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

[Emlin]

I will be taking a more scientific approach to our limited knowledge of reality and recognize the shortcomings of current methods of measurement.

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But within audio, what counts is pretty well known and can and has been counted.

 

[NTK]

I will be taking a more scientific approach to our limited knowledge of reality and recognize the shortcomings of current methods of measurement.

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Welcome to ASR! But you seem to be wronger than wrong.

 

[tmtomh]

I will be taking a more scientific approach to our limited knowledge of reality and recognize the shortcomings of current methods of measurement.

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The preponderance of evidence suggests that Einstein never wrote or said this:

Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted – Quote Investigator®

quoteinvestigator.com

More to the point, the second part of this statement - "not everything that can be counted counts" is quite true and also pretty uncontroversial. You can easily find this idea raised, without disagreement, in many threads here: differences in noise performance are irrelevant below a certain threshold; AC "purifiers" sometimes filter AC coming in from the wall but it doesn't matter because audio devices already filter the power more so and would not work properly if they didn't; impedance of RCA to AES digital cabling doesn't matter unless your run is longer than a certain length; and so on.

As to the first part - "Not everything that counts can be counted," that's not necessarily the case, and this idea is routinely abused by those who simply don't want to believe measurements and/or simply cannot or will not accept that listener bias and poor auditory memory are major factors in what a lot of us hear and experience when we compare hi-fi gear in uncontrolled situations.

Or to put it more simply, a lot of what we think "can't be counted" can in fact be counted - we just confuse our own limited knowledge with the state of human knowledge in general.

 

[ahofer]

I, for one, look forward cautiously to a more scientific approach. A welcome change.

 

[MarkS]

For me it's all very simple: either you can hear the difference between two components without knowing which is in your system, or you can't.

And if you have not tried tried listening without knowning which is in and which is out, then you may have been McGurked by your eyes into hearing something that isn't there.

 

[antcollinet]

I will be taking a more scientific approach to our limited knowledge of reality and recognize the shortcomings of current methods of measurement.

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With respect to audio though, what particular shortcomings are you thinking of?

Because, well, audio is pretty much the oldest and simplest ever application of electronics. In fact electronics was initially created to do it. We've ** been doing it for about 150years.

After all that time, we know how it works. We understand it very very well, and we know how to measure it.

**we being humanity. Specifically the engineering subset of humanity.

 

[Ricardus]

I will be taking a more scientific approach to our limited knowledge of reality and recognize the shortcomings of current methods of measurement.

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What shortcoming are those?

 

[xray]

I will be taking a more scientific approach to our limited knowledge of reality and recognize the shortcomings of current methods of measurement.

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If you don't understand or disagree with the measurement it's not a shortcoming of the measurement, it's a shortcoming of your knowledge.

 

[Ricardus]

I would just like to point out that on msg 1 from this user they are already making an "audiophile" anti-science point.

Scam account.

 

[antcollinet]

As tmtomh has deleted his comment I'm also removing it from the quote.

I think @Ricardus is referring to the one and only post from @plateaulight ** not the OP of this thread.



**who seems to have lobbed his hand grenade into the pond and scarpered. Probably got his audiophile badge of honour now on some other place.

 

[tmtomh]

I think @Ricardus is referring to the one and only post from @plateaulight ** not the OP of this thread.



**who seems to have lobbed his hand grenade into the pond and scarpered. Probably got his audiophile badge of honour now on some other place.

Oh, in that case my sincerest apologies to @Ricardus !

I have deleted my original comment above, as it was in error. I completely agree with Ricardus' point about the other member whose comment he was referring to. Sorry!

 

[Ricardus]

Oh, in that case my sincerest apologies to @Ricardus !

I have deleted my original comment above, as it was in error. I completely agree with Ricardus' point about the other member whose comment he was referring to. Sorry!

Yeah, I was commenting on the guy with 1 post TOTAL who said that he said.

On every audio forum where I'm a member I've noticed an influx of new fake account or bots or whatever promoting lots of anti-science views. They usually stick around long enough to get in arguments, and then they start swearing and calling names, and get banned.

 

[tmtomh]

Yeah, I was commenting on the guy with 1 post TOTAL who said that he said.

On every audio forum where I'm a member I've noticed an influx of new fake account or bots or whatever promoting lots of anti-science views. They usually stick around long enough to get in arguments, and then they start swearing and calling names, and get banned.

Indeed, I've noticed that too. Some seem to be fake/scam accounts as you say, while some seem to be real folks who have heard about places like this and think they can wade in right away and "own the objectivists." As you note, they quickly run out of arguments they can make.

 

[egellings]

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.

If I weren't biased, I'd be drawing no quiescent current.

 

[Dimitrov]

Has anyone looked at this paper from Kunchur? The Human Auditory System and Audio (April 28, 2023).
https://ssrn.com/abstract=4437822 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4437822

In general, one of the main takeaways is that our human hearing is more acute than most measurement tools we might currently have in the engineering field. For example that it seems that phase distortion could be more important than we might generally think. As the author indicates in point 7 of the summary, this could explain why many prefer amps with no or low negative feedback.

Maybe this should be posted in the measurements thread.

 

[MarkS]

More pseudoscience from Kunchur. What an embarrassment for that journal (Applied Acoustics).

Maybe Kunchur could first verify with level-matched blind listening tests with high statistics that "many" can actually distinguish amps with "no or low feedback" from high-feedback amps (which of course he has not done) before he starts speculating about "preferences".

 

[computer-audiophile]

I found this passage in the conclusion particularly interesting, since it concerns me today. Incidentally, I have always been of this opinion.

An individual’s audiogram does not convey the full scope of their ability to discern sonic details. Noiseinduced and age-related hearing loss raise thresholds for hearing certain frequencies without necessarily seriously compromising TR and RD. Well performing featuredetection circuity at the cortical level and a detailed longterm memory of live sound, etched through a lifetime of concerts, can make an elderly listener more adept at noticing differences in audio quality than a less experienced young listener.

 

[Newman]

Has anyone looked at this paper from Kunchur? The Human Auditory System and Audio (April 28, 2023).
https://ssrn.com/abstract=4437822 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4437822

In general, one of the main takeaways is that our human hearing is more acute than most measurement tools we might currently have in the engineering field. For example that it seems that phase distortion could be more important than we might generally think. As the author indicates in point 7 of the summary, this could explain why many prefer amps with no or low negative feedback.

Maybe this should be posted in the measurements thread.

Do a search of ASR for mentions of Kunchur. My favourite, link. Applies directly to you!

Amir did a video dissecting one of Kunchur's papers on cable sound, link. Covers similar presuppositions.

Here is a listing of some of his errors on temporal resolution issues, offsite link.

cheers

 

[Dimitrov]

Do a search of ASR for mentions of Kunchur. My favourite, link. Applies directly to you!

Amir did a video dissecting one of Kunchur's papers on cable sound, link. Covers similar presuppositions.

Here is a listing of some of his errors on temporal resolution issues, offsite link.

cheers

This is a big site and it will probably take a long while for me to dissect everything. So you don't agree with Kunchur? But he is a scientist with credentials? Otherwise he wouldn't be posting papers like this I'm assuming. So you do not agree with his conclusions or are you suggesting he is a quack? Help me to understand this a little better because as a layman when I read his paper it seemed pretty complicated and I think has references for his work.

 

[Mnyb]

This is a big site and it will probably take a long while for me to dissect everything. So you don't agree with Kunchur? But he is a scientist with credentials? Otherwise he wouldn't be posting papers like this I'm assuming. So you do not agree with his conclusions or are you suggesting he is a quack? Help me to understand this a little better because as a layman when I read his paper it seemed pretty complicated and I think has references for his work.

he has credential in another area of science , a common fallacy among intellectual people , assuming because you know a lot you then know everything and have authoritive opinions outside your core expertise . Also common among leaders and other people in some position of power or status , to claim authority in all parts of life because your are an authority in some circumstances .

The tell tale is that he promotes the same old snake oil that's been proven wrong for decades , clutching at straws to somehow make the "audiophile narrative" true .

Sadly there is a lot of really bad science and these guys are not perfect people .

And people buy scheme this all the time , you have for example famous athletes making car commercials ? I would not ask Zlatan what car to buy , I would ask him about football(soccer).