46 minutes ago, opus101 said:

But its not my steady state. He's set that up as the straw man he's debunking. Hence the sleight of hand.

... so it's not a common argument that "Sinewaves are steady-state signals that represent too easy a test for amplifiers, compared with the complexities of music"?

47 minutes ago, opus101 said:

...

Note here the irony - its typical for 'objectivists' to dismiss arguments by dismissing those who posit them. You've done that with Frank - 'That's why I generally ignore you Frank' - a perfect example of ad hominem. OTOH you describe Frank's response as 'dismissing the article's author' when in fact he dismissed the arguments, through referring to the fallacy they embodied.

Guilty as charged. I really need to ignore him. 

1 minute ago, Don Hills said:

 

... so it's not a common argument that "Sinewaves are steady-state signals that represent too easy a test for amplifiers, compared with the complexities of music"?

Its poorly expressed, an argument that might be heard from those without any technical training. Hence easy to dismiss. Let's turn it around.

By observation, a single sinewave is quite unlike music in character. Given that amps are for playing music, not single sinewaves the onus is on those that claim single sinewaves are a good enough substitute for music when evaluating amp performance to explain why.

Granted, it's most commonly heard from such folks. Simple, logical, and wrong, because they don't understand why.

Also true that a single sinewave is quite unlike some music in character. In some ways though, it is more revealing of equipment shortcomings than music is. Example: the onset of clipping is much more  obvious with a sine wave than with music. And there's my  "party trick" from the 80s: Playing the 1 KHz tone from a test record on a very highly regarded turntable setup, then playing the same tone from a test CD. And then I point out that the defects so audible in the LP tone are present in all the music played on that turntable... why can't you hear them, if music is so much more revealing of defects than a single sinewave?

The answer of course is  - that the sinewave is revealing of some defects, but not those that matter so much to our ears/brain. Which is why, as I said in the last post, the onus is on those who promote them to justify why they use them.

One of the well regarded amplifier Quad was designed entirely by sinewaves. In fact, no listening test was conducted during the design search. 

1 hour ago, opus101 said:

The answer of course is  - that the sinewave is revealing of some defects, but not those that matter so much to our ears/brain. Which is why, as I said in the last post, the onus is on those who promote them to justify why they use them.

There is no justification needed to use a pure sine wave to measure some properties of a system. All the more complex signals, from square waves to music can be decomposed into some combination of sine waves.

If your point is that a single sine wave is not sufficient to completely characterize an audio component or system, then I agree.

But, the argument that you can only measure equipment with real music is the one that needs justification, as it is contrary to science and mathematics. IMHO, it only exists to justify the 'golden ear' audiophile myth.

That said, I tend to measure equipment with a single sine, multiple fixed frequency sines, sine sweeps, and music recordings.

1 minute ago, pkane2001 said:

 

There is no justification needed to use a pure sine wave to measure some properties of a system.

Right, but then I've not been talking about measurement.

14 hours ago, Don Hills said:

Long, but well worth reading in full, from a well regarded audio engineer:

"Science and Subjectivism in Audio", by Douglas Self

Note that the article was originally published 30 years ago... 😲

I think it is amazing how well subjectivism  has stood up all these years.

16 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

It is impervious to disproof!

Maybe! But if the ideas of subjectivism were random and unrelated to some underlying reality I would have expected the ideas to have changed in some way over time. 

I think Douglas Self poo pooed the idea that capacitors could sound different in the 30 year old paper, but I did find this recent talk he gave apparently about cost effective ways to avoid sonic degradation by capacitors:

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19535

11 minutes ago, Richard Dale said:

Maybe! But if the ideas of subjectivism were random and unrelated to some underlying reality I would have expected the ideas to have changed in some way over time. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236003702_How_Convenient_The_Epistemic_Rationale_of_Self-validating_Belief_Systems

Quote

This paper offers an epistemological discussion of self-validating belief systems and the recurrence of “epistemic defense mechanisms” and “immunizing strategies” across widely different domains of knowledge. We challenge the idea that typical “weird” belief systems are inherently fragile, and we argue that, instead, they exhibit a surprising degree of resilience in the face of adverse evidence and criticism. Borrowing from the psychological research on belief perseverance, rationalization and motivated reasoning, we argue that the human mind is particularly susceptible to belief systems that are structurally self-validating. On this cognitive-psychological basis, we construct an epidemiology of beliefs, arguing that the apparent convenience of escape clauses and other defensive “tactics” used by believers may well derive not from conscious deliberation on their part, but from more subtle mechanisms of cultural selection.

41 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

It is impervious to disproof!

Dude!  You have to ... like... experience it!

Never forget what Oscar Wilde said:  "We are all lying in the gutter.  But some of us hit our head so hard we think we are seeing stars."

On 1/13/2019 at 10:56 AM, pkane2001 said:

In science, the simplest explanation that fits all the known facts is the one that is preferred.

Quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics are all quite simple. yes.    (Not that audio is nearly as complex as those, I'll readily grant.  But you did say "science.")

I would only resort to old Geoff's razor when the ability to perform scientific research or simply to learn more from the available scientific and engineering literature isn't within our reach.  Otherwise, we're in danger of elevating the current state of our knowledge to the state of what is possible.

36 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236003702_How_Convenient_The_Epistemic_Rationale_of_Self-validating_Belief_Systems

 

 

I don't think subjectivism is a belief system, it is about subjective experiences. 

I have no 'belief in tube amplifiers' for instance, but I just find I like the sound of them. In 1977 there was article comparing amplifiers in HiFi Pleasure where a tatty Radform STA25 was voted the best sounding out of a range of expensive modern amplifiers. The guy who provided the Radford  worked for Audio T and was a friend of  friend of mine. I met Alan after he modified my friend's Radford STA15 power amp and associated preamp. He had all these apparently wacky ideas such as the power supplies being the most important part of an amplifier (tube or solid state), which is now pretty mainstream in high amp designs AFAIK. But the proof was in the pudding and my friends STA15 sounded amazing. After that I got hold of a tatty pair of Quad IIs and compared them with my huge flashy looking Rotel RX-602 receiver which I thought was the bees knees up to the point. Much to my surprise the Quad destroyed my Rotel receiver even with my relatively inefficient KEF 104Ab speaker I had at the time.

EDIT: Just found this link about the HiFi For Pleasure blind test:

http://boneshifi.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-radford-sta-series-of-amplifiers.html

24 minutes ago, Jud said:

Quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics are all quite simple. yes.    (Not that audio is nearly as complex as those, I'll readily grant.  But you did say "science.")

Note that I didn't say "simple", I said "simplest". That's significant. 

1 hour ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Note that I didn't say "simple", I said "simplest". That's significant. 

Do you know whether the theories that ultimately prevailed were the simplest?   

On this general subject matter, an interesting book: https://smile.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray-ebook/dp/B0763L6YR7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1547508603&sr=8-1&keywords=sabine+hossenfelder+lost+in+math

40 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Do you know whether the theories that ultimately prevailed were the simplest?   

 

On this general subject matter, an interesting book: https://smile.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray-ebook/dp/B0763L6YR7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1547508603&sr=8-1&keywords=sabine+hossenfelder+lost+in+math

I like how you subtly try to put words in my mouth, Jud  I also didn’t say anything about prevailing, just about simplest explanation being preferred.

28 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Do you know whether the theories that ultimately prevailed were the simplest?   

 

On this general subject matter, an interesting book: https://smile.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray-ebook/dp/B0763L6YR7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1547508603&sr=8-1&keywords=sabine+hossenfelder+lost+in+math

I think how the theory is expressed can affect how 'simple' or 'elegant' a theory appears to be. For instance when Maxwell formulated his equations using 'quarternions' they were very difficult to understand and not obviously a giant step forward that we know them to be today. It wasn't until Oliver Heaviside reformulated Maxwell's equations in terms of complex numbers and vectors and greatly simplified them, that they became widely understood and their full power could be realised. Maybe it is the notations that prevail tend to be the simplest because they allow a theory to have maximum leverage. 

24 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

I like how you subtly try to put words in my mouth, Jud  I also didn’t say anything about prevailing, just about simplest explanation being preferred.

Not at all, Paul, I was asking a different question.

Edit: It's related to my initial comment, where I said that Ockham's Razor should be employed where we don't have scientific and engineering literature and research ready to hand.  Instead of calling upon the Razor at a preliminary stage, let's see if there's more we can readily learn about the scientific and engineering facts of the matter.

3 hours ago, Richard Dale said:

I don't think subjectivism is a belief system, it is about subjective experiences. 

 

I have no 'belief in tube amplifiers' for instance, but I just find I like the sound of them.

What you say here is quite reasonable. And if your statement - that you have no "belief" in tubes but just find you prefer their sound - was where most subjectivist statements and claims ended, I don't think there'd be any issue.

But as you well know, that's often not where the claims end. Instead, many folks will expand on their preferences to further claim that tube amplifiers have higher fidelity to the source than better-measuring solid-state amplifiers. Again, if they were fine with the notion that tubes are less linear but that their predominantly 2nd-order distortion can make them more pleasant to listen to, that would be fine. But the claim often is that tubes have more fidelity - and at times the claim goes even further: such gear has more fidelity because of the features that make it measure worse, or else because of some other mysterious characteristic that we haven't thought to measure or figured out how to measure.

Now, with tubes this discussion/debate still is relatively easy to have, because the distortion characteristics of tubes (along with the distortion characteristics of, say. Class A/B solid-state amps) are well-known.

But when it comes to something like, for example, computer hard drives, then the discussion becomes impossible. "X brand of hard drive produces a much better soundstage image than Y brand of hard drive" cannot reasonably be interpreted as a mere subjective preference. It's a claim based on a belief, namely, that there's something about different hard drives that can impact the subtle, analogue-style qualities of sound.

That "subjective experience" of hard drives' alleged sonic differences requires an underlying belief in unspecified differences that are somehow in the bits and bytes and yet not in the bits and bytes; that are not in any discernible or measurable way transmitted through the very well-known mechanism by which a hard drive's data ends up in a computer's RAM buffer, and yet are somehow transmitted nonetheless.

And the reason I know that an underlying belief system must exist for these "in my experience hard drive X sounds better" claims, is that whenever someone who claims to hear differences between hard drives gets challenged on that, they don't respond with "well, I just happen to prefer this hard drive." Instead, they respond by challenging the basic principles of data storage and digital data transmission.

Now, to be clear, I am not trying to saddle you personally with this belief system. I'm only saying that, respectfully, I don't think your (and others') subjective preference for tubes is sufficient evidence to claim that subjectivism is not a belief.

1 hour ago, Jud said:

 

Not at all, Paul, I was asking a different question.

 

Edit: It's related to my initial comment, where I said that Ockham's Razor should be employed where we don't have scientific and engineering literature and research ready to hand.  Instead of calling upon the Razor at a preliminary stage, let's see if there's more we can readily learn about the scientific and engineering facts of the matter.

I'm not sure I understand. But if you are saying that Ockham's Razor should not be applied to audio because we don't have all the facts and research, I think that's incorrect. It can be applied at any stage of inquiry. As you dig deeper into a subject, you may find new data that invalidates your previously 'simplest' explanation. Then it's time to come up with a new one.

Current state of our understanding of electronics, audio, sound, is such that we know a whole lot more than we don't know. And the reports from golden ear audiophiles doing uncontrolled listening tests does not rise anywhere close to a level of invalidating established theories and design. This is because there is a much simpler explanation for these reports: uncontrolled bias and variable perception.

4 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

Audiophile subjectivism is a belief in the infallibility of human hearing and perception. 

As a self-identified subjectivist, I have no such belief. Nor have I heard any other subjectivist express such a belief. What evidence is this claim based on?

13 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

I'm not sure I understand. But if you are saying that Ockham's Razor should not be applied to audio because we don't have all the facts and research, 

I didn't know I was being that unclear, sorry. What I'm saying is precisely the opposite: We know or can readily access so much information and research that there's no need at all to resort to Ockham's Razor.