Measurable.
Measurable.
Measurable.
Measurable.
Don’t confuse happiness with accuracy, or customer satisfaction with measurable performance.
Rick “some people don’t want true ‘fidelity’, but we can still measure it” Denney
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"Things that cannot be measured"
- Thread starter ShiZo
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Don’t confuse happiness with accuracy, or customer satisfaction with measurable performance.
Rick “some people don’t want true ‘fidelity’, but we can still measure it” Denney
Yes, we'd (have to) study brain activity to confirm that hearing a sound is different from imagining it of course. I expect different pathways and structures in the brain are employed in either case, and that some people already know a fair bit about this.
It isn't the reponsibilty of reproduction, but it is the purpose of it. Among other purposes, like making money, and so on.
Still irrelevant. I do this whenever I play, but people (not just musicians) are not hearing a sound reproduced by an audio system, or instrument, or anything else. They see the note on the score and their brain fills in the sound; they imagine it, so from an audio perspective there is nothing to measure. No external sound is (re)produced by looking at a score. The same could be said about looking at an album cover and "hearing" the song; we are imagining it, there is no external audio stimulus.
I have no idea where you are going with this, but the focus of ASR is audio reproduction, and measurements related to that. Imaginary sounds we create on our own from inaudible stimuli are way out of scope. I do agree that sounds we imagine are unmeasurable using audio instrumentation.
If and until someone establishes that the mere presence of raised cables or an empty wallet changes the perception of music in some consistent way….
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Empty wallet could ease sciatica pain. LOL
It’s not what happens in the brain, but what leads up to it. The audio system’s purpose is to recreate a sound field accurately, not affect one’s perception of it. If it’s accurate at the ear and we still perceive it differently, it’s up to us to bridge the gap. That doesn’t really take a lot of imagination to do. Musicians are particularly good at it judging from the common mediocrity of their audio systems.
We are really taking the sound system a bit too seriously, it seems to me.
Rick “not giving a mere sound system responsibility for my state of mind—that’s the job of the music” Denney
kschiedi, welcome to ASR!
Think of it this way. You are absolutely correct, no one can measure the entire human listening experiemce. This is the exact point of this website. What happens between the ears and the brain is an individual experience, with all the biases and mood and preferences affecting the interpretation.
So it's useless to even try. What Joe Internet says he's hearing with his brain, in his room, with his current mood has almost nothing to do with me. So, we focus on the audio chain, ending at the very front of the speaker, before it interacts the room. That way, everyone is on the same page, starting with common data before all the other individual variables come in to play. What happens after the sound leaves the speaker is your personal experience, and only yours.
I'd argue that. For example, a center image will form not because the soundfield is the same as an acoustic source in that position but because the system is specifically designed to create the image in your braid because of (nearly) the same signals hitting both ears.
I can report that the emptiness of my wallet negatively affects my perception of music by limiting the quality of the speakers I can afford. And don't get me started on the affordability of a listening room.
But it does that using techniques that happen outside the brain, not inside it. I didn’t say we should be unaware of perception, but that the audio system’s responsibility is fulfilled outside of it.
But that said, a stereo image occurs because the signals in the two channels either align or don’t depending on directional and level information that happens upstream from the microphones. Yes, we can simulate that in production by changing levels of voices in each channel, but that is a convenience and the results are not always perfect. It’s still a physical measurable effect, and not related to how I might imagine music.
And I’m also not saying that we don’t fill in the blanks in our playback systems with imagined sound—that’s how musicians tolerate poor reproduction (apparently) so easily.
Rick “the perceived and imagined sound may get there from different sources—the playback system is only responsible for the part that goes through the ears” Denney
This part I agree with, but the perceptual end is not "recreating the original soundfield," which is an impossibility and something that practically no-one is even trying to do outside of research labs.
Instead, the engineering end is to take the massively compressed signal (2 or 4 or whatever channels) and create a perceptual state in the listener which has the illusion of more information, using well-established and totally non-mysterious targets. From the electronics end, it's simple, just make small signals larger. The less straightforward part is in the creation and manipulation of the finite-channel signals from the original soundfield(s) and taking that finite number of signals and translating that into an acoustic response by the loudspeakers.
Makes sense. And that was my point. Measurement of fidelity, accuracy, etc will never be a complete predictor for how different people will perceive sound quality, and hence, be satisfied or happy with said sound quality. So, we can measure, measure, measure.. and find many measures that we believe correlate... but, our ability to predict the human response will be forever clouded by the variability from human to human, and even the day to day psychological variations within a singular human.
But that's irrelevant to sound reproduction. Humans listen to live music as well.
As I said, I don’t conflate measured performance with customer happiness or even satisfaction. But that’s exactly why I prefer measured performance—it allows me to calibrate my own preferences to repeatable measurements if I consider myself out on the tail of a preference distribution from a larger population. This is why amplifier power with respect to frequency and load is more valuable to me than SINAD. But power output is still a measurement.
Without the measurements, or, worse, with the belief that measurements are false or unimportant, I have the impossible challenge of calibrating my preferences to those of a reviewer, whose preferences are at best inconsistent and biased by a whole host of inaudible influences disclosed or not.
The thread is about things that cannot be measured, but the assumption baked into that is that the things are important to how the system sounds, not how it looks or how much it impresses one’s buddies.
As a guy who used to race cars, by the way, it seems to me a car that simulates high-performance engine sounds as some now do is the height of tomfoolery. Either it performs or it doesn’t. I’m the same about sound equipment.
Rick “thinking we are splitting hairs” Denney
Absolutely true, but do you think that justifies or invalidates subjective reviews? I think it’s the latter. There’d have to be some consistent effect (human to human, day to day) to do the former.
On my side, I think there is a consistent effect on perceived accuracy from knowing, for instance, that I have done room correction and have fairly accurate equipment.
Sokel
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Nope,the trained person just remembers it,it's already hardcoded in it's brain because of the training.
Just like the voice of the people we love.
If it was about actual listening to it all aspects of it would follow.
And I never saw a classical drummer actually feeling the physical impact of the large drum just reading at the sheet.
I feel like it both invalidates and validates subjective reviews. I know that's double talk. But, what I mean is: We can't put too much stock into a subjective review, mostly because it comes from just one person. But, when that person is myself, I feel my subjective review is very important. Long way of saying, "it's in the ear of the beholder".
I went to Axpona this year. I spent hours in the listening rooms. I have no idea where any of those systems I heard would measure wrt to accuracy or fidelity. But, I wanted to gage whether my ear was lining up with other 'audiophiles'. Could I detect a fantastic sounding system, or a truly bad sounding system? So, I made it a point to linger in listening rooms where I felt the sound was either (based on my subjectivity) very good or very bad. I asked others in those listening rooms what they thought of the systems, without tipping my hand as to what I thought. The responses I got were all over the map. Some agreed with my take, some didn't. Some agreed with my take, but for different reasons altogether. It was an unscientific survey, to be sure. But, I left Axpona thinking that I could just as easily be considered a revered audio critic as someone who has no idea what good sound is. On one hand, this is pretty frustrating... on the other hand, it's encouraging because it means that I'm not likely "missing out" on some system that others subjectively believe is awesome. It means I can find a sound system that I truly enjoy and decide for myself whether it's worth the price...
I like the attempt to measure. Measurements are facts/data... they take out the subjectivity. But, I also believe we can't measure everything when it comes to what people like. I see that many have said the goal of this website is to measure the accuracy of sound reproduction. I think that is really cool and something I am interested in. My point is that sound reproduction accuracy may not be the only measure that predicts what makes a listener happy... and, we may not be able to measure all that make listeners happy. And, maybe thats ok.
Only to you, then. Kind of begs the question.
I would hope we can measure any “measure” (that predicts..).
At any rate, it’s ok that we don’t understand everything that might predict listener satisfaction, but we are still engaged in the search. The results of that search includes dismissing things that don’t reliably predict satisfaction.
I understand that part of the audiophile mindset, as it were, is calling it all a huge mystery and just enjoying the search knowing there’s never any progress or answers. That’s OK too, but it isn’t OK to insist that such a pursuit is a science or even a discipline.
Hedonic testing is a well-developed area in sensory science.
You confuse personal preference with High Fidelity.
You may prefer having your bass control turned up to +15, but that result will
in no way reflect the sound the artist/engineers intended to be reproduced.
Or the science of High Fidelity music reproduction, which can only be accurately gauged with measurements.
