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How science got sound wrong!

Purité Audio

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Tks

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Could've sworn I wrote about this article here on this forum. The idiotic fallacy of "famous musician would actually know better than most of the people talking about audio"..

Except here's the problem, not only is it logically fallacious. In this instance it's actually intrinsically stupid. Why? Because most musicians are usually suffering more hearing loss than average people anyway. SO EVEN IF musicians with their trained ears for sound was a valid argument, in reality it works out to be an unfortunate impossibility basically.

EDIT: Here was the topic about a month ago https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-going-aroud-that-is-a-crock-of-schmidt.9511/

EDIT 2: Yeah now I remember, this topic got me at a time I was irate. I proceeded to rip this irrational nonsense up.
 
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Wombat

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I've seen it before. Likely here.

It is one of the reasons I don't frequent 'Audio' outlets.
 
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Purité Audio

Purité Audio

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Yes there wasn’t much to take from it was there, I always listen naked so my skin gets full exposure as do my neighbours.
Keith
 

Wombat

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In your case, isn't it loitering with intent? ;)

To loiter, I would have to be there. Not likely in current times. Encel I felt was worthwhile but that was when I was a lot younger.
 

Juhazi

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Oh, Softky again... Now he quotes Neil Young's interview https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html
Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. “I’m only one person standing there going, ‘Hey, this is [expletive] up!’ ” he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts’s house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles. The dial thermometer at the far end of the porch indicated that it was now upward of 110 degrees of some kind of heat. Maybe the dial was stuck.

When you hear real music, you get lost in it, he added, “because it sounds like God.” Spotify doesn’t sound like God. No one thinks that. It sounds like a rotating electric fan that someone bought at a hardware store.

He is talking about compressed low bitrate music. These guys have a mission, modern battle with windmills. Seems like there is room for this continuosly

190px-Bronze_statues_of_Don_Quixote_and_Sancho_Panza.jpg
 

HammerSandwich

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The idiotic fallacy of "famous musician would actually know better than most of the people talking about audio".
The basic argument seems to convince a significant number of people.

Makes you wonder how the audiophile community would react if, say, @Floyd Toole told Neil Young how to arrange & play his songs. My guess is, "What's that #$^% needle watcher know about music?"
 

MattHooper

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Ugh, as someone who currently listens to more vinyl records than my digital source, I hate bogus justifications for why "analog sound" is "better."

From the article:

"Analog emotional resonance"

Bullshit. This is just a personal preference masquerading as a theory. This writer *thinks* analog sounds better, and represents some portion of people who think the same, and is moving from this personal feeling to rationalizing a theory for why "analog sounds better." It has "emotional resonance."

But clearly digital-source music has "emotional resonance." I mean for gawds sake, the PEAK of the music industry sales were during the height of the CD sales! People stream music and love it. Look at youtube's vast music videos and look at the countless comments of people swooning over how any particular piece makes them feel. All coming at you digitally.

My son will dance around to music on his laptop. He also likes listening to my stereo system and requests songs. He doesn't give a damn about whether it's a record playing or streaming from Tidal. It's "just music" to him, and rightly so.

I just hate it when people try to turn personal preference in to a theory that posits their preference is Objective Truth of some sort.
(Though there is nothing wrong with doing that insofar as your hypothesis is truly scientific and withstands scientific testing).


"This being science, all of it is testable."

Of course.

So why hasn't the author seemingly tested it? Here's one test: Get an analog-sourced vinyl LP, get a good digitizing system, do an A to D copy, then do a blind comparison between the original LP and the digitized copy. If this writer's hypothesis is correct, they should be easily distinguishable and the digitizing process should somehow ruin the 'emotional resonance' factor.

"Why do engineers think it is perfect while musicians think it is awful?"


They don't. That's just a grossly cherry-picked view of certain musicians. The majority have been getting on with digital for decades just fine.
 
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