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"Things that cannot be measured"

restorer-john

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My phone changes ' unmeasurable ' to ' unreasonable ' , sometimes auto correct knows best .

Sometime predictive/auto correct is Freudian:

Text to my neighbour who went away for the weekend with his wife and I was looking after his place. I said "hope you had a bone getaway". It was actually "hope you had a nice getaway"...

1614516429264.png


PS. The chlorine was for the pool. Not anything evil ok? ;)
 
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Thomas savage

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Sometime predictive/auto correct is Freudian:

Text to my neighbour who went away for the weekend with his wife and I was looking after his place. I said "hope you had a bone getaway". It was actually "hope you had a nice getaway"...

View attachment 115436

PS. The chlorine was for the pool. Not anything evil ok? ;)
Bone getaway.., men only weekend ? - hears the sound of banjos in background -
 

SIY

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By the way, about the marketing fun fact about audio electronic engineers doing their "voicing" by listening.
One of the world best best studio electronics engineer gave an interview from which I electronically translated a part below:

Friedemann Kootz: Your developments are really planned
planned, measured and tested down to the last detail.
and tested. Do you listen to the devices
do you listen to the devices you develop?


Thomas Funk: No.

This was essentially Peter Walker's stance. He never bothered to have listening sessions with their products. And all he managed to do was produce classic after classic.
 

Thomas savage

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This was essentially Peter Walker's stance. He never bothered to have listening sessions with their products. And all he managed to do was produce classic after classic.
Why would you , its not a perceptual effects device folks like Walker were / are developing.

Unless its a codec I cant see why you'd listen to anything audio device wise. Even speakers , we know what they need to do well and the artifacts that colour sound or are undesirable if only purely from a technical POV .

Listening just creates confusion and thats not what you want from a engineer , you want a beard , cup of strong tea in hand and a pragmatic abrupt demeanour...
 
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MrPeabody

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Something the subjectivist crowd often brings up. "There are things we cannot measure but the human ear/brain can hear it."

We retort, an analyzer can hear much better than any human can. Which is the truth. But thinking about the question I did being to wonder... Could it be possible for there to be a form of measurement we have not found yet? Is science completely clear on this point? Or is there possibly another measurement out there be to found. Usually in my experience science is evolving.

Of course, I am not saying that the measurements used are not valid, they have helped me personally assemble some amazing sounding systems. I'm not as well versed in the science of audio as others in this forum. But I was wondering if there is a possibility, that there could be other measurements "underdiscovered". Or at this point are we just increasing our abilities to further analyze (as well as improve the actual technology) in the ways we already know how?

We know that physically sound is fluctuation in air pressure, and we know that we are able to measure this to a high degree of accuracy.

Of course there is the closely related question of whether we know how to interpret sound measurements such that we can predict the perceived quality/accuracy just from analyzing the measurements. It is intrinsically impossible to prove that our ability to do this is perfect. Nevertheless, so much has been learned over the decades that I would say that it is unlikely that there are any major breakthroughs remaining, in the way of improved understanding of how to interpret objective measurements.

There is another layer to the question. There is a particular fallacy that is often promoted by the subjectivist crowd. Music (and art generally) generates an emotional response, and it goes without saying that it is difficult (to put it mildly) to quantitatively predict the emotional response to music. (Regrettably I'll now have to have defend this statement from someone wanting to argue that emotional responses are quantitatively predictable.) The fallacy that non-quantitative people often promote is the idea that it is somehow a logical consequence, of the fact that we can't quantitatively predict the emotional response to music, that we cannot quantitatively predict the perceived accuracy of sound that has been artificially reproduced. The fact that we cannot quantitatively predict the emotional response to music says zero about our ability to quantitatively predict the perceived accuracy of sound that has been artificially reproduced. Every argument that has ever been propounded by anyone, to the effect that the great difficulty in quantitatively predicting the emotional response to music means that we can't quantitatively predict the perceived accuracy of sound that has been artificially reproduced, is bogus. Arguments of this ilk are copious, and they are garden variety nonsense.
 

raistlin65

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Something the subjectivist crowd often brings up. "There are things we cannot measure but the human ear/brain can hear it."

We retort, an analyzer can hear much better than any human can. Which is the truth. But thinking about the question I did being to wonder... Could it be possible for there to be a form of measurement we have not found yet? Is science completely clear on this point? Or is there possibly another measurement out there be to found. Usually in my experience science is evolving.

Of course, I am not saying that the measurements used are not valid, they have helped me personally assemble some amazing sounding systems. I'm not as well versed in the science of audio as others in this forum. But I was wondering if there is a possibility, that there could be other measurements "underdiscovered". Or at this point are we just increasing our abilities to further analyze (as well as improve the actual technology) in the ways we already know how?

There is no significant evidence to support this notion that there is something unmeasurable that subjectivists hear.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are subject to perceptual biases that can explain what subjectivists hear.

Then there are the people that acknowledge perceptual biases exist, but feel that it does not apply to them. This is known as the blind spot bias and is a common phenomena

https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/june/bias-blind-spot.html

if you're not familiar with it, you should read Kahneman's Nobel prize winning research on cognitive biases and how it affects everyone's decision-making processes throughout our day-to-day lives.

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555
 

Lambda

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There are no "Things that cannot be measured" but can be heard.
But there are Things that cannot be measured with (long)FFT that can be heard.
 

solderdude

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A better question is if all that needs to be measured always is measured or can be measured.

The answer is nearly always NO, mostly only some basics are measured certainly when it concerns amps under load.
 

ahofer

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And what area of performance are they "tuning"? If they know what sound property they want to effect they must know how to modify the amps measurable performance to get there. They don't just stand over an amp and wave a magic wand or sprinkel magic dust on it do they? Remember the Stereophile Carver challenge?
So NO, there aren't any electrical properties of components that effect their sound qualities that we do not know yet. That's subjective BS to cover their butts on making claims of sound differences in things like power cables that just don't exist.
Put just a few more of those "fullness" thingies in it! So much more exciting!
 

DSJR

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This was essentially Peter Walker's stance. He never bothered to have listening sessions with their products. And all he managed to do was produce classic after classic.

Oh PW listened alright - BUT, back then, distortions were rather more audible I suspect than they are now, so he'd listen for annoying distortions in his amps or tuners and fine tune to make them as inaudible or un-noticeable as possible. Only THEN, after the design was signed off, would he listen to music (I refer to interviews published in the Quad table book and hope I summarised the comments he made correctly) :cool: I may have it wrong, but didn't Quad used to have dems of ten 303 power amps daisy chained together and doing a null test or similar, all you heard was noise? Apologies if I have this wrong.
 

scott wurcer

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There are no "Things that cannot be measured" but can be heard.
But there are Things that cannot be measured with (long)FFT that can be heard.

Please provide some evidence. The frequency domain representation (FFT) of a signal and the time domain representation are interchangeable, completely and with no loss of information.
 

Roland

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I don’t think there are things that can’t be measured, but there is the possibility that there are things that we’re not currently measuring. A double blind test to establish that there is no perceptible difference between a Yamaha A-S3200 and an R-N303D would prove that the measurements tell all. If there is a difference, something else needs measuring.
 

Lambda

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completely and with no loss of information.
that is, If the output is complex?!
Where is the time/phase/polarity information in a simple 2d fft graph?

Also the FFT gain apply to periodic signals not to a periodic uncorrelated signals.
That's the whole deal with FFT gain the noise floor in the fft is lower.

So if the is the noise of for example high amplitude and bandwidth pules length is very short (compared to the fft length).
it will not "properly" show up in the fft. that is it appears way lower in amplitude then it actually is.
 

jhaider

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Something the subjectivist crowd often brings up. "There are things we cannot measure but the human ear/eye/imagination/brain can hear it."

With the above additions, they're right. Here's light read that does a good job of synthesizing the insights of Kahneman et al. in a fun, engaging way: You Are Not So Smart.

Illustration: a while back I wrote a review of the ELAC compact integrated. It was a positive review, because the product looks great and has an innovate subwoofer integration/EQ software that I could confirm with measurements and listening does what it claims to do. Really the only thing it was missing was AirPlay support. Yet the first comment started like this:

"Great review with lots of information, but I fear that we may be missing the forest for the trees here...
I have compared this unit to similar offerings from other manufacturers and have found the Elac to be wanting in terms of imaging, detail and sheer musicality, even when paired with Elac's own well receive Uni-Fi speakers."

I never replied because I could not figure how to do so diplomatically.

One reason, aside from general delusion, is a funny/sad aspect to the comment: the commentator claimed an ICE-50 based compact integrated from Kanto "handily beats the Elac on the clarity/detail front at low to mid volumes" I owned that product. It had design flaw with the input stage that made it quite noisy. So much for "low to mid volume clarity/detail!" Kanto, to their credit, owned the problem, completely redesigned the product, and sent the new one to known owners of the broken model. (The new one had an integrated Class D chip amp, instead of the input board and ICE-50 amp.) Maybe I'm just a crazy point-headed measurement nerd, butI think a good general rule is a product with a low noise floor will have better "low to mid volume clarity/detail" than one with a broken input stage design that's super noisy.
 

ctakim

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Of course the laws of physics dictate that anything that can be sensed aurally can be measured, but a better phrasing of the question may be what can impact the quality or enjoyment of sound reproduction that we are not capturing in our standard measurements or spinorama assessments?
 
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