Is the entire audio industry a fraud?

[Spkrdctr]

It's not about personal preference. It's about the probability of audibility.

Just because my taste buds are different than yours, doesn't mean either of us can taste a grain of salt dissolved in an olympic swimming pool full of tap water.

We should pin this on the front page of ASR. Could be our motto! I might just have to steal this saying, it is that good.

 

[Sal1950]

We should pin this on the front page of ASR. Could be our motto! I might just have to steal this saying, it is that good.

They never listen.
No matter how different one mans hearing perception is from the next, a Yamaha piano sounds like a Yamaha
to everyone. And an accurate reproduction of a recorded Yamaha also makes it sound like a Yamaha to us all.

 

[napfkuchen]

Please name one, just one, demonstrated audible difference that isn't trivially measurable.

Just one.

Name one ... Hitchslapped

 

[ahofer]

I’m not confused. Just because our current ways of measuring such things cannot reveal differences, doesn’t mean those differences don’t exist.

What @SIY said is apposite. I didn't say you were creating confusion between two very different claims. For all I know it is intentional.

At any rate, based on accumulated science of hearing and sound, we can say your second sentence is false to greater than a 99% probability. It is not worth our time to argue about signal phenomena that have not been discovered, and you can't even demonstrate are audible. Show us that it even exists, before claiming it can't be measured.

 

[antcollinet]

There are as many controlled tests that prove we all hear and process sound differently. Sorry. Not everything is revealed with the current machines and testing parameters. In the coming years, we will understand these things better. Not saying measurements are super useful in some cases, they are, but it’s not an exact science as some claim.

It doesn't matter if we all hear differently - if there is no difference in the sound waves to hear.

We know both from engineering/physics/material science, and from numerous measurements, that cables (once of sufficient cross sectional area) have no audible impact on the signals reaching the speakers - therefore cannot impact the soundwaves emitted from the speakers in any audible way.

So no matter how differently we all hear - there is no difference to hear.



Yet on the other hand we know that our hearing is subject to all sorts of cognitive biases (call it placebo effect, or confirmation bias if you like). What we hear is impacted by what we know, what we believe, how we feel, our life experiences, what we see etc etc. No-one is immune to this if they are human - it is how we are built.

So when we see someone state that they hear differences between cables where the engineering, science and measurements all tell us that is massively unlikely to the point of impossibility - do we just take the statement at face value - or do we attribute it to the fact that the listener is being fooled by his (humanities) very fallible auditory system?

 

[fpitas]

It is childish since your beliefs are not absolutes. Perhaps the way a person processes a particular piano sound, which all sound different based on design, brings more pleasure to their brain. It has been shown that past exposure to sounds influences what people find enjoyable later on. Perhaps they grew up hearing a Yamaha B1 and not a Steinway. Perhaps accurate to them is comparing it to the Yamaha. All relative.

You have an interesting and creative definition of accurate.

 

[pkane]

It is childish since your beliefs are not absolutes. Perhaps the way a person processes a particular piano sound, which all sound different based on design, brings more pleasure to their brain. It has been shown that past exposure to sounds influences what people find enjoyable later on. Perhaps they grew up hearing a Yamaha B1 and not a Steinway. Perhaps accurate to them is comparing it to the Yamaha. All relative.

It's all relative. A belief that earth is flat is just as valid as that it's a spheroid. Just a matter of opposite, but equal beliefs, right?

 

[egellings]

My baseless claim that a guy who says he can jump 10 meters in the air is full of shit is more correct than his baseless claim.

This is basic E&M, which makes me somewhat suspicious that the "PhD" may have come from the back of a cereal box.

Piled higher and Deeper!

 

[Sal1950]

It's all relative. A belief that earth is flat is just as valid as that it's a spheroid. Just a matter of opposite, but equal beliefs, right?

LOL, that was good!

 

[MarkS]

Piled higher and Deeper!

A PhD in physics, or even a Nobel Prize in physics, is not a guarantee of immunity against unsupported beliefs:

Brian David Josephson FRS[3] (born 4 January 1940) is a Welsh[5][6] theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge.[7] Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University.
...
In the early 1970s, Josephson took up Transcendental Meditation and turned his attention to issues outside the boundaries of mainstream science. He set up the Mind–Matter Unification Project at the Cavendish to explore the idea of intelligence in nature, the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism, broadly known as quantum mysticism.[10] He has expressed support for topics such as parapsychology, water memory and cold fusion, which has made him a focus of criticism from fellow scientists.[8][9]

Brian Josephson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Sal1950]

A PhD in physics, or even a Nobel Prize in physics, is not a guarantee of immunity against unsupported beliefs:

Brian Josephson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Isn't he one of those dudes that buy and wear the exact same clothes every day because figuring out what
to put on each morning is too difficult a thought process for them?

 

[Dr. X builds a ... what?]

That's really cool. But having a PhD in physics and working with awesome things doesn't make you immune to the placebo effect.

Judging from what you originally wrote, you simply have a tendency to hear what you'd like to hear.

You can claim that's not the case all day long, but until you dish up some reliable evidence to cement it, I chose not to belive a single bit.

You pose an extraordinary claim, and taking that at face value is just nuts.

You sound like the logical positivists of the 2Oth Century. Quantum mechanics blew them away but they would still not open their minds.

No, what I heard in my little "experiments" is indeed what I heard and it was not imagined or hoped for. I had no idea what the results would be. Again, as I mentioned, I did not have transducers like microphones and instruments like an oscilloscope laying around in my apartment in that time long ago. I was not able to measure it but that does not mean it did not happen.

 

[Ricardus]

You sound like the logical positivists of the 2Oth Century. Quantum mechanics blew them away but they would still not open their minds.

No, what I heard in my little "experiments" is indeed what I heard and it was not imagined or hoped for. I had no idea what the results would be. Again, as I mentioned, I did not have transducers like microphones and instruments like an oscilloscope laying around in my apartment in that time long ago. I was not able to measure it but that does not mean it did not happen.

And yet another person who doesn't understand unconscious biases... and a person with 6 posts arguing bad science. Probably another bogus account.

 

[Newman]

No, what I heard in my little "experiments" is indeed what I heard and it was not imagined or hoped for.

How did you prove to yourself that this is true?

 

[Blumlein 88]

How did you prove to yourself that this is true?

Immaculate perception.

 

[RayDunzl]

Isn't he one of those dudes that buy and wear the exact same clothes every day because figuring out what
to put on each morning is too difficult a thought process for them?

It works for me...

 

[ahofer]

No, what I heard in my little "experiments" is indeed what I heard and it was not imagined or hoped for. I had no idea what the results would be. Again, as I mentioned, I did not have transducers like microphones and instruments like an oscilloscope laying around in my apartment in that time long ago. I was not able to measure it but that does not mean it did not happen.

You have 100% confidence that what you experienced must be in the signal, not your brain. Extraordinary to have such confidence in such faulty instruments.

 

[Sal1950]

You sound like the logical positivists of the 2Oth Century. Quantum mechanics blew them away but they would still not open their minds.

No, what I heard in my little "experiments" is indeed what I heard and it was not imagined or hoped for. I had no idea what the results would be. Again, as I mentioned, I did not have transducers like microphones and instruments like an oscilloscope laying around in my apartment in that time long ago. I was not able to measure it but that does not mean it did not happen.

You don't need to make serious measurements, a $10 multimeter can check level matching.
But what you do need to do is put very tight controls over your blind listening conditions so
it's in no way possible for you to know what's playing during the comparisons.
Otherwise your wasting your and our. time.

 

[Axo1989]

What @SIY said is apposite. I didn't say you were creating confusion between two very different claims. For all I know it is intentional.

At any rate, based on accumulated science of hearing and sound, we can say your second sentence is false to greater than a 99% probability. It is not worth our time to argue about signal phenomena that have not been discovered, and you can't even demonstrate are audible. Show us that it even exists, before claiming it can't be measured.

So that's Fry and Laurie, what a treasure.

 

[Killingbeans]

Quantum mechanics blew them away but they would still not open their minds.

We've been over that nonsense a million times already.

I'm usually a positive guy (to the point of toxicity), but this actually makes me belive the other posters, who says you are flat out lying about your credentials.

The argument of "Quantum uncertainty = anything is possible at the macroscopic level!" is absolute bulls¤¤t, and anybody, who has had just minimal real world contact with quantum physics knows it.

I had no idea what the results would be.

Sorry to break it to you, but that's not how bias works.

Read a review of any kind of indisputable snake-oil product, and you'll notice that they all start out with that same "disclaimer".

I was not able to measure it but that does not mean it did not happen.

No. But the possibility of it not being caused by placebo is infinitesimal.

Either that, or you simply removed some oxidation or fixed a loose connection in the process of the swap, meaning that the precious metals had nothing to do with it.