Master Thread: Are measurements Everything or Nothing?

[voodooless]

1. 108db (111db with two) isnt loud? what are you talking about lol 2.

That is basically a lie:

they are made for nearfield monitoring, you are not supposed to listen to them with listening position 6meters or more away

Sure they are. But the point is that a spinorama and a preference score is not enough to define is somebody would like a speaker.

 

[AdamG]

12. You guys run a cult here where you only go by measurements and no one is allowed to disagree.

yea no questions left.

Really? You had 40+ posts in this thread. Where you were allowed to express your Subjective Opinions. So much so that after 40 plus posts and many more counter posts by other members trying to explain to you why your opinions were not fact nor considered Science. You continued to hammer on. Relentlessly. I gave you a short Vacation so you could decompress and maybe take the time to possibly reread the reply’s you got and absorb some of the knowledge being offered. After all this your first post upon retuning is this? We gave you ample space and time to disagree.

At this point, To basically call us Cult Like is about as Trolly as a person can get. This is a Science Based Forum. If you are not mentally prepared to accept and embrace that here. Then maybe you should move on. Not all Forums we come across in our lives are a good fit. I highly suspect that is the case here. You are completely out of rope. So think carefully about what you post next.

 

[tvrgeek]

What measurement are we missing?
Tale of three DACs. All three measure with better specs that the "experts" tell us we can hear.
Schiit Asgard with old internal AKM DAC. So-so measurements on the DAC
Topping D30pro. Incredible measurements by any standard. I mean WOW.
JDS Atom DAC+. Down to the only "darn good" level of measurements, but still below the theoretical threshold of hearing

All measured here by Amirm. Solid, reliable objective numbers.

But
The Asgard I needed to roll off the entire top end and about 4 dB on 3100
Topping I could hear slight detail above the background on headphones better than the Schiit, but not through the speakers. A hair maybe better at 3100. The evil "glare" baby scream frequency.
Atom clearly smoother midrange allowing bringing up the highs about half way restoring the detail I lost taming the other two.

Atom seems to make the worst recordings ( someone give the Billy Joel engineer a dope slap please) only bad. The others seem to accentuate the bad. Great recordings sound great on all three. Maybe a hint to the subjective reviewers. Use bad recordings.

I am no golden ears. I am an old bugger who's hearing now rolls off in the above 16 and not sure goes past 18K. ( when young I did hear to 22). I do know what I hear and my wife who has far better hearing confirms. Not damage, but the normal thickening of the fluid in the inner ear that comes with age. Someday maybe science will have a pill that reverses that. Hard to believe any objective reviewer or mixing engineer older than 50, but I digress.

So, what am I hearing that is different and not captured in the current measurement suite? All vanishing low distortion below the 16 bits of my CDs, ruler flat response, noise way below threshold. All three were routed through the Asgard analog amp section. I did not hear a difference Topping direct or through. These differences were great enough not to require precise AB testing. Three or four CDs were enough and reproduceable. Bias? Of course, but my bias was the opposite of what I heard. I expected the D30 to be cleaner. I did not expect to hear any difference with the JDS. I had expected the more expensive better measuring to sound so. I liked the box. I got the JDS more to verify it was in the "good enough" camp and expected it to sound the same and then to use on my desktop. It stays in my Stereo.

Is there some threshold where additive distortions correlate and then bother us? So a .000-something is winding up at the speakers as .1% from all the steps mic to speakers and we can hear that? Do we need super playback to not accentuate all the previous steps? Failing on less than great material, but squeaking by on great?

FWIW, my older DAC was a first generation Wolfson. Better than my CD player, but we are talking '80's tech and distortion in the .01 range as I measured. Far less detail. Discernable noise with headphones. Required even more top end roll off to be listenable. Specs would have shown that and it would land about an inch to the right of the SNAID chart. Curious though, my cheap SMSL Tripath desktop amp is not as shrill as the Topping even with the Grados, but fatigue sets in pretty quick. I am waiting for a review of the new Topping all-in-one.

It seems, to a point, the classic measurements correlate to sound, but at some point, we need something else. If we hear a difference between the "blue" tested units, what is it? On paper they should be indistinguishable. Timing? Group delay? Something measured we are not focusing on, like the HF filters?

Atom is a keeper.

 

[Deleted member 23982]

Really? You had 40+ posts in this thread. Where you were allowed to express your Subjective Opinions. So much so that after 40 plus posts and many more counter posts by other members trying to explain to you why your opinions were not fact nor considered Science. You continued to hammer on. Relentlessly. I gave you a short Vacation so you could decompress and maybe take the time to possibly reread the reply’s you got and absorb some of the knowledge being offered. After all this your first post upon retuning is this? We gave you ample space and time to disagree.

At this point, To basically call us Cult Like is about as Trolly as a person can get. This is a Science Based Forum. If you are not mentally prepared to accept and embrace that here. Then maybe you should move on. Not all Forums we come across in our lives are a good fit. I highly suspect that is the case here. You are completely out of rope. So think carefully about what you post next.

well, hell, thats one point of a view, but yea everyone can have his opinion i guess, kinda ironic
i could write a alot now but i dont or i get banned again for disagreeing... so... i will leave this conservation at that

 

[_thelaughingman]

well, hell, thats one point of a view, but yea everyone can have his opinion i guess, kinda ironic
i could write a alot now but i dont or i get banned again for disagreeing... so... i will leave this conservation at that

We have come to a point on the internet where people do not believe in goodwill that's been extended to them while they engage in nefarious behavior. You've certainly had a good run at espousing your views even though the majority of them do not have any credence, but you still backed yourself into a corner. It obviously would be a good thing for you to walk away from this conversation, since you've dug a hole that you can't get out of.

 

[alitomr1979]

This thread is interesting to me because it shows there are some people who don’t accept a placebo actually exist. But it is also interesting because there are people who just don’t get that there are more to speakers and audio components and their ability to reproduce sounds than what is usually measured and presented as THE MEASURES to know how good an audio equipment is. Reductionism. We have all been trained our whole lives in it, to practice it, and often its limitations are very elusive to us.

The thread is interesting because as almost always and with mostly everything, it is not binary, but a continuum, and most of us are placed in a point between those two “extremes”. I am convinced that when you accept this chances are you will learn from other people instead of getting mad because they think differently.

When you find yourself responding emotionally to something it is usually because it is mostly ideology. A group of interwoven opinions, often mixed with some facts, that seem to be glued together with emotions. When they are under attack emotions get unglued and arise. Understanding this also helps to manage those “emotions assaults” as Prof. Golemam from “Emotional Intelligence” calls them.

Let’s keep it civil and fight the need to feel special by establishing others as flawed or inferior because of ideas or feeling they have that are not inline or even contradicts ours. To the contrary, We should embrace those, because that is how we grow. Always. In any field or setting.

Excellent thread. Happy listening.

 

[alitomr1979]

If we care, it is not “their problem” when they are stuck. The reason they remain stuck is because of our lack of empathy, because it determines our inability to identify where and why they are stuck.

Problem is most people engage in this conversations to be right and that implies the other is wrong. Scientific curiosity, honest curiosity requires empathy, and from there, we can help others and ourselves in the process.

In the end it is only you who have to like what you hear. As many sarcastically proclaim, “nobody will stop you from hearing distortion”. So many of us even pay big money (big is subjective) for that distortion in the form
Of tubes… it is ok to like them.

 

[BillyBear]

For the same reason GM sells Cadillacs; people buy them. In fact, people ask for them.

Many people are uncomfortable with the realization that businesses will not turn down an opportunity to make money. And they don't have to be immoral or misleading to do so. I don't like Cadillacs. My neighbor doesn't like Cadillacs. But someone out there sure likes Cadillacs. More power to them. Jim

?? There are large differences between cars and those differences are objectively measurable, When magazines such as Car & Driver present tests of cars or comparisons among cars, they present objective measurements (0-60 time, standing 1/4-mile time, skid pad results, etc.) - not just subjective judgements.

 

[Killingbeans]

This is an argument, to paraphrase, one hears a lot :

"objective measurements are everything and if you, as an individual, are hearing something that doesn't chime wholly with the measurements, then you must be the one at fault"

That's more of an interpretation than a paraphrase. What I mostly hear is somthing in the lines of:

"Given what research has shown us so far, the measurements at hand does not correlate with you subjective impression. The most obvious explanation would be that your impression is being colored by something other than the sound itself"

The "Fault"-part only arises when the contradiction is taken as a personal attack. A belittlement of the person's listening abilities.

Science does not deal in absolutes. Ignorant people often use that as an excuse to claim equal legitimacy of all opinions, completely disregading the importance of probability. If an opinion has an infinitesimal probability of being factual, it also requires an inversely substantial amount of empirical evidence in order to have any hope of being promoted to a discussion worth spending time on.

 

[Deleted member 23982]

We have come to a point on the internet where people do not believe in goodwill that's been extended to them while they engage in nefarious behavior. You've certainly had a good run at espousing your views even though the majority of them do not have any credence, but you still backed yourself into a corner. It obviously would be a good thing for you to walk away from this conversation, since you've dug a hole that you can't get out of.

what are these views? just leave me alone in my "placebo" corner, you guys are truly on top of things, so i give up (and no, that doesnt mean you are right...)

guys think they figured it "finally" out so they are 100% certain their point of view is correct now whichs seems way worse than just having "placebos" imo (if so...) and thats the last thing i say here and the reason why i refuse to argue

 

[Killingbeans]

When you find yourself responding emotionally to something it is usually because it is mostly ideology.

It doesn't help that music is a highly emotional thing. People have a very hard time letting go of those emotions when switching their focus to audio reproduction.

 

[Digby]

I more or less agree with you, Killingbeans. With respect to this:

"Given what research has shown us so far, the measurements at hand does not correlate with you subjective impression. The most obvious explanation would be that your impression is being colored by something other than the sound itself"

I did say this earlier:

I meant does the measured data fully explain the difference in sound between one speaker and the next. Fully explain, in that everything we could want to know about how a speaker sounds can be seen from the data (as it is currently taken). Amir says it represents about 70%, so does that mean the data gathered is flawed or not extensive enough, or is the remaining data just subjective? (what is that 30% made up of)

Obviously subjective biases exist and need to be accounted for, but one has to be open to the data being incomplete/flawed/misunderstood in some way as well.

 

[Killingbeans]

I completely agree that things get a lot more messy as you transition from electronics to acoustics. 99% of my facepalm-moments happen when people are talking about line level electronics, cables and what have you.

 

[audio2design]

This thread is interesting to me because it shows there are some people who don’t accept a placebo actually exist. But it is also interesting because there are people who just don’t get that there are more to speakers and audio components and their ability to reproduce sounds than what is usually measured and presented as THE MEASURES to know how good an audio equipment is. Reductionism. We have all been trained our whole lives in it, to practice it, and often its limitations are very elusive to us.

The thread is interesting because as almost always and with mostly everything, it is not binary, but a continuum, and most of us are placed in a point between those two “extremes”. I am convinced that when you accept this chances are you will learn from other people instead of getting mad because they think differently.

When you find yourself responding emotionally to something it is usually because it is mostly ideology. A group of interwoven opinions, often mixed with some facts, that seem to be glued together with emotions. When they are under attack emotions get unglued and arise. Understanding this also helps to manage those “emotions assaults” as Prof. Golemam from “Emotional Intelligence” calls them.

Let’s keep it civil and fight the need to feel special by establishing others as flawed or inferior because of ideas or feeling they have that are not inline or even contradicts ours. To the contrary, We should embrace those, because that is how we grow. Always. In any field or setting.

Excellent thread. Happy listening.

Except placebo does exist. You can have your own opinions not your own facts.

Placebo effect is a fact.

Being able to measure differences and state they are inaudible is close enough to a fact to be one (especially since not disproved).

How good something sounds to you has little to do on a personal level with facts but statistically on a group level does.

Another fact is bias. You will like something better if you think it is better. Not being able to see it, that bias is broken. Also fact.

 

[Vintagear73]

Ok, so you don't recall the model # of any complete design that measures well but sounds bad?

You unnecessarily stick to it like a drunk on a fence.


I haven't looked at specifications on paper for many years (at least 30 or more). The only thing that interests me is how that device sounds. I have never read the specifications, nor do I know which ADC / DAC chips are inside my, eg, Lexicons PCM 70, 80, M300 and 224XL. The devices are great and it never occurs to me to think about their specifications. This is just one example.
If need be, here’s another little example. The tantalum capacitor is known to introduce certain distortions in the path of the audio signal, but in NEVE you will find just that, and that is another small part, along with their transformers, that gives a specific sound. So we can say that it was done against the rules, and yet it sounds superb. Again, although I have two NEVE preamps, I have never read their specifications.
When someone comes to your recording studio, do they ask you for papers with specifications from the complete equipment, or will they be interested in how they sound?

 

[voodooless]

But

But where is the evidence? All I read is a nice personal story.

 

[LTig]

If need be, here’s another little example. The tantalum capacitor is known to introduce certain distortions in the path of the audio signal, but in NEVE you will find just that, and that is another small part, along with their transformers, that gives a specific sound. So we can say that it was done against the rules, and yet it sounds superb. Again, although I have two NEVE preamps, I have never read their specifications.

A DAC with a specific sound is not transparent and not suited for an accurate experience of the recording. The problem with such DACs is that the perceived "better" sound is only true for a subset of recordings, e.g nice for Rock but bad for classical.

When someone comes to your recording studio, do they ask you for papers with specifications from the complete equipment, or will they be interested in how they sound?

Recording studios use equipment with a specific sound for specific tasks. The final result should not need additional "sounding".

 

[tifune]

You unnecessarily stick to it like a drunk on a fence.

They're your words, not mine:

Some devices may have perfect specifications on paper, but end up sounding bad.

So, which devices have perfect specifications on paper but end up sounding bad?

 

[alitomr1979]

That's more of an interpretation than a paraphrase. What I mostly hear is somthing in the lines of:

"Given what research has shown us so far, the measurements at hand does not correlate with you subjective impression. The most obvious explanation would be that your impression is being colored by something other than the sound itself"

The "Fault"-part only arises when the contradiction is taken as a personal attack. A belittlement of the person's listening abilities.

Science does not deal in absolutes. Ignorant people often use that as an excuse to claim equal legitimacy of all opinions, completely disregading the importance of probability. If an opinion has an infinitesimal probability of being factual, it also requires an inversely substantial amount of empirical evidence in order to have any hope of being promoted to a discussion worth spending time on.

The last paragraph is very interesting and the last sentence is only partially true, as it is the kind of approach that leads to incremental improvements/discoveries. This is ONE way to approach it, not THE way to approach it. We need more of that tolerance not only here, but in the whole world. No?

 

[BDWoody]

If we care, it is not “their problem” when they are stuck. The reason they remain stuck is because of our lack of empathy, because it determines our inability to identify where and why they are stuck.

There seem to be many that are determined to be, and stay stuck. That's due to my lack of empathy? If the horse is lead to the water, and he doesn't drink...maybe he's just a dumb or stubborn horse.