• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Why haven't subjectivists and objectivists met to do a live ABX test?

Blumlein 88

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Feb 23, 2016
Messages
20,521
Likes
37,050
Pls bear with me.
Say a thousand reliable tests show that 'subjectivists' are right, they 'scientifically' prove there are differences.
What is the effect on the 'objectivists'?! What do you do, think, feel at that moment?
IMHO, 'objectivists' do not look for tests & research for truth, but to show the other camp is wrong. Very different things.
Then, why is an objectivist an objectivist?! Because measurements say so (and that could be right) OR cause they listened and draw this conclusion?

Ironically, John Yang never expressly endorsed the 'objectivist' statement that all DACs measuring the same sound the same.

Also, did you read the 'measuring & listening' clarifications on Benchmark site, that manufacture one of the best measuring amps? These highly competent people are not that drastic in their statements as you 'objectivists' here. Very strange.
I suppose among millions of people may be some unusual motivations. I do think your depiction here is wrong for nearly all of them. I don't know of objectivists looking for test made to show up subjectivists. Most appear to find the most reasonable relatable test to use. They do require certain guidelines to be met. Like level matching or even frequency response. Why? Because if the only difference is level, a volume change fixes that. Uneven FR is known to sound different. etc. etc.

Then, why is an objectivist an objectivist?! Because measurements say so (and that could be right) OR cause they listened and draw this conclusion?

Rather bizzare reasoning here. In fact it is objectivists who draw conclusions based upon listening and listening alone. Measurements are used to understand why something might sound different, or why it meets criteria so that it sounds of high fidelity to input. Naive uncontrolled listening merely confuses people.
 

DonR

Major Contributor
Joined
Jan 25, 2022
Messages
2,968
Likes
5,611
Location
Vancouver(ish)
Honest question, who cares what the objectivist hears? They aren't the ones claiming to hear the differences.
I think the objection was that objectivists can lie claiming there is no difference when there is. I agree that the burden of proof lies with those that claim to hear a difference when objectively there should be none.
 

Digby

Major Contributor
Joined
Mar 12, 2021
Messages
1,632
Likes
1,555
Are there well defined points for where differences cease to matter? I imagine there are some people who wouldn't notice stuff that is very out of whack, then there is maybe 1 in 1000 who have superhuman ability to tell the difference between things that are supposed to be inaudible to the other 999.

It is probably more like a sliding scale, than a hard limit at x point.
 

SuicideSquid

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Jan 20, 2022
Messages
699
Likes
1,647
Are there well defined points for where differences cease to matter? I imagine there are some people who wouldn't notice stuff that is very out of whack, then there is maybe 1 in 1000 who have superhuman ability to tell the difference between things that are supposed to be inaudible to the other 999.

It is probably more like a sliding scale, than a hard limit at x point.

I think that definitely depends on the person. There are some people perfectly content to listen to music on laptop speakers and pack-in earbuds for the rest of their lives.

There are two separate questions that need to be answered when talking about things like DACs, amps, and cables:

1. Is there any audible difference at all?

2. Does that difference matter?

You can't answer 2 until you've answered 1. If you can hear the difference and do or do not care, well that's just personal preference. If you can't hear the difference but express a preference anyway based on "audiophile" nonsense and self-deception, that's just foolish.
 

Blumlein 88

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Feb 23, 2016
Messages
20,521
Likes
37,050
Are there well defined points for where differences cease to matter? I imagine there are some people who wouldn't notice stuff that is very out of whack, then there is maybe 1 in 1000 who have superhuman ability to tell the difference between things that are supposed to be inaudible to the other 999.

It is probably more like a sliding scale, than a hard limit at x point.
Obviously there are differences in innate abilities, plus age or occupation related hearing damage etc. In academic research you first aim to use younger healthy subjects to find limits for best normal hearing. Hearing damage normally doesn't improve things. And there are groups on the edges. Like yes, some people hear to some extent over 20 khz when young adults. Maybe 2% or so of them. Most don't and almost all hear less than 20 khz as you get past 30 years old. When most audiophiles are over 40 and worry about ultrasonic effects it simply makes no sense. So rather than a sliding scale think of a bell shaped distribution curve.
 

JustJones

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 31, 2020
Messages
1,726
Likes
2,391
Also, did you read the 'measuring & listening' clarifications on Benchmark site, that manufacture one of the best measuring amps? These highly competent people are not that drastic in their statements as you 'objectivists' here. Very strange.

I wouldn't say they are drastic either but I would say their approach looks objective and scientific.

From Benchmark​

MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES MUST BE DRIVEN BY LISTENING TESTS​

Listening tests are never perfect and for this reason it is essential that we develop measurements for each artifact that we identify in a listening test. An APx555 test set has far more resolution than human hearing, but it has no intelligence. We have to tell it exactly what to measure and how to measure it. When we hear something that we cannot measure, we are just not doing the right measurements.

LISTENING TESTS REVEAL PROBLEMS BUT NOT THE ROOT CAUSE​

Any design process that relies solely on listening tests is doomed to fail. If we just listen, redesign, and then repeat, we fail to identify the root cause of the defect and we never approach perfection. We may arrive at a solution that just masks the artifact with another less-objectionable artifact. On the other hand if we focus on eliminating every artifact that we can measure, we can quickly converge on a solution that approaches sonic transparency. At Benchmark, if we can measure an artifact, we don't try to determine if it is low enough to be inaudible, we simply try to eliminate it. This process eliminates all but the most elusive artifacts.
 

SuicideSquid

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Jan 20, 2022
Messages
699
Likes
1,647

I wouldn't say they are drastic either but I would say their approach looks objective and scientific.

From Benchmark​

MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES MUST BE DRIVEN BY LISTENING TESTS​

Listening tests are never perfect and for this reason it is essential that we develop measurements for each artifact that we identify in a listening test. An APx555 test set has far more resolution than human hearing, but it has no intelligence. We have to tell it exactly what to measure and how to measure it. When we hear something that we cannot measure, we are just not doing the right measurements.

LISTENING TESTS REVEAL PROBLEMS BUT NOT THE ROOT CAUSE​

Any design process that relies solely on listening tests is doomed to fail. If we just listen, redesign, and then repeat, we fail to identify the root cause of the defect and we never approach perfection. We may arrive at a solution that just masks the artifact with another less-objectionable artifact. On the other hand if we focus on eliminating every artifact that we can measure, we can quickly converge on a solution that approaches sonic transparency. At Benchmark, if we can measure an artifact, we don't try to determine if it is low enough to be inaudible, we simply try to eliminate it. This process eliminates all but the most elusive artifacts.
The problem with this claim from Benchmark is that they don't make clear what kind of listening tests they're doing.

If they're doing blind tests and identifying problems, all is well and good. If they're doing sighted tests and think they're hearing problems that can't be identified in the measurements, nine times out of ten they're chasing phantom problems and wasting their time.

Given the quality of Benchmark's engineering, I suspect they're doing properly controlled blind tests but aren't disclosing this because they don't want to turn off the audiophile crowd with deep pockets.
 

JaMaSt

Senior Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Sep 14, 2021
Messages
369
Likes
693
Location
Vancouver, WA
And they try to assess why people prefer something so their engineers understand what to focus on.
Is this the case? Are they delving into the physiology and psychology of perception to explain 'why' a certain frequency response is viewed positively by a statistically significant number of people ? Or are they just trying to find objectively determined statical preferences wrt frequency responses? The latter is challenging enough, while the former is something else much more complicated.

And to be clear, I'm not devaluing the tests around the Harman "curve", but I'm not certain that it should be extended beyond trying to establish guidelines for developing audio equipment that many will find enjoyable.
 

JaMaSt

Senior Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Sep 14, 2021
Messages
369
Likes
693
Location
Vancouver, WA
You expect to hear a difference; you do; you take it home and in a few weeks your biases aren't pushing the same way; you become dissatisfied; maybe there is something better.

Bias is non-stationary.

To add to this, listening to music involves both "feed forward" and "feed back" listening. I fell in love with a certain recording of Schubert's 9th, on a cassette, in the early '80's. In '87, when I bought my first CD player, I couldn't find the exact same recording issued in CD. Finding a suitable recording, which matched my ingrained bias, was hellish. I probably went through a dozen recordings. The one I finally settled on was "different", but over time it became the "new" standard.

Expectation is intimately tied to perception. We would all be dead from any number of accidents if this were not so.
 

MattHooper

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
7,194
Likes
11,806
The difference between an "objectivist" and a "subjectivist" is that the objectivist recognizes his/her own fallibility, while the "subjectivist" believes that he or she cannot be fooled, and that his or her own senses are the only final arbiter of truth.

Yeah I've had that conversation so many times over the years with "subjectivist" audiophiles. I keep trying to argue for the relevance of blind testing for audio but it just won't land. Even just standard methods of argument, where you say "look, here's an example showing you accept this principle right? Ok, now apply it to the issue at hand" doesn't work.

For instance, when the subjectivist goes in to the "so you are just calling me a liar or deluded?" mode I try to explain, no you can just be mistaken. I've used the example of my peanut-allergic son who was part of a large blinded study for a new peanut allergy treatment. It was double-blind placebo-controlled, so neither the subjects nor the researchers administering either the placebo or the medical agent knew which was which. Obviously to control for the variables of bias on either side. I ask "would it have been wise, or intelligent of me to strenuously object to the blind protocols, as in 'why can't we know whether my son is getting the placebo or medicine? Do you think we are liars or that we might be deluded? How insulting!" No, that would be pretty naive and immature and a misunderstanding of why the studies are blinded, right? The reason science uses those protocols is because we know how biases, error and misperception can skew results. The spectre of biases are a fact of human perception. There is no reason to think audio is magically excepted from this problem. What you are objecting to are standard protocols for removing the influence of bias when comparing one thing to another. Why would you do that?

The response is always to either completely ignore this question, or to say "But that's all fine for Medical Science! But why are you talking about MEDICAL science? That's totally irrelevant. We are talking about Audio here! Using our ears! Our ears work!"

Point---whoosh!----over head.

This is what I call Reasoning In A Bubble: it's easy to come to strong conclusions in a particular domain, especially one you are invested in (e.g. audio gear), while not having thoroughly checked your reasoning for consistency outside that domain. You've got your "thing" your hobby or belief system or whatever, and a firm conclusion feels so comforting your bias deflects from recognizing any checks for wider consistency with other facts.

Of course, humans being human, that can sometimes be found in forums like this too :)

We have to be careful about thinking "Since I'm citing science, the facts are on my side so I'm in the right." But there are all sorts of ways for bias to drive the conversations. Someone may be citing science, but making arguments that don't necessary follow from that science. Or cherry picking. Or drawing firm conclusions from a single small study because it aligns with one's own conclusions, etc.
 
Last edited:

Geert

Major Contributor
Joined
Mar 20, 2020
Messages
1,937
Likes
3,525
Is this the case? Are they delving into the physiology and psychology of perception to explain 'why' a certain frequency response is viewed positively
With 'why' I didn't mean psychological factors. I refered to pinpointing the sound attributes that makes a component more prefered (like stronger bass, better imaging), opposed to just saying I prefer component X over Y. The objective of their listening training program is to help listeners identify and express differences in a way its helpful to engineers.
 

Killingbeans

Major Contributor
Joined
Oct 23, 2018
Messages
4,088
Likes
7,544
Location
Bjerringbro, Denmark.
Expectation is intimately tied to perception. We would all be dead from any number of accidents if this were not so.

Exactly. And it's important to remember that evolution hasn't made the rationality of those expectations top priority.

It's better to pay the price of imagining nonsense to guarantee the avoidance of any off chance lethal situations, than it is to be rational and risk death.

We are hardwired to make silly first assumptions.
 

ahofer

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jun 3, 2019
Messages
4,947
Likes
8,694
Location
New York City
Alan Shaw had a small tantrum on HUG recently that is worth quoting:

We have been drawing attention here for at least - what? fifteen years? - to the absolute necessity to separate the quantitative judgement of audio from the qualitative judgement by removing loudness as a bias. It has been ignored, and the audiophile business carrys on its own merry way. Those who work in sound professionally know that this is lesson 1 semester 1 in audiology: the very core of the science.

So we have given up trying to educate on this point, as every audio engineer has eventually done over the last half century, as the usual audiophile has an emotional need which cannot be reached by logic, reasoning and science. Frankly, if folks confuse qualitative and quantitative when they are provided the tools for free to separate them, I for one am long past caring. Good luck to you - but don't use this forum to promote nonsense! There are places which will lap it up.

Meanwhile, we busy ourselves with new product development based wholly on science.
 

dshreter

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Dec 31, 2019
Messages
794
Likes
1,226

Why haven't lions and baby zebras met to do a gazelle hunt together?

 

ahofer

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jun 3, 2019
Messages
4,947
Likes
8,694
Location
New York City

Why haven't lions and baby zebras met to do a gazelle hunt together?


26C6A72C-DF9D-40EC-9C8C-F6C432DA8B4A.jpeg
 

Suffolkhifinut

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 8, 2021
Messages
1,224
Likes
2,027
Education is key, and as Alan Kay once said, “a shift in point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”
Subjectivism deluxe?
Last week went into Media Centre 19 installed on my MacBook Pro and changed it to Concert Hall it added some reverb. My God don’t my ripped playlists sound alive!
How does it measure?
Don’t care too busy enjoying the music.
Education who cares?
 
Top Bottom