Popular Post John Dyson Posted May 20, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted May 20, 2020 43 minutes ago, jabbr said: The Placebo Effect is very real and powerful. I cures diseases with a surprisingly high effectiveness. If you spend $$$$$ on a cable it really will improve the sound of your system! My own religion requires me to be an ascetic, that and my wife would threaten to cut me with Occam's Razor, so overindulging on an AC power cord would cause me both psychological and physical harm that would diminish my enjoyment of music... ... I *have* build my own power cables with leftover wire using the technique described at Bottlehead. My workstation solves problems much more smoothly now and my network switch relays frames more effortlessly. It is so funny to hear about all kinds of strange beliefs about 'quality' in the audiophile world. Even audiophile recordings (not even talking about FeralA) have often been made using equipment with off-the-shelf, and sometimes ugly technologies and cables. Those recordings can sound really good, and be of full audiophile quality. One problem in the audio world, probably other hobby worlds also, that two people with similar misunderstandings will re-enforce an mistaken belief. Dunning-Kruger is operative here where two people will each not understand the depth of their knowledge, re-enforicing a mistaken belief. There is a poor risk/reward for technically compteent people to try to explain things to people who do not want to know, who already know 'everything.' Even now, my ego encourages accepting my own mistakes -- opposite of many people. My philosophy is to accept a mistake earlier on, rather than to continually compound the folly. Now, I'll give a technically accurate evaluation about cables: Sometimes there are really bad cables, sometimes the interfaces to/from the cables are not well designed/bad grounding, sometimes the RFI environment is egregiously bad, sometimes experiments are poorly controlled. Sometimes, people simply want to believe something strange, and will psychologically make that fake-fact true in their own minds. There are actual, scientific explanations for given observations, but the observation might be in error, the analysis is often very defective, and the conclusions are sometimes absurd. Until a correspondent understands&accept the possibility of these potential flaws, and looks at a situation with an open mind, it isn't helpful for an actual expert to participate in the discussion. It is best for the expert to demure even if that true expert REALLY KNOWS what is going on... John jabbr, gmgraves, vmartell22 and 2 others 2 1 2 Link to comment
Popular Post John Dyson Posted May 21, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted May 21, 2020 15 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said: I almost fully agree with this John except: "psychologically make that fake-fact true in their own minds." presupposes you are absolutely certain they are wrong ...and that it can only be explained by expectation bias and "It is best for the expert to demure even if that true expert REALLY KNOWS what is going on..." If you meant demur (not demure) then I disagree, anyone can object, hesitate or question. As for expert appeal to authority -Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion that... "really knows" People never *really* know if they are actually right or wrong, but an engineer with 40yrs of real experience, honest with themselves about what they do/do not know, and head not in the clouds isn't going to be too far off from reality. I am assuming that the person isn't crazy or has a delusion, because any of us can be crazy, cant' we? Metaphysics is not needed -- more like actual learning & education, THAT is what is needed. There is NO leading edge science going on here in audio -- it is all well understood for at least the last 20-30yrs, and fairly well understood for 30yrs before that. The math has been solid for 20-30yrs before that (Nyquist, sampling theory, statistics -- much from Bell Labs.) Point being -- there is little room or need for metaphysics in the audio world. The mathematical understanding and the experience of the actual engineering community is strong enough that silly claims are pretty darned easy to spot. Some assertions made in some audiophile forums are bordering on totally delusional -- there are really competent engineers out there, there is absolutely no need to be a leading edge scientist, some claims are just wrong.... This all means that the observations might have truth in them, but when observations are made with a faulty sensor, and processed with a poorly programmed computer, then the results are likely going to be eccentric, aren't they? The results are going to have errors.l I can understand the absurd claims, but sometimes very sane explanations and simple questions are answered by something like 'you just dont understand' or 'non-believer'. I try to hold a very sober attitude, attempting to kindly educate -- note the term KINDLY, instead of being rude. It can be frustrating to see these odd 'memes' persistently floating around in the hobby realm. I don't do the appeal to authority - I am more into the appeal to reality. Of course, we can always distract things arguing about the number of angels on the head of a pin. Audio technology itself (inclding transducers, electronics/layout, etc) is NOT pushing the state of the art. We are talking about 100kHz signal payload at the most, with people worried about 24bits of resolution (almost achieving that accuracy) not being enough... There is some real absurdity going on if we are worried about metaphysics in audio -- but a lot of discussions ARE metaphysical, especially when someone starts worrying about the lack of competency available. * the reason why competent engineers don't get involved in discussions with people who aren't intellectually prepared, is that metaphysics bursting forth is so very absurd, it isn't worth wasting their time. People without enough of a technical background are sometimes not patient enough to learn actually what is going on -- so they fall back to metaphysics. I hope that I did my part, trying to make some inroads in the community about the 'ringing' associated with FIR/Brickwall filters -- maybe we can raise the bar (refer to South Park for that allusion.) I'll bet you that there are some technologists who still don't completely understand the important differences between Gibbs, ringing and actually understanding the mechanisms that can make different kinds of filters potentially audible (and it isn't specifically about phase, but instead the related 'time'.) PS: My spelling sucks -- you wouldn't believe how bad my typing gets, both hands out of sync, three or four characters off --- it is almost like both sides are disconnected. John pkane2001, gmgraves and jabbr 2 1 Link to comment
John Dyson Posted May 22, 2020 Share Posted May 22, 2020 2 minutes ago, jabbr said: Well yes, but I was not addressing a particular experiment, rather a report of a get together in which sound perceptions were reported as different. I extended that from perhaps 4 people to 1000. Previously I used the term “placebo effect” but that was met with hostility from some parts. People also don’t react well to the term “expectation bias”. I would like to use the general term “bias” like the electrical bias applied to a transistor, to mean a force that pushes, in this case perception, in one direction or another. Has anyone met someone or had personal experience with synesthesia? In that case a color may evoke or modulate a sound as might touch, likewise a sound might evoke a color. Id say that all perceptions are real. If we are interested in explaining perceptions then yes you want to identify the force pushing the perception in one direction or the other. I do have a bias towards using/assuming 'normal' settings on the decoder, where they are sometimes wrong. (I mean, when I write 'normal', I intend to imply the 'most commonly correct'.) After listening with 'bad' settings, my hearing accomodates the error, then results end up with what seems to me -- a PERFECT result that actually sounds like hell. (More often than not, my taste preference is towards extreme brightness, which further dulls my hearing.) Hearing appears to have a variant of 'AGC', which does have both advantages and disadvantages when working with recordings. SO, the bias that recently affects me is two layered, that is a normally correct setting, which happens to be wrong, creating some kind of 'bad sound'. Then, my hearing accomodates the 'bad sound', therefore I end up seeming to be the fool or crackpot when I demo the result. IF there was a good way of objectively measuring 'accuracy' of the decode, without having a good, but still defective, reference, I would use it. Useful objective measurements result in a lot less wasted effort than trying to make a subjective determination or even direct comparison. Biases and accomodation encourage all kinds of mistakes. I have to continually remind myself of this error source. I just got burnt yesterday by the syndrome of accomodation (a kind of AGC inside in human hearing.) John pkane2001 1 Link to comment
John Dyson Posted May 24, 2020 Share Posted May 24, 2020 11 hours ago, gmgraves said: If Frank actually believes that he can make poor recordings sound like good recordings just by “messing around”, then he is actually ahead of the rest of us because he’s able to hear around lousy source material. I certainly can’t do that! I agree with the sentiments, because very intelligent and well educated people have been trying to 'fix' recordings at least back to the time of the Radiotron Designers Handbook, and even before. IMO, it is best, if one is going to try to 'fix' a recording, to try to fix the impairments one at a time. Each impairment has very specific characteristics -- spectrum of a tick or pop, tape hiss is different than its vinyl brethren of various kinds of 'rumble' or 'vinyl surface noise'. Each one has different characteristics, and even an adaptive general purpose FFT spectral technique misses the mark for most specific impairments. (perhaps the FFT technique might be a last finishing polish to a recording, but must be used very carefully.) Admittedly, the general techniques are getting better and better, but they become tricky when considering the side effects of the 'repairs' create worse problems. All of this doesn't even consider stereo imaging issues (time distortions)... -- 'messing around' will not do much to substantively improve the objective characteristics of a recording: VERY INTELLIGENT people have been trying to do it for years, and with varying results. Generically 'messing around' in a non-scientific way would be on the level of Edison's experiments: once the technology becomes sophisticated at all, then ad-hoc playing around becomes ineffective. Edison was smart enough to partially recognize this, and start hiring competent people, and have them operate on his general ideas. Edison had a general good idea about power transmission, but DC would have been a botch. An exquisitely competent genius in electricity and applications of electro magnetics was needed. Of course, Edison's ego, arrogance and attitude caused him to lose Tesla. I am sure that Edison was very satisfied with his own concepts, but was misguided probably by his ego. We are ALL easily misguided by our egos - just have to realize that fact. Once we fully recognize and respect the fact that 'genius' doesn't come around very often, then we realize that working smart and VERY diligently is the way that most of us get things done. Invention doesn't come easy... Sadly, US patent laws have been too generous naming the results of 'messing around' as 'inventions'. John Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now