Sanity Check

[marce]

16 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

So the question is -- does better audio interest you, or not?

Or how much your system cost...

[marce]

16 hours ago, Indydan said:

They misspelled the word "conclusion" twice in the last paragraph:

 

"Well, we think that each can reach to its own conclussion..."

 

Were they as sloppy with their research methods?

 

Was the research conducted by the University of jackoffs?

 

"Don't believe everything you read" sounds appropriate right now...

especially if it goes against your beliefs.

[marce]

12 hours ago, GUTB said:

This should be obvious but modern hi-fi doesn’t actually have much to do with high fidelity. First of all, speakers are totally incapable of it...well, recording equipment is also incapable of it. What we’re doing is chasing a form of sonic art. A Norman Rockwell painting doesn’t look like anything like real life. But you can appreciate the mastery of the art and derive pleasure from it.

 

This is unbelievable, if true all bets are off and any subjective report is just that someones opinion of their subjective art system, a total joke. How do you even define a base-point....

[marce]

11 hours ago, mourip said:

 

I am curious what you have in mind by fidelity.

 

Faithful to the original performance? Faithful to the recording? Sounds good/real/convincing?

 

How would one know? Seems pretty subjective even if you had been sitting at the original performance.

Wot goes in comes out louder, nothing added nothing taken away, its not a hard concept really is it and what the hobby as been based on, or was certainly when I started out.

[adamdea]

11 hours ago, mansr said:

That's not necessarily accurate. Nevertheless, that's still what they say they want.

 

This usually means emphasised high frequencies or high-order harmonic distortion. In other words, not accurate. Once again, however, the adherents claim they are getting accuracy.

 

In other words, what people think they want and what they actually like are not necessarily related.

Purely accurate sound reproduction will not necessarily lead to greater verisimilitude because in the real world we don't rely exclusively on our ears; so maybe the sound needs to be goosed up a bit to make it seem like there's a real person there without the necessary visual, tactile, olfactory, time continuity back up to support that idea. 

[botrytis]

BAS (Boston Audio Society) has done dbt's. If you look around their website, there is plenty of information there. They have done tests with amps and did not hear differences.

 

Much of this can be attributed to the fact our senses are hooked together and it biases our hearing and the outcome. Example, going to a demo of a new piece of equipment. Oft times they will tell you what to expect to hear and you do. This is a known phenomenon and is how bias affects our ears. Another example was done with removing information from a piece of music. If we know the piece of music well, our brain actually will fill in the missing information in the playback that was filtered. This is why it is important to do dbt's and also examinations of the science/theory of things. MQA is a classic example of this.

[mansr]

43 minutes ago, adamdea said:

Purely accurate sound reproduction will not necessarily lead to greater verisimilitude because in the real world we don't rely exclusively on our ears; so maybe the sound needs to be goosed up a bit to make it seem like there's a real person there without the necessary visual, tactile, olfactory, time continuity back up to support that idea. 

This is a possibility. However, the starting point should still be accurate reproduction with tweaks added to taste. Also, such tweaking is best done in a controlled manner, these days probably through DSP, not by combining ever weirder cables in the hopes that the cumulative effect will resemble the desired outcome.

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

This is a possibility. However, the starting point should still be accurate reproduction with tweaks added to taste. Also, such tweaking is best done in a controlled manner, these days probably through DSP, not by combining ever weirder cables in the hopes that the cumulative effect will resemble the desired outcome.

 

We are focusing on the wrong thing. We don't need accurate sound reproduction. We need quality, life-sized hologram video of the performers. I guarantee that the sound will become super-realistic. Luckily, we're almost there:

 

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-holograms-d-thin-air.html

 

[mourip]

3 hours ago, marce said:

Wot goes in comes out louder, nothing added nothing taken away, its not a hard concept really is it and what the hobby as been based on, or was certainly when I started out.

 

How do you know when nothing has been added or taken away? Your only frame of reference can be the system you are listening on.

 

The music is the reference but it does not really exist without the playback system. 

 

The point is that "high fidelity" is a moving target and the bottom line is that each of us decides what it is and where we stop in searching for it.

 

Some good points were made by others about measuring however probably 0.00001 percent of audiophiles have that equipment so we are all left with our built in subjective evaluation devices...our ears. We can buy equipment that has lots of graphs that look good but a system is usually more than the sum of it's parts. At that point we all decide what sounds good to us. "High Fidelity" is a concept and we all decide when we reach it.

 

My guess is that as someone stated above improvements come pretty quickly until about $10K but by $20 we are left with "a hundred shades of great". When we call it quits is a product more of pocketbook and personal preference than oscilloscopes.

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, mourip said:

My guess is that as someone stated above improvements come pretty quickly until about $10K but by $20 we are left with "a hundred shades of great". When we call it quits is a product more of pocketbook and personal preference than oscilloscopes.

I would never buy a component that didn't measure well, seeing as moderately priced gear achieves this with ease. What I ultimately choose then comes down to aesthetics, availability, and price.

[rando]

I took the title of this thread more literally.  

 

What do subscribers to DBT's do to prepare their ears and mental capacity for the work at hand?  Does someone enter the room in a robe signalling all other distractions be cut off and a few minutes of rapt silence ensues before source material pierces the air unannounced?  Toot out the key work is orchestrated in on a pitch pipe as all participants strain their voices to produce an organic stimulus?  Or does everyone sit around eating rich foods and drinking their fill as they further degrade their accountability by adding to the pre-din eroding their senses?  

 

Quite literally, nobody who takes themselves seriously in any sensory testing capacity fails in their twofold preparation ; Internal tuning routines to heighten and nurture the sense.  Challenging their ability to accurately discern qualities within mentally quixotic as well as physical perplexingly diametric samples.   

 

Everyone from the person who tastes ice cream at the factory using a gold spoon to someone inspecting uncut stones to determine their best cut will not even attempt in the presence of even the slightest chance for miscalculation.  I use these two examples specifically to highlight the greater meaning of stereo respectively in stereochemistry and stereotomy.  Inborn heightened ability lending intrinsic empathy for the intricate science.  

 

Tl;dr  What type of psychological experiment do you engage in and under what conditions? 

 

(I feel compelled to add I don't hate audiophools.  )

[GUTB]

5 hours ago, marce said:

Or how much your system cost...

 

The issue is performance. The relationship between price and performance isn't linear, but in general they follow the same upward trend.

[Albrecht]

5 hours ago, marce said:

This is unbelievable, if true all bets are off and any subjective report is just that someones opinion of their subjective art system, a total joke. How do you even define a base-point....

Comparative listening

[NOMBEDES]

Any well constructed set of audio equipment will, given quality source material, sound acceptable.

I suspect at this point in the history of audio development the room and other factors may have more to do with music enjoyment than the hardware.

 

 

[Albrecht]

1 hour ago, rando said:

I took the title of this thread more literally.  

 

What do subscribers to DBT's do to prepare their ears and mental capacity for the work at hand?  Does someone enter the room in a robe signalling all other distractions be cut off and a few minutes of rapt silence ensues before source material pierces the air unannounced?  Toot out the key work is orchestrated in on a pitch pipe as all participants strain their voices to produce an organic stimulus?  Or does everyone sit around eating rich foods and drinking their fill as they further degrade their accountability by adding to the pre-din eroding their senses?  

 

Quite literally, nobody who takes themselves seriously in any sensory testing capacity fails in their twofold preparation ; Internal tuning routines to heighten and nurture the sense.  Challenging their ability to accurately discern qualities within mentally quixotic as well as physical perplexingly diametric samples.   

 

Everyone from the person who tastes ice cream at the factory using a gold spoon to someone inspecting uncut stones to determine their best cut will not even attempt in the presence of even the slightest chance for miscalculation.  I use these two examples specifically to highlight the greater meaning of stereo respectively in stereochemistry and stereotomy.  Inborn heightened ability lending intrinsic empathy for the intricate science.  

 

Tl;dr  What type of psychological experiment do you engage in and under what conditions? 

 

(I feel compelled to add I don't hate audiophools.  )

Yet you use the term.

What i read underneath your post are all kinds sarcastic assumptions that somehow human hearing is such a bad sense that we might as well give up listening to music altogether.

[rando]

17 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

Yet you use the term.

What i read underneath your post are all kinds sarcastic assumptions that somehow human hearing is such a bad sense that we might as well give up listening to music altogether.

 

Could you clarify what term you are referring to.  

 

If you were unable to ride the crest of prevailing sentiment, and prefer rather to be a bottom feeder, then yes.  The sarcasm being portrayed was both deep and broad.  Ask yourself if indeed I was attempting to wash away these easy insults to refocus on what a DBT should be.  One of multiple ways to reach the same point of commonality well above the interests of most listeners. 

 

Very few are endowed with olfactory, auditory, visual, gustatory, or tactile senses to a level it overwhelms.  Slightly more are naturally bereft of one or more senses.  What in fact I'm referring to is the greater mass who can train and utilize one of these senses if they so wish.  As opposed to lazily passing judgement, the hooch/Dutchie, or themselves off as better than others.  It was a very loaded question denoting the casual atmosphere and allowance for undefined discussion. 

 

The first fence post in a wilderness does tend to get erected in the middle of nowhere to begin enforcing order on the surroundings.  

[Indydan]

6 hours ago, marce said:

especially if it goes against your beliefs.

 

It does go against my personal beliefs. So what?! I have my experience. Believe what you want, I'll believe what I want. 

[mourip]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

I would never buy a component that didn't measure well, seeing as moderately priced gear achieves this with ease. What I ultimately choose then comes down to aesthetics, availability, and price.

 

I assume that like many of us who pursue "fidelity" you have owned a procession of different pieces of equipment. What drove you to replace what you had and how was that determined?  Did you buy anything that measured well but had disappointing sound in your system?

 

What is your system now? Your profile just says "Electronics". It would be instructive for us to know what you consider to be equipment that produces fidelity as you define it.

[Samuel T Cogley]

19 hours ago, GUTB said:

This should be obvious but modern hi-fi doesn’t actually have much to do with high fidelity. First of all, speakers are totally incapable of it...well, recording equipment is also incapable of it. What we’re doing is chasing a form of sonic art. A Norman Rockwell painting doesn’t look like anything like real life. But you can appreciate the mastery of the art and derive pleasure from it.

 

 

I imagined it to be more like this:

 

 

 

 

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

I can't speak for you, but I would suggest that rather than the things that bothered one no longer doing so, they tend not to bother one as much. They do not disappear.  IOW, while the sound may become acceptable, it does not become desirable. Replacing that amp with the "normal' amp that preceded it will only serve to highlight and remind one of the deficiencies of the "unacceptable" amp.,

Rather than getting hung-up on semantics, lets say that I get to a point where I'm so used to the sound of the amp I'm reviewing that it's shortcomings are no longer noticeable by me unless I remind myself that they are there. Again, I think it's important to keep the proper perspective in this discussion. We're not talking about my reference amp being glorious while the amp I'm reviewing is junk. We're talking about two pieces of equipment which just sound different (as opposed to one being bad) from one another, and I might not like one as well as I do the other. I've even had cases where the amp I'm reviewing sounds better than what I'm running as my "reference" at the time. But again, after a couple of weeks, those differences fade from my consciousness as well. 

[gmgraves]

19 hours ago, GUTB said:

This should be obvious but modern hi-fi doesn’t actually have much to do with high fidelity. First of all, speakers are totally incapable of it...well, recording equipment is also incapable of it. What we’re doing is chasing a form of sonic art. A Norman Rockwell painting doesn’t look like anything like real life. But you can appreciate the mastery of the art and derive pleasure from it.

While what you say IS the reality of high-fidelity, my view is that we should never lose sight of the fact that a perfect capture and reproduction of a musical event is the ultimate goal. Otherwise what is audio struggling toward? I mean, each year new and more capable equipment is released by the industry's manufacturers, and while not every new product is a step forward, the overall trend is toward less and less colored reproduction. Everything needs a goal or ideal; otherwise everybody is stumbling around in the dark.

I also am of the opinion that the tools on the capture/record end of the chain are much better these days than the playback side of things. I can remember when microphones sounded as different from one another as speakers still do. Today, the individual sonic character of different condenser microphones is much more subtle than it was just 20 years ago. Even relatively cheap mixing boards/microphone preamps are dead quiet (-127 dB and better) have extremely wide frequency response and lots of overhead. High resolution digital recorders are relatively cheap and make marvelous recordings. Getting a playback system together that can reproduce all that an even modest recording kit can capture will cost several magnitude more than did the recording equipment.

[Samuel T Cogley]

4 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

While what you say IS the reality of high-fidelity, my view is that we should never lose sight of the fact that a perfect capture and reproduction of a musical event is the ultimate goal. Otherwise what is audio struggling toward? I mean, each year new and more capable equipment is released by the industry's manufacturers, and while not every new product is a step forward, the overall trend is toward less and less colored reproduction. Everything needs a goal or ideal; otherwise everybody is stumbling around in the dark.

I also am of the opinion that the tools on the capture/record end of the chain are much better these days than the playback side of things. I can remember when microphones sounded as different from one another as speakers still do. Today, the individual sonic character of different condenser microphones is much more subtle than it was just 20 years ago. Even relatively cheap mixing boards/microphone preamps are dead quiet (-127 dB and better) have extremely wide frequency response and lots of overhead. High resolution digital recorders are relatively cheap and make marvelous recordings. Getting a playback system together that can reproduce all that an even modest recording kit can capture will cost several magnitude more than did the recording equipment.

 

I agree with your point here.  I think what @GUTB is putting forth is more like subjectivist audiophile apologia than a rational argument.

 

It doesn't have to sound "accurate", it only has to sound, "good".  And in this dogma, "better" is always going to cost more.  Personally, I find some high end systems make "euphonic soup":  It tastes good, but who knows what's in there?

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, zackthedog said:

The other thing is that a lot of high-end equipment sounds wretched to my ears.  I sat in the Wilson room at RMAF two years ago and found it simply unbearable.  So forgive me if I say that it really all depends on one's own room, ears and sonic preferences.

 

I second that. I was at a Hi-fi show in the SF Bay Area a couple of years ago and walked into the Wilson Audio room expecting to hear the Alexandria XLF. Instead were all these serious audio types contemplating a pair of Duette 2s. I believe these to be Wilson's cheapest speakers at US$19,000/pair (!). I thought they sounded extremely mediocre. In other rooms, I had heard other speakers that, to my ears, sounded far better than the Wilson Duette 2s at 1/10th the price! Of course, I hesitate to make any hard and fast judgements based on a speaker's performance at a hi-fi show in a hotel suite. It is a hostile environment!

 

[Albrecht]

1 hour ago, rando said:

 

Could you clarify what term you are referring to.  

 

If you were unable to ride the crest of prevailing sentiment, and prefer rather to be a bottom feeder, then yes.  The sarcasm being portrayed was both deep and broad.  Ask yourself if indeed I was attempting to wash away these easy insults to refocus on what a DBT should be.  One of multiple ways to reach the same point of commonality well above the interests of most listeners. 

 

Very few are endowed with olfactory, auditory, visual, gustatory, or tactile senses to a level it overwhelms.  Slightly more are naturally bereft of one or more senses.  What in fact I'm referring to is the greater mass who can train and utilize one of these senses if they so wish.  As opposed to lazily passing judgement, the hooch/Dutchie, or themselves off as better than others.  It was a very loaded question denoting the casual atmosphere and allowance for undefined discussion. 

 

The first fence post in a wilderness does tend to get erected in the middle of nowhere to begin enforcing order on the surroundings.  

"audiophool"

 

""Very few are endowed with olfactory, auditory, visual, gustatory, or tactile senses to a level it overwhelms"

Not too sure what you mean here: like all other senses, our hearing, like our eyesight is not perfect, can be fooled, varies according to experiences, affected by outside events & moods, etc.

What i mean is that our hearing, and our comparative listening experiences are denigrated by the anti-audiophile trolls here as a completely unreliable and untrustworthy methodology and subjective to the point where there is no point in conducting any sort of listening tests, - blind or otherwise. When in fact the opposite is true.

[zackthedog]

17 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 

I second that. I was at a Hi-fi show in the SF Bay Area a couple of years ago and walked into the Wilson Audio room expecting to hear the Alexandria XLF. Instead were all these serious audio types contemplating a pair of Duette 2s. I believe these to be Wilson's cheapest speakers at US$19,000/pair (!). I thought they sounded extremely mediocre. In other rooms, I had heard other speakers that, to my ears, sounded far better than the Wilson Duette 2s at 1/10th the price! Of course, I hesitate to make any hard and fast judgements based on a speaker's performance at a hi-fi show in a hotel suite. It is a hostile environment!

 

 

I agree that hi-fi shows in hotels are not the best place to audition components.  That said, like you I heard far better sound in other rooms, even under less than ideal circumstances.  I've actually heard Wilsons in a pro showroom setting and didn't care for them then, either.  My main point was that price has never dictated my own choices.  I lusted after the original ProAc Response 2s the first time I heard them with a Cary 300B amp almost 30 years ago.  Ten years later I snagged a good used pair for $800.  Others may find them deficient but they suit my purposes eminently and I don't have any plans to get rid of them. Best $800 I ever spent, IMO. ;-)  OTOH I roll my own tube amps and have probably spent waaaayyyy more experimenting with various versions over the years than I would have on a decent commercial amp to start with.  But I like the current end result, and my wife likes them, and it's been a heck of a lot of fun along the way.