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How we could finally pin down flowery audiophile subjective descriptions

MattHooper

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"How would someone 'describe' the sound of this headphone based on the numbers ?"

Someone wouldn't. The numbers "speak" for themselves. In other words, the numbers are a language, and that language is separate and different from the language we use to speak to each other.
And like any language, you have to learn it to be fluent in it.

Jim

That's certainly true!

However, by saying "someone wouldn't" that reply at least suggests one is ignoring the role of interpretation and intersubjective communication.

The audiophile hobby is not some abstract academic exercise: We only care about measurements insofar as they relate to what we ultimately care about: the subjective impression created by the sound.

Certainly "someone" can gain enough experience in both understanding what is being measured, reading the measurements and...importantly...plenty of experience directly correlating the measurements to what he/she hears. Then, yes, someone can eventually look at a set of speaker measurements and have a good idea "how it will sound." Just as a classical composer or conductor will through study and personal experience eventually be able to look at mere notes on a page and "hear" what the score sounds like.

But not everyone has the time or inclination to put that much effort in to becoming that experienced. How we gain and communicate knowledge has to have a level of pragmatism. That's why we have short hands and various ways of communicating. A physicist could identify the difference between "hotter" and "colder" or "frozen" and "liquid" by looking at the mathematical description, yet it's still useful and far more pragmatic to just use those short-hand terms "colder/hotter/frozen/liquid" to get across the idea in everyday life - terms we've arrived at not by measurements or technical theory, but by Intersubjective communication. In fact, we never even needed to have developed deeply technical understanding of the physics for "hot and cold" to communicate knowledge.
Much of this comes from people experiencing the same thing and agreeing on that subjective experience! (Does that flickering light hurt your fingers too? Yes? Ok, we'll refer to that as "fire" or "too hot..." etc)

Just because one way of understanding or communicating can be numerical doesn't mean "the numbers must speak for themselves" since there can be translation to alternative language.

If a person who is knowledgeable enough to know what a speaker will sound like from looking at the measurements can not also get across the subjective consequences of those measurements in the non-technical intersubjective ways we use to communicate all day, then he wouldn't be much of a teacher.
 
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MattHooper

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How so? You inserting preference for distortion like with vinyl or something?

No, Ricardus simply asked us to accept a conclusion based on some outrageous broad claims.

Here...

I don't think these discussions even matter. Subjectivity is subjectivity. It cannot be agreed upon.

"Subjectivity can not be agreed upon?"

Except...that we do this all day long and it forms the basis of human experience, communication and coordinating our efforts!
All our experience is subjective, and we communicate information by correlating our subjective impressions!

WITHOUT appeal to measurements....

Do you think we could agree, but putting our hands in water of two distinctly different temperatures, that one is warmer than the other?

Could we agree that today was warmer than yesterday?

You don't think we could agree that one dish is clearly spicier than another?

That one surface is harder or softer than another?

That one object is brighter or darker than another?

I mean, the list of things we CLEARLY can agree on intersubjectively is virtually endless, right? Yes, there can be disagreements, but if agreement weren't possible human communication would be impossible and inexplicable!

So Ricardus' claim that subjectivity can not be agreed upon is just clearly, utterly wrong.

But...wait!...an objection may come...you've given other everyday examples, but Ricardus means to refer specifically to audio.

Ok...so exactly what magic dividing line occurs where we can not "subjectively agree" on things that we hear? If I play you and a friend a tone and then raise it 20 dB, do you think you can both perceive this and agree "it is now louder?" Of course. Right? We can give endless examples for differences in sound that people can perceive and agree upon and communicate about. As I've pointed out so many times, my own work in sound literally depends on this obvious fact.
We can agree when we are hearing "more bass" "clearer sound" "brighter highs" etc.

So there is no magic genie that pops in to the picture JUST for percieiving and describing things like, say, the different sound of speakers. My audio pals and I mostly agree on what we are hearing, when listening to the same systems. Whether we LIKE it the same is different, but this idea that "subjectivity can't be agreed upon," either broadly construed or pertaining only to audio is just ridiculous.


Which is why we have measurements.

People should just go listen and buy. Some will realize their ears are the weakest links in the listening chain and some won't.

There simply is NO WAY to describe audio to another person when we live in a world where people think 3 foot lengths of AC cable makes your system sound different.

^^ See above. The reference to people imagining things that aren't in AC cables there in support of his point is a totally fallacious inference. One may as well point to optical illusions to conclude "Well, looks like the human visual system is wholly unreliable!"

And it's also fallacious to cherry pick examples of people miscommunicating, or failing to communicate or agree, in order to claim that "therefore communication and agreement never happens."

If it measures good it is good. Good specs are the definition of high fidelity. FULL STOP.

Which leaves "good" just floating unhinged to why anyone would care about this "good."

If we don't care about the subjective consequences/character of the measurements...why care about them at all?

But of course we do care about the subjective consequences of measurements. And we can communicate with one another about "How It Sounds," just like we do with all our other sense information.

In fact...while measurements can add more reliability and another level of understanding....we don't need measurements to discuss and communicate about "How Something Sounds."
 
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MattHooper

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You mean like this?

788px-Checker_shadow_illusion.svg.png


Jim

Precisely! (And just the type of optical illusion I was thinking of earlier).

That makes both my points.

1. It would not make sense to argue from the fact our eyes are fooled in that optical illusion to "therefore our sight is wholly unreliable." I mean, you'd have one hell of a lot to explain with that hypothesis - for instance how you managed to drive successfully to work, among the billions of such real world examples. It's likewise fallacious to appeal to the fact that our aural perception CAN be inaccurate to the conclusion "therefore it's always inaccurate, and we have to rely on measurements for everything."

2. Such illusions illustrate how we can certainly agree on our subjective experience. The whole point of that illusion IS that we BOTH (and everyone else here) are perceiving square B as lighter than square A. This is TRUE about our perception, and we can agree on this. Not a measurement has to be provided.
Then, if we remove the shadow, we will likely agree that...wow!...now the squares look the same tone! And we can investigate the relationship of the shadow to our perception to figure out how this illusion occurs. But all that just proves the utility and worth of sharing subjective impressions! Can our understanding and agreement be augmented by further technical theory? Sure. Could we express the luminance of the squares in technical terms? Of course. But subjectively arrived at terms like "lighter" and "darker" also communicate information.

Further, if you ONLY expressed that image in measurements, technical terms for luminance values etc, that would NOT actually tell you about the existence of the optical illusion! There's nothing in those measurements that tell you "What It's Like" in perceptual terms. It's only by our looking at it, and agreeing "hey, are you seeing the same thing?" that we first communicate about it. Without that, the numbers would never tell us that phenomenon. Perception of, description of, and agreement about phenomena often come BEFORE the measurements...it tells us what we want to measure and why! (Which also tells you, that the measurements, while adding more information, were not necessary to percieve and describe it in the first place)!

Cheers.
 

witwald

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My thought was more that we could pin down people who don't even have this degree of connection to the actual sound.
That's a bit of a big ask. If they don't have a high degree of connection to the actual sound, then their use of any terminology may require editing in order to make it more correct, from the perspective of those who are more trained/knowledgeable in the discipline.
Interesting that they differ by +/- 100hz here and there for the same terms. Even people who feel they have a strong grip on this stuff don't perfectly agree. Not a huge surprise but kinda illustrates the point, too. These terms rely on loose averages and not exact numbers.
I'm not entirely sure that I would describe them as "loose averages". If someone is trying to teach a course in sound engineering, then there needs to be a reasonable degree of interchangeability between what different teachers are saying. Otherwise, to take an extreme example, one person's treble boost is another person's bass cut.
 

MattHooper

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Good! Here is another video on hearing that goes into more depth:


The upshot of this all is that although you may think that your perception is correct (and it may indeed be!), you cannot be certain of the way in which someone else perceives the same thing.

And that's the point I've been trying to make.



Jim

But that is again - fallaciously using exceptions to claim the rule! Like reasoning from optical illusions to "therefore our visual system is always mistaken about what is really happening in the world!" Which clearly can't be the case. It just cherry picks failures and ignores the successes. Which is a pretty basic mistake for us to make in a titular "science" forum :)

Think about it. You just posted an optical illusion in your previous post. The reason you did so is because we will RELIABLY perceive the same effect! "That square B looks lighter than square A."

And yet you follow this by saying we can't be certain of the way someone else will perceive something. You were quite certain we'd perceive that optical illusion, weren't you?

And of course we never have "Absolute Certainty" about anything or never need it. We care about what is probable or reasonable to expect. I can be "certain" in any pragmatic use of that term that if I raise a sound 20 dB you will hear it as "louder" just as I will.
 

witwald

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Until subjective reviewers post their audiogram results from certified technicians that administer tests using calibrated audiology equipment then their review is useless. The reasons being is I don't know their range of hearing or what frequencies they can't hear within their range.
I like that concept: calibrating the reviewers to a known standard. However, if we take the example of a calibrated microphone, it can take completely accurate measurements even though its own natural response is not completely flat by quite significant amounts. Within reasonable limits, a reviewer's judgment might still be trustworthy even if their hearing is not perfect, as the auditory system likely compensates for such issues to some degree. I have used the word judgment, rather than opinion, as I'm thinking of reviewers whose auditioning might be more akin to measurements. Ideally, it would be hoped that detailed measurements would make up a big part of a review.
 
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witwald

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And of course we never have "Absolute Certainty" about anything or never need it. We care about what is probable or reasonable to expect. I can be "certain" in any pragmatic use of that term that if I raise a sound 20 dB you will hear it as "louder" just as I will.
And that 20dB increase in loudness on music program material will also lead to the concomitant perception that there is more bass and treble in the music.
 

MattHooper

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And that 20dB increase in loudness on music program material will also lead to the concomitant perception that there is more bass and treble in the music.

Yes! Just like the optical illusion!

What we perceive is not just "obviously there in the measurements" - it's "there" in our perceptions first of all.

Perceptual consequences, among them Fletcher–Munson curves, are not "there" in the measurement that simply tells us the sound is louder. The only reason we know about this is by what we perceive, and that we agree that, even though the measurement may imply an even rise of volume, the SUBJECTIVE effect is of uneven frequency relationships! Which, again, speaks to the relevance of intersubjective agreement and communicating about our subjective impressions.
 
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kemmler3D

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If it isn't reliable, then it's about like playing Russian roulette

Actually, you have inadvertently hit the nail on the head of why I think this "statistical comparison of unreliable subjective terminology" could work, to an extent.

Yes, very often people will hear something differently than you, or even if they hear it the same as you do, choose a different word to describe what they hear.

However, I believe as @MattHooper probably does, that in general, people hear more alike than they hear differently.

As such, with a sufficient sample size, a statistical average converges on the "true value".

(this is also why "wisdom of the crowds" works. If people's perceptions of a quantitative value are generally alike and are based on the true value with no systematic bias, they converge on the true value.)

So the "true value" of the subjective term "harsh" might be a combination of distortion and excess energy in the 2000-5000hz range. Or something.

If you could establish that, then you would have a little more to work with when someone uses the term "harsh". Rather than throwing up our hands and saying "subjective language is meaningless!!" we could say "okay, they're probably hearing something in the 2-5khz range." And you would at least know what measurement to run next.

So that brings me to the point. This is just like russian roulette. On any given pull of the trigger, the outcome is both unpredictable and wildly divergent. Either you are alive or dead, with no predictability! An insurmountable difference...

But in a statistical sense, russian roulette is very predictable. The average player will live for 3 trigger pulls. We can compute this if we know the number of chambers (6) or we can observe enough rounds of the game to establish the average with high confidence.

That's about the idea I am trying to put forth here... we can average out russian roulette to find out how many chambers there are in the "flowery" gun.

Hopefully that made at least half a lick of sense...
 

MattHooper

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Let me put it another way; maybe you will get what I'm trying to say.

You are correct about my using a well-known and reliable illusion. I used the illusion(s) to show that there are inherent imperfections to our senses.

Sure, but we already knew that. It's why I'd already alluded to this, and why reference to known illusions, and only using failures of perception don't amount to an argument for the general unreliability of our perception. One has to make very specific arguments.

So I'm happy to see the following...


But .... take that to the next step. The unpredictable world of reality-at-large is not structured in the same way that those illusions are. It is not predictable; it varies, it has circumstances wherein the principles of subjective imperfections shown in these "illusions" might apply to a lesser degree, and perhaps to a greater degree. Not only that, but when? With whom? Regarding which sounds? We don't know.

What about our attempts to use subjective terms (words with no reference) to describe audio values once we know that our brains can be fooled, which is what the illusions show? To use your example .... the illusions are much more predictable than the circumstances we encounter in the real world. The real world is a morass of infinite differences and permutations.

How much is my brain being fooled by this one, particular audio characteristic? Perhaps I'm describing this sound to someone half a world away. How is their brain being fooled by the same characteristic? A little? A lot? Only so-so? Perhaps none at all. I can't know.
Which one of my descriptions is going to be accurate, and which is going to be woefully inaccurate ..... for them?

And then what about the next person?

Talk about a "circle of confusion"!

If it isn't reliable, then it's about like playing Russian roulette. Ya might win, ya might lose. The gamble might be worth it to you (or someone else) but it's not worth it to me. If you, or I, or anyone else uses words referenced to measurements then the situation improves (im)measurably

Jim

Yes, I know that's where you were going, but it's exactly what I've been arguing against. You are moving from instances where our perception is known to be unreliable to a sort of "might as well throw up our hands, it's all up in the air, subjective impressions are useless" conclusion. I know you are wanting to make a case terms of audio at the moment, but the implications are really much wider than that.

The noise is there in the perceptual system, but you are greatly exaggerating the consequences. Think about how we communicate successfully all day long, via our sense perception. If you want to try to portray our our senses as delivering hopelessly varied impressions, like I've said, you have one hell of a lot to explain in terms of how our senses guide us through the day, and how we so often successfully communicate and pass on information using our sense perception, and what we agree we are experiencing! Do you see that gas station sign? So do I. Is it a rectangle? Yup, I agree. Is it red lettering on a white background? Yup, that's what I see... Countless examples of people agreeing on what we are hearing would follow the same route. If our sense perception were THAT different, we couldn't communicate!

So in terms of audio, as I mentioned in another thread: I had recently eq'd some rumble out of an audio track (on a TV series). Why? Because it was obscuring dialogue. The only reason I did so was because I knew OTHER PEOPLE would perceive the same problem. I can guarantee that if I didn't EQ it out, the mixers would have had to EQ it out, and they would do so BECAUSE we know people would generally perceive the same issue. Equing out the rumble reliably increases the clarity and intelligibility of the voices. %100 for every living person? Likely not. But is this some equivalent to 'playing Russian Roulette, some totally unpredictable crap shoot? Of course not. Our job would be impossible if human perception was THAT intractably unpredictable!

When I visit my friend (audio reviewer) to hear the latest speaker he has in the house, it's not "Russian roulette" whether we hear the same thing. We almost always agree on the characteristics of the speaker - compared to his reference speakers is the imaging focused? More diffuse? Bigger soundstage? Smaller? More or less bass? More or less prominant highs? Neutral sounding? Colored? Bass tightly controlled or flabby? Etc. And if he's complaining, for instance, of some bass boom or dull high end, if I drop over I usually hear that, yeah, he's right. That's exactly the issue I hear as well.

And remember, the only reason why people here continually cite research from Toole et al is because it found *very reliable patterns* in what people subjectively perceive.

So, not only does the mass of human experience - so much success in communication - undermine the direction you are taking your argument, my daily job in sound editing shows it to be untrue, blind research in human perception shows plenty of reliable patterns, and in the case of audiophiles, I've had way too much success "hearing the same thing as others" and communicating the subjective character of sound, often leading to me and others successfully to gear we really like.
 
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Curvature

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Devil's advocate here: I take 'plankton' to mean 'very fine detail in the recording'. Perception of "plankton" would therefore depend on a good transient response and very low noise and distortion, particularly IMD. So I think you can relate even something like "plankton" to measurable quantities. The difficulty comes in knowing whether anyone interprets a colorful term the same way.
Sad part is all this is pure conjecture. You're making up objective referents.

"Transient response", "low IMD". Speakers and headphones don't have audibly different transient responses and IMD tends to be within similar ranges.

There is a lot that is difficult to measure in speaker/room and headphone/ear interactions. So difficult that pinning exact subjective experiences to specific measurable elements is not possible because we lack the data. Even then it requires training and special study.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Until we figure out what we are talking about, that is.
 

MattHooper

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In a nutshell: I'm not arguing subjective impressions, and our attempt to communicate about them are perfectly reliable. They obviously aren't. I'm just arguing that we can certainly acknowledge problems, without exaggerating those problems to the point where communicating what we perceive becomes some worthless, useless crap shoot.
 

Curvature

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In a nutshell: I'm not arguing subjective impressions, and our attempt to communicate about them are perfectly reliable. They obviously aren't. I'm just arguing that we can certainly acknowledge problems, without exaggerating those problems to the point where communicating what we perceive becomes some worthless, useless crap shoot.
In the absence of measurements I can't see individual descriptions meaning much. They need an anchor, which is reliable performance data, specs.
 

Curvature

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In the absence of measurements I can't see individual descriptions meaning much. They need an anchor, which is reliable performance data, specs.
I'll expand.

With no measurements, all impressions are unreliable to a high degree.

With measurements, you can start sorting through them and get a good idea of what people are reporting and why.
 

Axo1989

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When discussions like this come up we see the common divide between more literate vs more numerate people. And it isn't surprising that there are passions involved. I work with numbers and have to be competent, but I don't love them. Quite a few people really do love them, and I sometimes envy that. What am I doing here? Well, the literate/numerate binary is an oversimplification of course. We can also be spatial, tactile, auditory or kinesthetic. And usually, some combination. I love words, but perhaps more so I love shapes and spaces. Visualisations of data are fabulous. Behaviour of sound in physical space is fascinating. To me.

Among the issues that highly numerate people often have with text/verbal language are fuzzy logic and ambiguity. The same word refers to a different thing an a different context. Audiophile language is obviously rife with this: "air" can refer to clarity (eg a sound with "space and air around it") or it can refer to the highest octave. The former may come from lack of higher order harmonic distortion, low noise floor and/or some combination of other factors (including room reflections) the latter may simply be a flat (or raised) frequency response above ~14 kHz. Rinse and repeat for a variety of terms. And people using them may be sh*t with numbers and not that great with words either. How do we know what the f*ck people are talking about?

Usually, from context. If as @MattHooper often describes, we work with people, we get to know what they perceive and how they express themselves. In an audiophile context we may become familiar with certain reviewers—music they listen to, room and equipment they use, comparative perceptions of gear we may have/heard etc. We also know that language is fuzzy, not linear-deterministic. We know that words have multiple meanings. We know that words mean different things when grouped with other words, and so on. And we function with it. Some more, some less. Those who cope less with those aspects of language are often attracted to STEM disciplines, for obvious and perfectly good reasons.
 
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Axo1989

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"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Until we figure out what we are talking about, that is.

Yes, it's useful to consider Wittgenstein here. He helps explain common misconceptions many have when they are confounded by audiophile terminology.

Firstly, he didn't say one cannot speak. Consider s.2 of Tractatus: he certainly didn't say one cannot speak of space, colour, tone or touch (see 2.0131). He did say "every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes." (2.0201)" and "it is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something—a form—in common with the real world." (2.022)

This is what @kemmler3D is suggesting: that we may well be able to make useful commonalities between the imagined world of audiophile narratives and the real world of sonic phenomena.

Secondly, the use of verbal/textuaI symbols noted above (eg "air") is often misunderstood syntactically. At s.3 Wittgenstein continues "in order to recognize the symbol in the sign we must consider the significant use" (3.326) and "the sign determines a logical form only together with its logical syntactic application" (3.327). Complaining that "air" is meaningless because it may correspond to one thing (a particular frequency range) in one context and different thing (a particular clarity*) in another is conflating a sign with a proposition.

Wittgenstein then invokes Occam's razor: some of the language symbols used are unnecessary and therefore meaningless. However—and obviously—it doesn't follow that they all are.

*we would break down clarity further, but I'll leave that for now.
 
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Galliardist

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The problem is not just the language, but the question of what is supposedly being described
Most often, we come into contact with this language in a comparison situation (often implied) - a component is inserted into an audio system, or a change is made to it. The language is used in a description attached to the sound of the component, or how the sound has been affected by the change.

The description is more often than not useless, because although it describes the listener's response to "the component" or "the change", there is a very high chance that the sound does not arise from "the component" or "the change" in the way we are invited to believe: or the person describing the change is somehow describing an internal response to something else about the system under review, that they perceive as a change in the sound.

So not only do we not know what the words mean, but we don't even know what they may be describing, how that relates to what they are seeking to describe, or even if what they are trying to describe is actually present.

And even if we are presented with say, a measurement of the component under review, we don't know the whole context to judge the described sound, since we don't know how the component is reacting with the rest of the system. Is placing a component in a system and listening guaranteed to give a good opportunity to understand what the component is doing in context?

If the words are effectively devoid or known context, what is the point in even trying to understand what the writer believes themselves to be reporting?
 

Ricardus

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No, Ricardus simply asked us to accept a conclusion based on some outrageous broad claims.

Here...



"Subjectivity can not be agreed upon?"

Except...that we do this all day long and it forms the basis of human experience, communication and coordinating our efforts!
All our experience is subjective, and we communicate information by correlating our subjective impressions!
Except you don't. Which is why this thread exists.

Your entire set of replies to me was just a giant straw man.

There is subjectivity and objectivity. Look them up.

You wanna believe in magic? Fine. But I have bad news for you. You're on the wrong site.

The OP asked for universally accepted descriptions, and ASR does it... EVERY TIME Amir shows test results. Specs are universally accepted descriptors for what the amp is doing (ergo what we're hearing) and good specs the definition of high fidelity. FULL STOP.

The rest is just audiophool nonsense. No one will hear what the OP hears because we don't have his brain/bias, his ears, his system, or his room. There is no point is trying to standardize subjectivity simply because it can't be done. If you need a link to those definition please ask.
 

Jim Shaw

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A Glossary and Definitions of Audio Terms?

Years ago, I approached several YT pundits with a suggestion that we (readers, listeners, viewers) need a listing of terms and definitions.
Essentially, a dictionary of audio terms.

The response was remarkably consistent:

"I don't want to, I don't have to, I won't, and you can't make me. And if one is made, I won't read it."

Chaos enjoys chaos, revels in chaos, creates more chaos, and money can be made from chaos.
 
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kemmler3D

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The description is more often than not useless, because although it describes the listener's response to "the component" or "the change", there is a very high chance that the sound does not arise from "the component" or "the change" in the way we are invited to believe: or the person describing the change is somehow describing an internal response to something else about the system under review, that they perceive as a change in the sound.
Yes, I would limit this to descriptions of speakers, to at least avoid measuring known-zero differences...

The OP asked for universally accepted descriptions, and ASR does it... EVERY TIME Amir shows test results.
You're not quite addressing the point of what I've proposed here. The whole idea is to do this precisely because descriptions are not used universally, but we could identify relationships between objective measurements and TRENDS in how they are used out in the world. This would have some uses, and I just think it would be interesting.
 
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