Why Do People Come To Computer Audiophile To Display Their Contempt For Audiophiles?

[Ralf11]

If a properly conducted blind test shows that there is a difference between components A & B, then you either return the lesser performing item or keep it if it is the pretty, shiny one and that outweighs your interest in SQ (and price)

 

there is nothing wrong with favoring ergonomics or visual esthetics, it just isn't the straight approach to the audiophile goal of best SQ

 

e.g. I like the ergonomics and esthetics (and euphonics) or ARC tubed gear, and have an LS25 Mk II in my system - maybe an Ayre would sound better, but so far I have not changed

 

 

and BTW, science is not just speculation - speculation is not publishable; the best one can say is that it could lead to hypothesis formation 

[christopher3393]

9 hours ago, Dragonfyr said:

Oh boy. Pray tell, what can't be measured in terms of sound? Please be specific. 

 

If we can only measure a small percent of what we hear and there are apparently many things that can't be measured using current technology then how are these "sounds" designed and engineered into the products? Divine intervention? I didn't know that alchemy was alive and well in 2017. 

 

Yesterday's alchemy is today's transhumanism    

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

 

Alchemy was "alive and well" in the mid-twentieth century in the form of psychologist Carl Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, subtitled An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy.

 

I wonder if it could be applied to the "objective/subjective", coincidentia oppositorum?   Maybe we need a Jungian therapist as a consultant?

[Ralf11]

it's possible there are aspect of sound and of human perception thereof that cannot be measured yet, and also possible we don't yet know what they are

 

the proof is in the pudding however

[Albrecht]

5 hours ago, Jud said:

Maybe the “great divide” isn’t between subjective and objective, but between those who can have a friendly conversation without turning it into an argument, and those who can’t.

If we go back to your original post about contempt for audiophiles, - does this mean that those who are displaying contempt are more "objective" and that the contemptible audiophiles are more subjective? More money than sense? Or does the audiophile buy really expensive equipment because she falsely equates expensive equipment with better sound? Are Wilson Sophia speakers better than Dynaudio because they measure better, or because their cabinets are damped, or because they are more expensive? How do you measure how Wilson speakers sound with a Nagra tube amplifier vs how they sound with a Classe solid state amp? How do you know if someone is lying to themselves? What if people have not bought any equipment at all and had it given to them?

And what about those audiophiles who buy really cheap equipment, - then mod it all? Are they contemptible because they are audiophiles?

 

I am still kind of waiting to hear why people who get more enjoyment from recordings played back with better (or more expensive, {whatever}) gear should be derided on a website that has "audiophile" in its name?

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

How do you measure how Wilson speakers sound with a Nagra tube amplifier vs how they sound with a Classe solid state amp?

With a microphone.

[Albrecht]

Just now, mansr said:

With a microphone.

LOL, and here I was thinking that it was with (droll) sarcasm.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, mmerrill99 said:

Nope, the correct phrase is "CAN change what we hear" but so can smell, mood, lighting, worry, tiredness, company - any number of things!

 

Yes, a myriad of circumstances can alter how one reacts to music playing, what it "sounds like" - but that won't change the perception of "realness" of the playback - if you're in a filthy mood, and someone sits down and plays in a polished manner on a piano nearby, you may hate the music but if someone asks you whether the problem is because the SQ is not good enough, you would say, "Don't be ridiculous!!",.

 

And same goes for competent playback - it will always sound "right", no matter what mood you're in ...

[fas42]

3 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

it's possible there are aspect of sound and of human perception thereof that cannot be measured yet, and also possible we don't yet know what they are

 

the proof is in the pudding however

 

The very interesting one to me, is that high quality reproduction can cause the mechanism producing the sound to become "invisible" - that is, it becomes impossible to locate the source just using one's ears. In a completely conventional playback setup this translates to the listener not being able to "hear the drivers", no matter how hard he tries to do so - a quite facinating behaviour.

 

In normal audio this happens extremely rarely, so almost never talked about - some people may not be able to register this "illusion" for various reasons.

[Teresa]

19 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

Sorry but that is where your argument runs off the tracks.  The "ear/brain system" is the most fallible tool to use in sighted evaluations of a High Fidelity system. Without a scientific approach you are lost in the human weaknesses of bias and illusion.  It's like believing the magicians tricks are real magic because your eyes saw that airplane disappear off the runway.

But I'm very glad you enjoy the sound of your music.

Sal

 

Sal, I thought you finally had a post I could agree with. Sorry, but I have to disagree.

 

You use your ear/brain system when you attend a live acoustic concert, which has a feeling of liveliness that no audio system I've ever heard has quite captured, but some have gotten close. This is the goal, this is what most of us strive for.

 

Perfect measurements are only the beginning! Yes, we want perfect measurements but we want more. We want real!! The difference between sounding like live acoustic music or like recorded acoustic music is the talent of the audio designer who designed the audio components.

 

Get out there and listen to some real live acoustic music in a good sounding concert hall or club. That is what you want to compare audio components to. The goal of better reproduction equipment is getting closer to the real thing. The ear/brain system is the best and only tool to use to compare the real event to the reproduction of it.

[Teresa]

19 hours ago, firedog said:

 ...By the way, to understand how much sight effects our auditory perception, watch this: 

 

 

With this video, with eyes open you will hear "fa" because the lip is shaping the "fa" even though the sound is "ba" thus the brain has a conflict between "ba" and "fa" and choses the visual clue in the conflict, that is how the brain works. BTW If you close your eyes you will only hear "ba".

 

Another way to put this, this is pattern matching, your brain has stored what someone looks like saying "fa". Pattern matching is also why A and B in an audio test will start to sound the same when switching back and forth.

 

This is why I don't trust my eyes. When I audition audio equipment I do it with the lights out, or a dim as possible. And when listening to music alone at home I do it with eyes closed and lights out. For me the illusion of listening to music versus listening to a recording can only happen with my eyes closed.

[Teresa]

19 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

No, what I said was her approach to evaluation of a systems capability to accurately reproduce music was flawed.

But in the end if you don't care about such things and love the sound of your rig that is all that counts for you.

 

I have to strongly disagree yet again! My approach to reproduced music is what sounds and feels the closest to real live acoustic music. I want excellent specifications, but excellent specs in a cold, dry sounding audio component don't do it for me. Specifications are only the beginning, get that done then next is realism and feeling.

 

This is also why I prefer real audiophile recordings, which are audiophile from the microphones to finished product.

 

So what is your approach?

[Jud]

45 minutes ago, Teresa said:

Pattern matching is also why A and B in an audio test will start to sound the same when switching back and forth

 

Hi Teresa -

 

This is not actually the case.  Pattern matching can be inborn, as various experiments regarding the way we hear have shown.  If it is not an inborn pattern, then laying down that auditory pattern to the point where your brain automatically matches it isn’t a quick process.  Experiments have been done showing a week of training just in perceiving a single type of sound is inadequate.

 

So whatever is occurring in several minutes of A/B doesn’t have to do with your brain learning to do pattern matching in that amount of time.

[mav52]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

 

Hi Teresa -

 

This is not actually the case.  Pattern matching can be inborn, as various experiments regarding the way we hear have shown.  If it is not an inborn pattern, then laying down that auditory pattern to the point where your brain automatically matches it isn’t a quick process.  Experiments have been done showing a week of training just in perceiving a single type of sound is inadequate.

 

So whatever is occurring in several minutes of A/B doesn’t have to do with your brain learning to do pattern matching in that amount of time.

Maybe its not pattern matching but pattern perception.

[lucretius]

27 minutes ago, mav52 said:

Maybe its not pattern matching but pattern perception.

 

Please explain the difference.

[mav52]

1 hour ago, lucretius said:

 

Please explain the difference.

Actually the word I should have used is pattern recognition.

Pattern matching dictates that what we are looking for is either here or not and might not be accurate.. Like a baby wanting to suck on a nipple and instead is given a pacifier. Its matches but its not the same thing as a mothers nipple/.,

Pattern recognition relates to what has been experienced before and its embedded in our memory or a computers memory and its going to be exact.. example, military target recognition, finger prints, Retina security scanning.

 

[Superdad]

18 minutes ago, mav52 said:

Actually the word I should have used is pattern recognition.

Pattern matching dictates that what we are looking for is either here or not and might not be accurate.. Like a baby wanting to suck on a nipple and instead is given a pacifier. Its matches but its not the same thing as a mothers nipple.

 

Oh okay. Now it finally makes sense why I prefer speakers that use that Scanspeak nipple tweeter! 

[jabbr]

23 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

No, what I said was her approach to evaluation of a systems capability to accurately reproduce music was flawed.

But in the end if you don't care about such things and love the sound of your rig that is all that counts for you.

 

Sal, I appreciate the goal of accurate music reproduction -- the goal being "live" that sounds live, and recorded, sounding as the artist intends etc. The issue is that nothing is 100% accurate in the sense that each two replays or reproductions of a piece will be slightly different. At the most basic level the background noise level will be random, so not the same from play to play. Ok, we discount that. But there might be 100 factors and what we just don't know is to what degree each of the 100 factors is important for the recoding to "sound live" for us. Suppose it is only 3 out of 100. So we have tradeoffs and because we don't have knowledge of which tradeoffs are critical vs irrelevant, we don't really even know what to measure. I do believe that if we knew, we could measure but we aren't there yet -- hence these permathreads... reminds me of the old measures bad-sounds great "looks bad feels great" joke  ... and yeah in the end what you conclude is all that counts.

[jabbr]

16 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

Oh okay. Now it finally makes sense why I prefer speakers that use that Scanspeak nipple tweeter! 

Dude, you were brought up wrong ...

[mmerrill99]

42 minutes ago, mav52 said:

Actually the word I should have used is pattern recognition.

Pattern matching dictates that what we are looking for is either here or not and might not be accurate.. Like a baby wanting to suck on a nipple and instead is given a pacifier. Its matches but its not the same thing as a mothers nipple/.,

Pattern recognition relates to what has been experienced before and its embedded in our memory or a computers memory and its going to be exact.. example, military target recognition, finger prints, Retina security scanning.

 

A worthwhile read:

"Superior pattern processing is the essence of the evolved human brain"

[Superdad]

27 minutes ago, jabbr said:

Dude, you were brought up wrong ...

 

That's for sure! 

[jabbr]

3 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

That's for sure! 

I worry that it could be particularly dangerous in your house with lack of proper grounding technique ...

[semente]

17 hours ago, Albrecht said:

Are Wilson Sophia speakers better than Dynaudio because they measure better, or because their cabinets are damped, or because they are more expensive?

 

Are they better? They don't measure better...

[Jud]

1 hour ago, semente said:

 

Are they better? They don't measure better...

 

For some measurements, anyway.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

Dude, you were brought up wrong ...

 

Ooh, and it vibrates.

[jabbr]

6 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Ooh, and it vibrates.

Those are his big iso transformers  He likes them balanced, but there's always a slight asymmetry...