a studio engineer, his hearing is far more sensitive to comb filtering than most people. He disagrees with Toole precisely on this point. Toole has said that the upper RT60 target can be achieved with normal room furnishing alone. Ethan thinks that Toole (an engineer/scientist) has less studio experience than he does, so Toole doesn't hear the comb filtering that bothers Ethan so much.

This is one of the claims that makes you go "hmmmmmmmmm". It's impossible to blind test, and even with sighted testing it's difficult to conduct a preference test. I can change the RT60 in my room and reduce specular reflections and comb filtering simply by taking my acoustic foam out of storage and deploying them around the room. The effect is profound, and I don't like it. But whether it's because I have become accustomed to the sound of my room, or whether it is genuinely worse is hard for me to say! I have tried it with guests and I have asked them whether they prefer it with or without? Most of them say "without".

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

It's impossible to blind test...

Yeah, I can't come up with a double blind experiment that would test the hypothesis in Ethan's article. OTOH, confirmation bias has been established fairly conclusively in many fields not just audio so I suppose we can stick with that.

 

[Daverz]

Yeah, the comb filtering thing strikes me as another "just so" story. It's completely unnecessary to explain why we hear differences: that's just he way our brains work.

 

[fatoldgit]

I run a funky four channel system from two channel sources... I don't do anything too exotic with my rear speaker signal.

I run this way cause I have a massive number of stereo albums from prior to modern pan potting so the sound stage is hard left, center and hard right. By using two volume controls (one master for the fronts and one slaved off this for the rears) I can control the relative volume between fronts and rears and with a specific speaker layout I can get the hard left and hard right images to stretch out and relocate to the outsides of what would be their normal clustered/narrowed location in a two channel system, which makes whatever sound that occupies this space lifelike.

And this setup works just as well for pan potted modern recordings so nothing is lost in this setup.

I have a DEQX HDP-4 to assist in this setup and if I measure my well treated room with any number of room measurement software, they all show massive comb filtering.

Yet in reality there is none that can be perceived. I have a suite of 40 test tracks that I have curated over the last 30 years and thus have a good baseline for identifying room issues (flabby bass, comb filtering, lack of crispness etc)

Now my use case is relatively unique but my conclusions are, based on my struggles to match what I hear with what room measurement software shows, is that room measurement software is very limited in how it can interpret what is really happening and how we really hear.

It can obviously help with identifying egregious issues but once stuff is dialed in somewhat, I think the false positives start to come into play and you can go down a rat hole.

Peter

 

[RayDunzl]

It's hard to hear comb with two ears.

Play 1khz from both speakers.

Put yer finger in one ear to plug it.

Move around a bit and hear the tone vanish and reappear.

Experiment further from there if you like.

Same effect happens to both ears listening but at different times, so you don't notice it so much.