Message to golden-eared audiophiles posting at ASR for the first time...

[Galliardist]

But this is what I'm talking about. I know you are trying to make a joke here but clearly people are experiencing this. It's real within their minds. I don't know if it's an emotional reaction or a psychological reaction to audio gear combinations, but I don't think it's magic.

Synergy is taking place for these folks.

It seems acceptable to some to believe a room and speakers can colour or affect the type of sound from a system, but seemingly not other devices earlier in the connected chain (amps, pre-amps, dacs etc etc). Once again this logically doesn't seem to be fully cohesive. Whether by design, or poor engineering, cost saving, whatever, all these things are in the path and surely can have an affect whether very obviously perceivable to everybody, or only to those with acute hearing.

Once again, we can all believe what we want to, and see the world the way we want to, but it makes way more sense to state ones ideas or claims on a specific topic without the (not so subtle) implication of your ideas somehow being of greater value than that of other commenters. Ultimately everything is subjective, we all have different ears, brains etc and things could be perceived differently at different times of the day, different moods, weather, on and on.....but ultimately with all these small variations we experience, we are intelligent beings that can create a full picture of what something is.

If we reduced everything to measurements and graphs and specifications then how could we ever say anything is real or tangible.

I don't believe in magic. However, there is a space where something happens, in the way people's minds interpret what they hear, that is currently largely outside of a concrete understanding. It will happen in time, but until then that space is a black box and a collection of ideas that sometimes sort of work, like biases.

I've been criticised for this before, but I'll state it again anyway. When you or @MattHooper, or anyone else, seeks to describe what they are hearing, the "system" changes. What you sit in front of is a collection of equipment that makes a sound. But I'm on the other side of the world, and what I get is a system that consists of those components, and your understanding of them, and the output of the system to me is your verbal description: not the sound from the speakers. It's actually a big difference. If you choose words that have a different meaning to me, I now have a faulty understanding.

In my subsequent post, I addressed the use of the word "synergy" as doing just what you don't want: it's a word which has a meaning that implies that your post has greater value, an "I'm an expert" word. Put the two ideas together, and we have "I'm an expert in some magic". There is I think a fine line. Often I find that when someone is describing a difference in this forum, there's a big put-down: but if you actually get the details of the equipment in use, there is sometimes a place where that difference can live in the sound as much as in the head.

So, I'm not against the use of words for description. I'm against the use of certain words because of their implications. I recognise that other words may have a technical and a general meaning that work against each other. The one I'm thinking of here is "bias", which is often misunderstood unless it is explained as a technical term every single time it is used. One of the common complaints, after all, is "how can I be biased"? Just like warm is good, bias is bad, and insulting to the "ears" of listeners who have been trying to fit into the subjectivist paradigm and then suddenly hit this particular rock in the audiophile ocean.

As for your last sentence, measurements and graphs and specifications, when honest, are real and tangible, and take "you" at least partly out of the equation. What you refer to as the full picture is one that includes the intangible, the interpretation and ideas, biases, whatever, of the listener.

 

[Killingbeans]

I don't know if it's an emotional reaction or a psychological reaction to audio gear combinations, but I don't think it's magic.

This.

The only thing that can become greater than the sum of its parts is an emotional reaction.

As an example, when an audiophile sees both the soothing glow of a tube amp and the "pureness" of a pair of single driver speakers made from "humane" materials, it triggers a much greater emotional response than the individual parts could ever do. You get a visual "synergy" that takes your bias to a whole new level.

Synergy is taking place for these folks.

If you go to a magic show, the things happening on the stage are also "taking place" for the audience. The experience would be completely identical if the "magician" wasn't fooling us and did real magic, but we all know that's not possible. Same thing with 'synergy' as it has become defined by the high-end press. It's simply not possible. Psychological mechanisms that make the 'synergy' appear to be real, are very much possible though.

It seems acceptable to some to believe a room and speakers can colour or affect the type of sound from a system, but seemingly not other devices earlier in the connected chain (amps, pre-amps, dacs etc etc).

Nobody has any problem accepting that upstream devices can have a distinct sound signature.

It's just that the vast majority of such devices aren't poorly designed enough to actually have one.

 

[Dimitrov]

This.

The only thing that can become greater than the sum of its parts is an emotional reaction.

As an example, when an audiophile sees both the soothing glow of a tube amp and the "pureness" of a pair of single driver speakers made from "humane" materials, it triggers a much greater emotional response than the individual parts could ever do. You get a visual "synergy" that takes your bias to a whole new level.



If you go to a magic show, the things happening on the stage are also "taking place" for the audience. The experience would be completely identical if the "magician" wasn't fooling us and did real magic, but we all know that's not possible. Same thing with 'synergy' as it has become defined by the high-end press. It's simply not possible. Psychological mechanisms that make the 'synergy' appear to be real, are very much possible though.



Nobody has any problem accepting that upstream devices can have a distinct sound signature.

It's just that the vast majority of such devices aren't poorly designed enough to actually have one.

How do you know that? That the vast majority of devices don't have a distinct sound signature? Why would you think they would need to be poorly designed in order to have a distinct sound signature?

 

[Dimitrov]

I'd love to know where all this placebo effect stops, because to be a complete ideology it really must be applied holistically to everything, we can't cherry pick what this view or experience of the world applies to.

 

[antcollinet]

How do you know that? That the vast majority of devices don't have a distinct sound signature? Why would you think they would need to be poorly designed in order to have a distinct sound signature?

Most audio electronics when measured have flat frequency response, and noise and distortion below the levels of human hearing. In this case, the device has no distinct sound signature. It is "straight wire with gain".

 

[antcollinet]

I'd love to know where all this placebo effect stops, because to be a complete ideology it really must be applied holistically to everything, we can't cherry pick what this view or experience of the world applies to.

Well yes - this is why all scientific studies endeavouring to determine the human experience of something use blind testing.

I mean - just look out of your nearest window. You are perceiving a complete 3 dimensional view of the world. With the ability to detect different objects, their relationship to each other, how far away one is relative to another, etc etc.

But that image (actually a full 3d model of the world you can see) exists only in your brain. It has been fabricated from the ground up from two tiny distorted and incomplete images focussed on the back of your eyeball. It is absolutely staggering what the brain does with such limited information.

Same sort of thing is happening with what you hear.

 

[Killingbeans]

How do you know that? That the vast majority of devices don't have a distinct sound signature? Why would you think they would need to be poorly designed in order to have a distinct sound signature?

Because a sound signature can't exist without one or more nonlinearities in the performance of a device, and those can be measured. Human hearing also have a relatively high tolerance for nonlinearities compared to what the high-end industry would like you to think. When you combine the current state of nonlinearities in well designed audio products with realistic expectations of human hearing abilities, you'll come to the conclusion that audio gear with a genuine "signature" is a rare animal. They mostly come in the form of "audiophile" products that are designed deliberately to have massive nonlinearities in order to give them "personality".

Furthermore, there's been countless blind tests designed to reliably detect audible differences in well designed audio gear. Source components always fail miserably, and amps don't do much better as long as they don't start clipping.

I'd love to know where all this placebo effect stops, because to be a complete ideology it really must be applied holistically to everything, we can't cherry pick what this view or experience of the world applies to.

Audibility thresholds of amp and DAC measurements

Introduction A recurring theme on ASR is whether or not the various measured qualities of the devices are audible. In this post, I'll present some clear and visual thresholds for when those imperfections can be considered a potentially audible concern. I will not explain the basics of amp/DAC...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[dkinric]

Objective audio describes in measurements the sound that reaches the ear. It seems much of subjective audio is finding prose creative enough to describe what is happening between that person's ears and their brain. While I'm very interested in the former, the latter has almost nothing to do with me. Different room, different brain, different subjective impressions.

 

[Dimitrov]

Most audio electronics when measured have flat frequency response, and noise and distortion below the levels of human hearing. In this case, the device has no distinct sound signature. It is "straight wire with gain".

I've heard this many times, but measured flat on the test bench using a simulated load vs a real speaker with widely varying impedances, how do you know that the combination won't result in an audible difference, above the thresholds of human hearing?

 

[antcollinet]

I've heard this many times, but measured flat on the test bench using a simulated load vs a real speaker with widely varying impedances, how do you know that the combination won't result in an audible difference, above the thresholds of human hearing?

If you are talking amps, then most well designed modern solid state amps have such low output impedance, that the impact of even widely varying impedances have little to no audible impact.

It is true that some amps - especially tube amps - with much higher output impedance may be pulled about a bit - but they are not generally considered to be of the class without signature. High output impedance can certainly be considered poor design.

And bear in mind, even in the case of amps with high output impdeance - you are now talking about the characteristics of the speaker influencing the sound - not that of the electronics. In this case, you are not hearing the 'sound signature' of the amp - you are hearing the signature of the speaker with its widely varying impedance, combined with source impedance. Any otherwise linear amp with similar output impedance will sound the same with that speaker. And the 'sound signature' will be different with different speakers - so it can't be viewed as being the amps' sound signature.

 

[MediumRare]

I'd love to know where all this placebo effect stops, because to be a complete ideology it really must be applied holistically to everything, we can't cherry pick what this view or experience of the world applies to.

Why would it ever stop? It's called a placebo effect because it's universal for humans to create ideas and interpret information subjectively. When taking a drug we misattribute symptoms; when seeing a crime we misremember details and misidentify suspects; when legs are amputated we still feel phantom pain; when we do surveys we need a lot of respondents because opinions vary; we think 50 degrees is cold in the summer but hot in the winter. Are you still not convinced that our "impression" of audio quality is unreliable without a scientific double-blind study?

 

[Killingbeans]

I've heard this many times, but measured flat on the test bench using a simulated load vs a real speaker with widely varying impedances, how do you know that the combination won't result in an audible difference, above the thresholds of human hearing?

Doesn't matter as long as the amp's output impedance is low enough.

But impedance is not the same as resistance, and people keep claiming it's an important thing to keep in mind. Which is why @amirm have added a test with reactive loads to his review suite.

Here's a "dirty" PA amp not giving a f¤¤k:

Again: You will only encounter "personality" if the amp is designed by a muppet.

 

[fpitas]

For those interested in some further explanation:

Audio Myth - "Damping Factor Isn't Much of a Factor"

Myth - "Damping Factor Isn't Much of a Factor" Myth - "A Damping Factor of 10 is High Enough" Myth - "All Amplifiers Have a High-Enough Damping Factor" Where did these Myths Originate? These myths seem to trace back to a well-known paper (PDF) written by Dick Pierce. His analysis shows that a...

benchmarkmedia.com

 

[antcollinet]

For those interested in some further explanation:

Audio Myth - "Damping Factor Isn't Much of a Factor"

Myth - "Damping Factor Isn't Much of a Factor" Myth - "A Damping Factor of 10 is High Enough" Myth - "All Amplifiers Have a High-Enough Damping Factor" Where did these Myths Originate? These myths seem to trace back to a well-known paper (PDF) written by Dick Pierce. His analysis shows that a...

benchmarkmedia.com

@fpitas : You've posted that article a number of times recently, so - school time for me. Probably going to embarrass myself, but engineering maths was never my strong point - in for a penny, in for a pound.

The author makes a statement that confuses me:

Notice that the impedance at 119 Hz is only 2.6 Ohms. Also notice that the phase angle at 94 Hz is -53 degrees, indicating a highly capacitive load. I'll spare you the math, but the combination of these two parameters means that at 100 Hz, the amplifier will need to deliver the same current that would be required by a 2.2 Ohm resistive load.

Sparing me the math is never a good idea, because unless someone rubs my nose in it, I'm not going to get it.

Surely for a fixed voltage, the current magnitude at a given frequency is always going to be the voltage divided by the impedance magnitude at that frequency (The black line) irrespective of phase. But here he is saying the current magnitude at 100Hz is - due to the phase at 94Hz, and the magnitude at 119Hz - greater than that given by the lowest impedance magnitude of 2.6ohm - is the equivalent of driving 2.2ohm.?

What am I missing?

Incidentally - he then goes on in his analysis of the impact on the system frequency response to use the pure impedance magnitude in his calculations, now ignoring phase.

 

[MattHooper]

OK, I've thought about this, and I was wrong with one part of what I said.
The word "synergy" is not meaningless. Actually, the rest of my post showed that it is laden with meaning. And what's more, I suspect that not one of the writers I picked up those ideas from actually meant all of those things when I picked up each one of them.

Synergy in hifi is an "I'm an expert" word. You could say "I think these products work together well" and it captures the point. But it sounds much more expert to say "there's a synergy between them". You see? Now it's not an opinion but a fact. But because it's "expert speak" it puts the user of the word in a kind of more official or expert position just from saying it.

Here's a non-hi-fi example: the spread of the descriptors "male" and "female". So, previously, someone describing a crime on the TV news would say "I saw a man running down East Street after the gunshots". OK? But a police officer would now say, "A male was reported running north along East Street after the gunshots were heard". The use of the word "male" supposedly makes the report more official than saying man, for some reason. When I had to give a statement to police about something a few years ago, I had a long argument and insisted on changing where they wrote "female" in their taking down of my statement, to "woman" when it was read back to me. Apparently, "female" sounds better in court? Anyway, nowadays when you watch the news and someone gets a mic shoved in front of them, they now automatically say "male" or "female" though they would never do that in normal conversation.

Or, returning to hifi, let's take one of the most common descriptors, "warm". As far as I can tell, warm was first used as an informal term applied to radios and early electric gramophones, the opposite of "bright". It seems to just mean that low frequencies were present in the sound: later, it meant that low frequencies were emphasised. However, it had and has an emotionally positive feel to it (my feet are cold while I'm writing this, so of course it feels that way to me right now!).

So, reviewers used the term. But it didn't feel right to use imprecise language, so of course, people tried to give it a meaning, and you can find those lexicons and articles online now. So one definition of the term was that frequencies around 250Hz are emphasised. See what just happened? A warm sound isn't a positive thing any more. Now it's becoming a specific distortion. Now, for people like most of us at ASR, warm=distorted=bad when used that way. Warm also in that process gets a little of the "I'm an expert" meaning because it is now a technical term.

Yet newcomers to the field, as well as some of the subjective reviewers, don't see it that way. Warm is still a positive attribute. How do we know what is meant? It still carries the "I'm an expert" thing though.

We've had people arrive here claiming that the most treble-heavy speakers (B&W's recent output of course) have a lovely, warm sound, not like those cold steely KEF speakers. Confused? It appears that because the writer likes the sound, and warm is a positive description in the press - thus an "expert word" though divorced again from its specific meaning - the system they have must be warm!

This leads to posers, not clarity. About a decade ago now, I had an earnest young salesperson (male, see - I'm doing it myself here!) tell me that the disc player he wanted me to buy was first "warm", then "smooth". So was I right to reply that a component can't be both warm and smooth, or not?

The thing is, we have to make the words work. Some words aren't going to work, and some words carry too much or the wrong meaning now. I don't intend to strawman the idea that some components work together better than others, though I expect that to be explicable through measurement...

My sense is you are reading a bit too much in to the use of the term "synergy."

You may be right about how some people use it. But far from all, IMO. It just seems a convenient term for when two or more components work well together, sonically.
Since we are talking about the audiophile world, the term may be used in the context of some error or delusion, but not necessarily with the level of pretension you have inferred.

 

[Purité Audio]

Synergy doesn’t mean a thing, technically compatible on the other hand…
Keith

 

[MattHooper]

As usual: communication is a two-way activity.

Some people seem bent on robbing descriptive language of any power. I find that weird.

 

[Purité Audio]

We need to disavow the notion that sound reproduction requires some form of alchemy.
One simply needs to know whether two components are suitable.
Keith

 

[MattHooper]

There is nothing inherent in the description "synergy" that denotes magic.

No more than using the term "bright" in audio suggests the sound will miraculously make your eyes squint.

Anyone is course free to reject the term and substitute "compatibility," but that doesn't entail someone else using the term "synergy"
"means nothing" by that term. It's as silly as saying "Saying one speaker sounding 'brighter' than the other is meaningless. There is only a difference
in high frequency output." Well, ok, but "brighter" is another descriptive way other people can communicate such differences.

It just takes a desire to understand what people mean when using a term, as well as understanding different people have different goals, where
they may find "synergy" between components reach those goals. (And in fact, what YOU may define as "compatible" may not actually suit
that other person's goals).

 

[Purité Audio]

Perhaps look up the definition of synergy Matt.
Keith