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

[plissken]

2 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

...another small step toward normalizing contempt?

 

If given a choice between normalizing contempt and self delusion. I mean if I had to make a sighted choice.

[plissken]

1 hour ago, 4est said:

 

What do you mean by this in context?

 

I meant in the context that has been openly talked about:

 

Q: What equipment constitutes 'transparent' playback

A: A lot of mastering grade equipment

Response: Well if it's good enough and isn't missing any information. That's why you need a subjective high end audiophile to provide that.

 

You CAN NOT add information once it is lost in the production process. We have sound REPRODUCTION equipment. What ever it is given is what it has. No matter DSP, Upsampling, EQ, cables, lifters, Hookum sticks. 

 

You can only have a reproduction chain that does the least amount of damage to the source as it makes it way through our systems. That's why I'm a shortest path first. 

 

[AJ Soundfield]

11 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

...another small step toward normalizing contempt?

No, utter contempt of logic, reason, scientific method, intellectual honesty, ridicule of measuring "measureists" , etc, etc. all considered quite normal.

No steps.

[Jud]

Been too busy to do much posting the past week or so.  Looking in, I see a lot of pretty uninformative sniping back and forth, and a choice posed between contempt and self-delusion.

 

I’ll take neither, thanks very much, and opt for good conversation with friends instead, during which I may learn a thing or two.

 

Speaking of which, @semente, we were having such a conversation a few days ago when I had to leave off.  Later today or tomorrow I’ll try to get back to that.  Right now, more work to do.

[AJ Soundfield]

11 minutes ago, Jud said:

Right now, more work to do.

No matter what the case involves, I'll be your expert witness.

I've trained myself and passed all my own tests A+

I can hear stuff others can't. I know more about audio than...the scientists know, believe me.

[jabbr]

12 hours ago, plissken said:

 

You can apply any post processing you want. You not add lost fidelity. Regardless if the loss is in choice of mastering equipment or the choices of the mastering or mixing engineer.

 

This is stemming from someone asking what hardware was 'transparent'. I answered that question.

 

11 hours ago, jabbr said:

 

That depends entirely on what you mean by "lost fidelity" exactly. In many cases a deconvolution does exactly that, restores fidelity. If by "lost fidelity" you mean "lost information" then no, but that's an important reason to "oversample" which allows introduction of error at a level less than the LSB.

 

1 hour ago, plissken said:

 

Oversample a 192kbps mp3 all you like. 

MP3 lossy compression is obviously lossy. We aren't presumably dealing with MP3 in the context of this forum although the principles are important for audio in general.

 

Using a real (for us) situation like CD Redbook, 16/44.1 if the mastering engineer applies an equalization profile its possible it could run into the headroom available in 16 bits, and information might be lost.  Instead if the file is supplied as 24 bits there might be enough headroom that the equalization is reversible by applying an "invert" equalization (just the opposite of the original eq) and then no information will be lost. This would be termed a "reversible" operation. If the mastering equalization is a very simple convolution, the reverse equalization would be a very simple deconvolution, and in this case reversible. So back to my original question: do you consider "loss of fidelity" only irreversible convolutions or do you consider reversible convolutions (where the deconvolution restores full fidelity)?

 

The functional analysis convolution-deconvolution had been developed precisely to "restore" signals that have been modified.

[plissken]

4 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

 

MP3 lossy compression is obviously lossy. We aren't presumably dealing with MP3 in the context of this forum although the principles are important for audio in general.

 

Using a real (for us) situation like CD Redbook, 16/44.1 if the mastering engineer applies an equalization profile its possible it could run into the headroom available in 16 bits, and information might be lost.  Instead if the file is supplied as 24 bits there might be enough headroom that the equalization is reversible by applying an "invert" equalization (just the opposite of the original eq) and then no information will be lost. This would be termed a "reversible" operation. If the mastering equalization is a very simple convolution, the reverse equalization would be a very simple deconvolution, and in this case reversible. So back to my original question: do you consider "loss of fidelity" only irreversible convolutions or do you consider reversible convolutions (where the deconvolution restores full fidelity)?

 

The functional analysis convolution-deconvolution had been developed precisely to "restore" signals that have been modified.

 

I understand inverse filters. It's still not restoring information that isn't there. 

 

Again: Someone asked what equipment tends to be transparent. The answer I provided was a lot of mastering grade equipment. 

 

The retort is that it could err on capturing information. Ok. So what then? Nothing you can do about that regardless of ANY and ALL processing you do. I don't care if it's biquad filtering. Linkwitz Transform, convolution-deconvolution, up sampling, transcoding, etc...

[jabbr]

6 minutes ago, plissken said:

 

I understand inverse filters. It's still not restoring information that isn't there. 

Deconvolution is a generalization of "inverse filter" and in the same way that a bandwidth limited analog signal can be entirely represented in 16/44.1 and then reconstructed, a deconvolution can restore a signal that has been altered. Back to the question: do you know the information isn't there? That is the crux of the question. If you are sure the information isn't there then it can't be re-created. Like refocussing an image to remove "blur" seemingly lost information can be restored. It really depends.

 

OK you added that clarification -- yes "mastering grade" equipment would tend to be transparent, and I assume works at high bitrate, depth for the reasons I've outlined. 

[plissken]

5 minutes ago, jabbr said:

do you know the information isn't there? That is the crux of the question. If you are sure the information isn't there then it can't be re-created. Like refocussing an image to remove "blur" seemingly lost information can be restored. It really depends.

 

Don't get off on tangent that I didn't bring into the conversation.

 

AGAIN: 

 

Question by other: What equipment constitutes transparent playback

 

Answer by me: Probably most mastering grade audio equipment

 

Retort by other: It may not capture everything and that's why we need subjective audiophile approached systems.

 

You are barking up the wrong tree. Systems can apply dither and other methods to effect mathematically approximation but it still is not a true reconstruction in the XOR sense. 

 

Look, I totally get what you are saying and these systems can be really good, but they aren't mathematically perfect. 

[pkane2001]

21 minutes ago, jabbr said:

The functional analysis convolution-deconvolution had been developed precisely to "restore" signals that have been modified.

 

It's not so simple in the real world. EQ-convolved signal is further corrupted by noise and other signals (e.g., leakage currents, jitter, EMI, feedback loops, etc.) 

 

For deconvolution to recover the 'original' signal, you need a very precise model of the corrupting signal. In most real-world cases, this is very hard to derive. Because of this, an estimate is commonly used as the deconvolution kernel. An estimate may help with signal recovery in some cases, but it can also destroy or corrupt signal in others. There are other complexities related to deconvolution, for example that the process is iterative and has to be applied over many small increments. The number of iterations is itself a variable, and has to be estimated based on some other measure which is often not known precisely.

 

 

[jabbr]

4 minutes ago, plissken said:

 

Don't get off on tangent that I didn't bring into the conversation.

 

AGAIN: 

 

Question by other: What equipment constitutes transparent playback

 

Answer by me: Probably most mastering grade audio equipment

Agreed ... I think we all are guilty of responding to short quips out of context, as well as writing that is too brief to convey the context or intent...

[AJ Soundfield]

15 minutes ago, jabbr said:

yes "mastering grade" equipment would tend to be transparent

I wonder how many audiophiles would prefer a TASCAM over a piece of $50k audiophile bling, in a sighted evaluation, 2 months or not?

Hmmm 

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, plissken said:

You can only have a reproduction chain that does the least amount of damage to the source as it makes it way through our systems. That's why I'm a shortest path first. 

That's been my approach, as well: shorten and simplify. This often has helped drive the choice of components for my systems. I guess some might call it a bias

 

 

[Jud]

14 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

That's been my approach, as well: shorten and simplify. This often has helped drive the choice of components for my systems. I guess some might call it a bias

 

 

 

Though of course all such approaches have their advantages and disadvantages once one gets down to specifics.  Many folks like to include the extra step of DSP for room equalization, for example.

[mansr]

51 minutes ago, AJ Soundfield said:

I wonder how many audiophiles would prefer a TASCAM over a piece of $50k audiophile bling, in a sighted evaluation, 2 months or not?

Hmmm 

My Tascam is great. Guess I'm not a real audiophile.

[jabbr]

59 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

For deconvolution to recover the 'original' signal, you need a very precise model of the corrupting signal. In most real-world cases, this is very hard to derive.

The room correction that @Jud just mentioned is an example of a deconvolution that is measured rather than estimated.

[AJ Soundfield]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

My Tascam is great. Guess I'm not a real audiophile.

Just another poor deaf Mid-Fi measureist who begrudges those who can afford to hear better.

Wait, did I just sound contemptuous???

Nah....

[pkane2001]

Just now, jabbr said:

The room correction that @Jud just mentioned is an example of a deconvolution that is measured rather than estimated.

 

I'm not aware of any DSP that uses deconvolution to apply EQ. Convolution -- yes. Deconvolution is a complex mathematical process that doesn't have a simple solution. Convolution is much, much easier in comparison.

 

[AJ Soundfield]

4 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

I'm not aware of any DSP that uses deconvolution to apply EQ.

DSP "room correction" also has nothing to do with the original signal(s).

It is based purely on one transduction of it.

[plissken]

14 minutes ago, jabbr said:

The room correction that @Jud just mentioned is an example of a deconvolution that is measured rather than estimated.

 

 

2+X=4. No information is missing. It simply hasn't been calculated yet. When we end up with 2 as the answer we know what the original hard value was. 

 

2+X+X=4 can be computed, the answers are literally infinite and we may, or more likely, may not be able to reconstitute the original missing values. But do we care if the end goal is an answer of 4 if nothing else is negatively impacted? 

[jabbr]

18 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

I'm not aware of any DSP that uses deconvolution to apply EQ. Convolution -- yes. Deconvolution is a complex mathematical process that doesn't have a simple solution. Convolution is much, much easier in comparison.

 

Convolution and deconvolution are a pair and map to division in the Fourier domain.  Consider the system as the convolution and the deconvolution is a Fourier domain divisor that results in 1. In room correction, the deconvolution is simply 1/impulse response. It is really as simple as dividing the Fourier domain signal by the measured impulse response.

 

To clarify deconvolution is simply 1/convolution in the Fourier domain. By measuring an impulse response, the deconvolution is thus measured.

 

Of course software like HQPlayer applies this transform in the time domain in realtime in SDM so @Miska could provide the math  

[pkane2001]

2 minutes ago, jabbr said:

Convolution and deconvolution are a pair and map to division in the Fourier domain.  Consider the system as the convolution and the deconvolution is a Fourier domain divisor that results in 1. In room correction, the deconvolution is simply 1/impulse response. It is really as simple as dividing the Fourier domain signal by the measured impulse response.

 

To clarify deconvolution is simply 1/convolution in the Fourier domain. By measuring an impulse response, the deconvolution is thus measured.

 

Of course software like HQPlayer applies this transform in the time domain in realtime in SDM so @Miska could provide the math  

 

As I said, not so simple in the real world, in the presence of noise and other distortions that are also convolved with the signal.

[christopher3393]

Back to the original question, if you don't mind. In his big book (Sound Reproduction, p.345) Floyd Toole mentions that disputes btw subjectivists and objectivists are not new, then includes the following quote from a '60s article on the origin of psychoacoustics:

Quote

In 1852, as Helmholz began his research, the sciences and the arts were at loggerheads. The cold rationalism seemingly preached by Darwin’s biology, Faraday’s new atomic chemistry, and Gustav Magnus’ physics were being strenuously opposed by a hostile school of arch-Romanticists, who believed that exposure of the roots of art as mere extensions of matter and energy meant the complete destruction of all beauty.

 

So maybe this is all a bit bigger than we tend to recognize...Maybe. Here's a little presentation (more like a tease) that places the notion of objectivity in a larger context than usual for this forum. Hope you find it interesting:

 

https://prezi.com/j1s4xv9nis5l/historicizing-objectivity/

[semente]

1 hour ago, christopher3393 said:

Back to the original question, if you don't mind. In his big book (Sound Reproduction, p.345) Floyd Toole mentions that disputes btw subjectivists and objectivists are not new, then includes the following quote from a '60s article on the origin of psychoacoustics:

 

So maybe this is all a bit bigger than we tend to recognize...Maybe. Here's a little presentation (more like a tease) that places the notion of objectivity in a larger context than usual for this forum. Hope you find it interesting:

 

https://prezi.com/j1s4xv9nis5l/historicizing-objectivity/

 

Thanks, that's a nice summary.

But I wonder why Dürer was stated as an example, since he never got to see the Pope's Rhinocerus...

[jabbr]

2 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

As I said, not so simple in the real world, in the presence of noise and other distortions that are also convolved with the signal.

Life is implementation  dependent