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General debate thread about audio measurements

Thomas savage

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My point didn't have much to do with blind testing. It's about using measurements as some sort of declarative tool for making large pronouncements when the small (measured) differences noted don't really have much to do with predicting how a unit would sound during music listening. But yet people trash gear on here and chortle at manufacturers based on these small differences. Some demand to know why anybody would choose any gear that produces even slightly worse than their favorite measurements even though they have little reflection on the sound.
You do come across as anti knowledge, that basically nothing is known and it’s all up to some layman interpretation where ultimately nothing is wrong.

Folks here will rebel against that, you might find that hostile but we are a knowledge based platform, the members here don’t subscribe to the post modern mentality your embodying.

If a piece of electronics has a task to perform you can measure it, there’s known performance parameters to judge stuff by.. if you want to ignore all that and judge things by what some guy says they hear and further more expect knowledge to bend to that whimsical notion that’s fine but don’t expect that to not irritate folks here .

We all create room for each other , you would do well to realise your own effect on others before you blame them for not accommodating you..

Sometimes we question things because we believe there’s more to being human than there really is.. there’s reality then there’s the demands of our perception, it’s a cart before the horse issue imo.

Ultimately we must respect what’s known while keeping room for new understanding, that’s a difficult place for folks to reside , especially on these social media platforms. We can all do better in making room for our mutual effect on one another .
 

garbulky

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You do come across as anti knowledge, that basically nothing is known and it’s all up to some layman interpretation where ultimately nothing is wrong.

Folks here will rebel against that, you might find that hostile but we are a knowledge based platform, the members here don’t subscribe to the post modern mentality your embodying.
Absolutely. I think mutual respect is important.
FYI, having a degree in science (non audio), I am not anti-knowledge. If I was, I would NOT BE HERE.

However, pointing out a flaw in an interpretation is not the same as being anti-knowledge. We have to be honest with ourselves about what we can and can't do with data. I see it repeatedly said that level matched DBT testing proves that people are deluding themselves. It absolutely does not. Now are these people deluding themselves? Always possible. But nobody challenges this interpretation of null DBT results. People take it as gospel truth that they just proved delusion. They did not. Does it make common sense that it proves people are making it up? Not to me because that's not what DBT proves. We are bending DBT results to make it fit a popular line of thinking.

If a piece of electronics has a task to perform you can measure it, there’s known performance parameters to judge stuff by.. if you want to ignore all that
I am not. I'm just not ignoring that because a parameter measures different that it doesn't automatically manifest as sounding bad or even audible. We have to take the amount in to account.
and judge things by what some guy says they hear and further more expect knowledge to bend to that whimsical notion that’s fine
Well I basically judge things by what I hear, but I don't call it scientific. I can't because it's not. It's subjective. It's subject to bias. I'll listen to what other people say about their subjective listening impressions too. But they aren't scientific either and subject to bias.

but don’t expect that to not irritate folks here.
I see that it does, evidently. I think that's a personal problem.

We all create room for each other , you should realised your own effect on others before you blame them for not accommodating you..
I don't ask for accomodation. I ask for some civility. People think that because they are right they can jump on somebody the outlier. That's herd mentality and is no excuse for bad behavior. Not that that will stop bad behavior.

Sometimes we question things because we believe there’s more to being human than there really is.. there’s reality then there’s the demands of our perception, it’s a cart before the horse issue.

Ultimately we must respect what’s known while keeping room for new understanding, that’s a difficult place for folks to reside , especially on these social media platforms. We can all do better in making room for our mutual effect.
I'm all for more respect. :) I like music and I suspect so do some of you :p (I kid!) I think there's too few audio enthusiasts in the world so I think it's good to be civil.
 

garbulky

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Okay, I think I understand you better now.

I largely agree. As long as that isn't an excuse for over-priced sub-standard gear. Still room for appearance, or UI differences, or feature differences or plenty of things to differentiate beyond sound and make different prices for different gear make sense.

So where do we draw the line? Is that a question you have or a suggestion you'd like to make or just wish it were discussed more than the fact Dac A has .0002% distortion and Dac B is substandard because it has .03% distortion when in fact both will sound the same.
Thanks for the reply. I don't think it's out of line with saying measurement wise one dac performs worse than the other because they do. I don't have much more to add. I guess a bit more talk about how it relates to the user experience of listening would be beneficial. My post was really with Frank. And his initial question was about measurements and differences which was what I was responding to. I moved it here because they've requested that they keep these debates out of the yggy measurement thread.
 
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Sal1950

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We have to be honest with ourselves about what we can and can't do with data. I see it repeatedly said that level matched DBT testing proves that people are deluding themselves. It absolutely does not.
DBT is the gold standard by which all avenues of science take to determine if a result is actual or fictional. I don't know what you would use as a alternate?

Does it make common sense that it proves people are making it up?
Yes, absolutely.

Well I basically judge things by what I hear, but I don't call it scientific. I can't because it's not. It's subjective. It's subject to bias. I'll listen to what other people say about their subjective listening impressions too. But they aren't scientific either and subject to bias.
For the millionth time, no one here has ever denied your or anyone's right to chose your components by the way you think they sound, that's a perfectly acceptable path. Just don't present it as a path to choosing a accurate playback system. That would be a grave error of judgement.

I guess a bit more talk about how it relates to the user experience of listening would be beneficial.
What about the "user experience", why are we back there? Beyond the user interface, etc: Amir's measurements will reveal any differences. DBT's would reveal if there are audible differences that can be attributed to those measured differences and pinpoint possible areas of improvement.
 

garbulky

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DBT is the gold standard by which all avenues of science take to determine if a result is actual or fictional. I don't know what you would use as a alternate?
I don;t know. I think the answer has to do with relating measurements to perception to a much greater level than we do now.

I'd disagree about your usage of DBT and note that DBT in audio testing is a bit different from this gold standard you mention.

I feel we've ventured off yet again in to DBT which I have little interest in. If you guys like DBT, go for it.
 
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amirm

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I know the forum loves their level matched dbt's, but I'm not sold on it.
"The forum" has the entire force and credibility of the audio science and engineering behind it. Any other belief is on its own, defying decades of science and research.

I can tell you story after story of how I thought with 100% confidence that there were sonic differences when testing sighted, only to find out that there was none, both in blind tests and both in verification objectively.
 

tomelex

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Garbulky

You can go to a huge audio show and listen to a hundred rooms interpreting the same audio source song, they may sound similar, but you would hear the differences, audio measurments in these rooms would show the differences, even simple ones like FR, THD, IMD, etc, not even going into spectrum analysis. A the end of the day your favorite room has worse measurments than the others, or it has better, but your preference just does not mean anything to us. There is not much to discuss about what you hear, here. We are looking for better stuff that can be measured as better, and science involved in that.

So, say you choose the room with the worst measurments, then all we can say is your preference is for a system that does not accurately reproduce what is on the recorded medium, say you choose the one that has the best measurments, all we can say is you prefer a system that is more true to the recorded source. Where did that get us, scientifically speaking? Now if we did that sample for everybody there and then we would have folks preferring all of the rooms and maybe a few rooms nobody liked, that would allow us to measure and see what the difference is, but I do agree with you that at some point the gear (say electronics part for sure) can reach a level of quality that on its own it can not be made to be technically better and at the same time it will not have any "sound" of its own.

Let me add that I will trust a measurement done today and tomorrow anytime over your ears or mine from day to day, we are so "mystical" in our own skins, hell, we don't even know who "we" are, or where or why our thoughts come up to us from....we are HUGE variables, and why would anyone want to figure just you out when after you set that best audio gear up your heard in your home that after some period of time you are looking to "improve" your system...the system did not change, you did, we are just not to be trusted as our human measuring system is not calibratable, trainable yes, but calibratable, no.
 
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amirm

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So if things do sound notably different in music*, then I doubt it's these things making these differences:
- A -90db snr vs a 120 db snr
- better accuracies of a -90db sine wave (seriously?!)
"Things" don't necessarily sound different as to then look for their signature in these measurements.

As to measurements outside of that presupposition, our hearing in the absolute has about 116 dB of signal to noise ratio. If masking is not in play, we can show that there is audible effect here.

So if possible, we want to do better here than failing a -90 dB sine wave.

Fortunately audiophiles are so bad in hearing nonlinearities that your general point is correct. That they are most likely not hearing these artifacts. They are also NOT hearing the sonic improvements they think is there. All of that is from faulty testing. Do the testing properly and we see that even the cheapest DAC is liable to satisfy them.
 
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amirm

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Here is the thing: it would be incredibly difficult to improve the sonic fidelity of an audio product while leaving all the traditional measurements unchanged. Our instrumentation is exceptionally sensitive. While it may not explain the sonic effects, it catches any and all changes to the transfer function of the device.

This leaves us with only one alternative; that the sound waves did not really change. It is the listener that changed when declaring two audio devices as being different.
 

garbulky

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"Things" don't necessarily sound different as to then look for their signature in these measurements.

As to measurements outside of that presupposition, our hearing in the absolute has about 116 dB of signal to noise ratio. If masking is not in play, we can show that there is audible effect here.

So if possible, we want to do better here than failing a -90 dB sine wave.

Fortunately audiophiles are so bad in hearing nonlinearities that your general point is correct. That they are most likely not hearing these artifacts. They are also NOT hearing the sonic improvements they think is there. All of that is from faulty testing. Do the testing properly and we see that even the cheapest DAC is liable to satisfy them.
Isn't masking almost always in play when listening to music? The dynamic range of most records don't vary anywhere like 116db. I have trouble hearing lower than 50 db of difference, perhaps 40 db.
 

amirm

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Isn't masking almost always in play when listening to music?
No. Masking is content and distortion dependent. This is why on some content lossy compression is transparent, yet in others, audible.
 

March Audio

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But if the measurements are already different, can you say how this difference would manifest in a song you listen to?
You still don't get it.
A technically superior product is a technically superior product. In the simplest terms if it distorts the signal less then it is more accurate.

The onus is on you to demonstrate that the technically inferior product sounds better, which is your implication and Schitt apologist audiophile mentality.

You have it the wrong way round. Please provide evidence your Schitt sounds better than the plethora of technically superior and cheaper products that abound.

Otherwise repeating yourself on this is rather pointless and frankly tedious.
 
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Wombat

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I don;t know. I think the answer has to do with relating measurements to perception to a much greater level than we do now.

I'd disagree about your usage of DBT and note that DBT in audio testing is a bit different from this gold standard you mention.

I feel we've ventured off yet again in to DBT which I have little interest in. If you guys like DBT, go for it.


The perception comes from your auditory reproduction of the pressure waves impacting upon your ear canals and eardrums(add your head shape) and your mind produced influence/distortions added to the audio cortex processing.

Sound waves impacting on the ears can be accurately measured and related to signal in the audio reproduction chain. Analysis equipment is very sophisticated but a doddle compared to signal analysis in other areas of science where signals below noise floors are retrieved from MHz, GHz, THz signals.

The applications are out there for the looking, and explained. You seem to lack such knowledge re the capability of measuring and analysing signals and ignore the biological limitation of 'hearing'. Look within for your perceptiveness.
 

garbulky

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The perception comes from your auditory reproduction of the pressure waves impacting upon your ear canals and eardrums(add your head shape) and your mind produced influence/distortions added to the audio cortex processing.
I am interested in this last bit. I find it fascinating and look forward to more breakthroughs done on this in my lifetime.
I have tons of curious questions.
For instance
How does the brain sync the auditory information up with our visual field and how does it make it happen so fast without much delay? How does the brain translate a complex set of tones in to a particular distinct sound that we perceive.

I think this part has had good research done already: how does the brain use very fast variations between the left and right ear to form a mental shape of the sound.
What mechanism does the brain use to create height information from just two ears?
Are all these perceptual things completely hardwired in to us from birth or do we learn it as we age/practice?
Fascinating stuff.
 

maxxevv

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No they don't sound massively different. Easily proven under controlled blind conditions. You are deluding yourself.

Uncontrolled sighted personal subjective commentary has no credibility in this forum.

Its also dependent on the material being used and the implementation of the devices in question.

Its highly subjective but in my experience using a ES9018 and a ES9038PRO DAC to power a HD800, the tonality/timbre of a violin bow drawing in a short 1 minute segment from an David Oistrakh violin concerto is quite evident to me and my friend.
Playing a XRCD track of Eagles Hotel California yielded minimal (if genuinely discernible) differences. Both of us tried but couldn't really pinpoint nor agree on what (if there were any) differences there were for the latter.

However, there were a wide array of parameters that may have affected this outcome.

i) The end stage output implementation of the two DAC's were different. The ES9018 one had discrete elements for its amplification stage, the ES9038PRO used 6 single channel opamps.
ii) The former had a dedicated headphone jack output, the latter was plugged in via adaptor to its RCA output.
iii) The output impedance of two sets were not correlated.
iv) Output matching of sound levels was manual and not measured.

As such, there might be obvious differences but problem is that there is no way to have a direct , objective comparison of different DAC's or DAC chips unless the overall system conditions can be perfectly matched.
 

RayDunzl

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Are all these perceptual things completely hardwired in to us from birth or do we learn it as we age/practice?

Looking to the Animal World (of which I would argue we are a part), where various creatures pop out of their respective wombs/eggs/cocoons and immediately begin successfully going about their business, would indicate to me that hardwiring is certainly a factor to consider.

Why we (and many others) are relatively helpless at birth is just as interesting a question.

Just watched this year's crop of Carolina Wrens be laid/incubated/hatched/fledged on the patio. It didn't take long for them to have flown away the next time I looked.
 

rebbiputzmaker

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I am interested in this last bit. I find it fascinating and look forward to more breakthroughs done on this in my lifetime.
I have tons of curious questions.
For instance
How does the brain sync the auditory information up with our visual field and how does it make it happen so fast without much delay? How does the brain translate a complex set of tones in to a particular distinct sound that we perceive.

I think this part has had good research done already: how does the brain use very fast variations between the left and right ear to form a mental shape of the sound.
What mechanism does the brain use to create height information from just two ears?
Are all these perceptual things completely hardwired in to us from birth or do we learn it as we age/practice?
Fascinating stuff.
The brain is a very complex organ and one we know much less than we think, and one we are still learning about. The members who you are having this discussion with feel they fully understand the brain, even though they may be misguided, they are of course entitled to their opinions, and you will never convince them otherwise. Recently I have been working on some neuroplasticity research, fascinating stuff. I will give you the same advice I gave to Marie Antoinette. Quit while you still have a head!
 
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Wombat

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The brain is a very complex organ and one we know much less than we think, and one we are still learning about. The members who you are having this discussion with feel they fully understand the brain, even though they may be misguided, they are of course entitled to their opinions, and you will never convince them otherwise. Recently I have been working on some neuroplasticity research, fascinating stuff. I will give you the same advice I gave to Marie Antoinette. Quit while you still have a head!

Where did you get the idea that they feel that they fully understand the brain? Avoid gross-exaggeration and gross-generalisation. Maybe you could spend some time learning about perception and the mind.
 
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Frank Dernie

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I am interested in this last bit. I find it fascinating and look forward to more breakthroughs done on this in my lifetime.
I have tons of curious questions.
For instance
How does the brain sync the auditory information up with our visual field and how does it make it happen so fast without much delay? How does the brain translate a complex set of tones in to a particular distinct sound that we perceive.

I think this part has had good research done already: how does the brain use very fast variations between the left and right ear to form a mental shape of the sound.
What mechanism does the brain use to create height information from just two ears?
Are all these perceptual things completely hardwired in to us from birth or do we learn it as we age/practice?
Fascinating stuff.
Hi,
I know you moved this debate with me here but I am in England, so most of yesterday here there was nothing for me to look at at all and this morning I wake to a large number of posts which take a long time to digest!
My point is this. Whatever the mental or ear brain response is like may be fascinating but in this context it is not relevant, apart from any expectation bias or placebo effect.
This is why:
Before it gets to the speakers all the sound is is an electrical wiggle.
It is produced first at the microphone, of course, but that is usually manipulated by recording and mixing engineers to produce the LP, CD, file we buy.
Next we play it back at home. We, or at least I :), am fully conversant with all the many ways in which different record players can and do produce different electrical wiggles from the same LP, so lets ignore LPs for now.
In the case of a DAC the "end result" isn't whether it is a ladder dac has different filters or analogue sections it is "what is the electrical wiggle coming out of the analogue outputs, and how close is it to what it should be?"
This is also the case for the preamp and power amp. They can be treated as a black box with a transfer function.
If the transfer function of the "black box" is exactly as it should be, then there is no mechanism by which it could possibly actually sound any different to any other with the same transfer function, is there?
The electrical wiggle is unchanged so the air pressure wiggle from the speakers created by it is unchanged too, so how our brain may intereact with it can only percieve a difference by expectation bias or the placebo effect.
There is, of course a caveat. This is interaction between power amps and speakers. What I wrote above is the case for properly engineered DACs an preamps. Power amps have interaction with speakers which means that changing the power amp into the same speaker may well change the air pressure wiggle. This can be measured too though and show the changes/deviations from how it should be.
It is debateable exactly where distortion and signal to noise starts being audible, so I quite agree that the level at which deviation from perfect transfer function becomes audible is an unknown, so here it is just a case of preferring less deviation to more as a matter of principle IMO.
In the case of speaker/power amp interaction there is clipping and other sorts of overload into the actual speaker rather than an 8 ohm resistor that is obviously relevant to whether a system sounds different or not, but also the effect of a high output impedance of an amp on the complex impedance of actual speakers. This obviously is both amp and speaker dependant but since we know that changes in level of 1dB are definitely detectable, and very possibly much less by practiced listeners, it is probable, even likely, that an amp with a sufficiently high output impedance into speakers with a sufficiently complex impedance will result in sound level and frequency response changes which are audible, in that even though the speaker/room FR won't be flat the change created in it should be audible.
I know the ear has a very high dynamic range, but as a person who has made many recordings over the last 55 years it has never been necessary for me to record all of it at the same time, so having a level control on my recorder to get the recording into the "good bit" of a restricted dynamic range has always been possible (though more difficult on a reel-to-reel tape since it is quite marginal for classical music in a quiet environment).
Personally I agree with you that with music dynamic range and masking may well make most distortion inaudible, but it might not :) and the point is, why, since accurate stuff is available at modest prices, take the risk?

So, in summary, there is no mechanism by which the sound coming out of the speaker can be changed in any way that may be sensed by some little understood brain/ear phenomenon if there is demonstrably no way in which the electrical wiggle generating the pressure wiggle we sense has been changed - that is the nub of my point and the measurements we can do today do show whether that has been achieved or not.
 

Thomas savage

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The brain is a very complex organ and one we know much less than we think, and one we are still learning about. The members who you are having this discussion with feel they fully understand the brain, even though they may be misguided, they are of course entitled to their opinions, and you will never convince them otherwise. Recently I have been working on some neuroplasticity research, fascinating stuff. I will give you the same advice I gave to Marie Antoinette. Quit while you still have a head!
Total nonsense, you can observe the conclusions that are arrived at though brain function via external behaviours without understanding the minutia of the inner working of the brain itself.

The issue imo is not how we hear but the story we tell ourselves when we try and relate to and subscribe value to what we hear in the context of describing preferences, timber other such appraisals . ‘We’ get in the way.

Neuroplasticity is intresting especially in regard to how we punish/rehabilitate those who break the law.
 
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