Popular Post Archimago Posted April 4, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 4, 2018 1 hour ago, semente said: The Reich fellow saw a UFO. In my book that's up there. Up. There. LOL. I was reading until this point about the UFO experience and basically could not proceed word for word and skimmed the rest. I do love thinking and writing about audio because sound is such an ephemeral phenomenon that it can so easily divide audiophiles into "camps". Personally, the tool by which I like to adjudicate sound is with emotional and intellectual reason. This is at the heart of a previous article I wrote a year back - "On Being an Audiophile, Rationality, and Respectability ". Yeah... Plenty of straw men, inaccuracies, and lack of insight in that article IMO. For example: "Interestingly, objectivists like behavioral psychologists do not believe consciousness exists." Nonsense. I don't know any objectivist that denies consciousness exits! Who? Speaking for myself at least - consciousness is at the heart of my day job :-). "Their minds are not open to any forms of anecdotal evidence or unbiased collection of raw data." Again, what is this about? Other than Hydrogen Audio with their TOS, I don't think anyone here demands formal A/B testing be done. Informal anecdotal opinions are not necessarily automatically dismissed, but I think most would encourage the listener to go further using tools (whether ABX or other form of blind testing) to control for biases. This is simply reasonable especially when the opinion is one of "obvious" audible differences heard. "Dutifully, I remind these dismissers, that, by definition, an 'objectivist' is an experienced, unbiased and unprejudiced observer; and that every editor at Stereophile, Analog Planet, InnerFidelity, and AudioStream fits that description." Oy vey... Please think about how narcissistic, self-serving this comes across Mr. Reichert! Simply horrifying logic. The thing is that I would love to debate an article like this with these folks on AudioStream... But they banned me for basically expressing a philosophically different opinion years ago similar to statements above. I certainly do not think I came across as rude nor did I use any inappropriate language, just pointing out inconsistencies and questionable "faith based" commentary as I recall being promoted by Mr. Lavorgna. Indeed, "So why then can't objectivists and subjectivists respect each other?" Ultimately, this article comes across IMO as an example of the "old guard" trying to reinvigorate their faithful "base". Good. Keep trying boys... Ajax, crenca, semente and 1 other 2 2 Archimago's Musings: A "more objective" take for the Rational Audiophile. Beyond mere fidelity, into immersion and realism. R.I.P. MQA 2014-2023: Hyped product thanks to uneducated, uncritical advocates & captured press. Link to comment
Popular Post Archimago Posted April 4, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 4, 2018 49 minutes ago, Albrecht said: I don't disagree. But because he is pompous does not mean that he bans people for having an opposing viewpoint. Yes. It happens. Frequently I think given some comments I've heard through PM over the years. He seems to have very thin skin when it comes to disagreement... A shame because reasonable discussion would be fun and it doesn't have to end up being egotistical sword battles. Hard to find evidence when posts themselves get erased. Nordkapp and MikeyFresh 1 1 Archimago's Musings: A "more objective" take for the Rational Audiophile. Beyond mere fidelity, into immersion and realism. R.I.P. MQA 2014-2023: Hyped product thanks to uneducated, uncritical advocates & captured press. Link to comment
Popular Post Archimago Posted April 5, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 5, 2018 5 hours ago, miguelito said: Yes, but the fact remains that we don't have complete information. So one for example might derive some conclusions from "subjective evaluations" that one can corroborate or refute over time and subsequent subjective evaluations. For example, I have a pretty good idea what the sound signature of my AvantGarde speakers is since I have now used them in many places (three apartments at this point). I think this gives me an "objective" understanding of their sound (and in my experience other AG speakers's sound) without having measured them. I have also learned that although my Ongaku amp measures horribly, paired with appropriate speakers it is actually a very low noise and sweet sounding device. Again no real measurement but what I would call experimental discovery. Finally, I will mention the topic of MQA (yes!). People can have all sorts of opinions on it's DRM features or restrictions on decoding mechanisms without ever experiencing MQA sound. That is totally fine - it is objective. I have listened to a lot of MQA and have developed my opinions on its sound (I've been clear elsewhere). This I think is pretty objective as well in the sense it is reproducible. My point is objective is in my opinion measurable - but there's also experimentally objective which I don't have anything like numbers behind but are the result of long comparisons and forming an opinion. I don't regard that as entirely subjective. Hey @miguelito, good post man and appreciate your discussions on the forum here. First, I know the discussions after your comment also talked about "radical" objectivism and subjectivism. I honestly don't think the vast majority of the discussions here are "radical" anything whatsoever . I'm also not sure we need to get too philosophical about the "theory of knowledge" here. The way I see it is that "objectivity" (as in the pursuit of objectivist audiophiles) is an attempt to get directly at underlying "constructs" which are not the "quasi-imaginable cultural abstractions" that Reichert speaks of in his article. Clearly concepts like frequency, noise floor, dynamic range, time-domain characteristics whether measured in Hz, dB, microseconds which can be directly comparable between different devices are the foundations upon which the whole endeavor of audio engineering is built upon whether in hardware design or on the recording/production side. These basic, universal physical principles (with physiological effects in the brain) from sound waves are not in the realm of relativity, wave/particle duality, or other quantum mechanics principles; to bring these realms of physics up as germane to consumer hi-fi devices is IMO pretentious! Furthermore, it's a ridiculous straw man to say that "self-proclaimed audio objectivists" who desire to understand, compare and know these constructs are also "self-declared enemies of poetry, love, and humanist culture". Preposterous! I certainly don't see that kind of "either/or" thinking among "objectivists" here or really elsewhere except in the mind of the writer of this article and others of that persuasion who seem to be of the opinion that they have some kind of higher level perceptual ability. I agree with @crencaabove who suggested this lack of balance as highly unwise of HR... Does any of us actually believe that respected "high end" hardware designers don't understand these underlying principles when they design good gear? Some designers might not be aiming for technical perfection and perhaps there are corners to cut at certain price points. But surely, they are aware that if a device deviates from these measurements and basic "constructs" beyond a certain amount, the device will audibly no longer be capable of "high fidelity" reproduction. Now with regards to your comments, miguelito, on your Avantgarde speakers... You are providing an opinion on the sound of the device thus it is subjective. I certainly do not doubt that you'd be able to differentiate them from others and in fact be able to use many adjectives to express your opinions and preferences. However, it is an indirect type of assessment if I were to ask you about the basic physical constructs like smoothness of frequency response, time-domain accuracy, amount of detail retrieval, etc... I'm sure you would give it your best effort, but the assessment would have been a complex sequence of steps having the sound processed by your ears, mental auditory processing, comparisons made with previous memory of events, cross-referenced with lexicon of words to use, and then consciously expressed in language. This is not even to mention other important variables like the room you're using or the ambient noise level, etc. that would have significant bearing on the "sound" itself. Sure, we can of course grab 100 trained listeners to study the qualitative aspects of their perception and experience (which speaker do you prefer? which one sounds tonally the most natural? which one reproduced the best detail?). In this way we can get a numerical score based on some kind of standardized scale (which needs to be tested for validity itself), thus "objectifying" the exercise. The result can give us nice "group effects" and we can calculate things like standard deviation or even plot out the results if we see a typical "normal" curve often found in population studies. Ultimately, we would still say that each person as an "instrument" of perception will be providing an opinion based on their subjective experience, listening acuity, and sharpness of mind and the result is a reflection of this variance in the population. BTW, remember the studies done by Floyd Toole and Sean Olive on speakers? Here's a nice video of a lecture a few years back: By using objective techniques, they can predict with some level of accuracy the preferences among "subjects" but of course not everyone will have the same preference. For example, some people might love the sound of a speaker with high-frequency roll-off starting below 10kHz or a DAC that is incapable of >16-bit performance, or an amplifier with high THD (is that the case with your Ongaku amp?)... That is the privilege and freedom of subjective opinion and preference and I would not say anyone is "wrong" to have such preferences. We each will have to find the balance between awareness of those basic physical properties of the device, and be happy with what we like intellectually (an important element of objectivity) and emotionally (an important element of subjectivity). I'll avoid the topic of MQA here. Enough said . crenca, semente, esldude and 3 others 3 2 1 Archimago's Musings: A "more objective" take for the Rational Audiophile. Beyond mere fidelity, into immersion and realism. R.I.P. MQA 2014-2023: Hyped product thanks to uneducated, uncritical advocates & captured press. Link to comment
Popular Post Archimago Posted April 7, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 7, 2018 2 hours ago, Rexp said: The quality of a fine audio system and the quality of a fine wine are both subjective judgments and since no one has come up with an objective way to determine quality, i'll stick with my opinion and opinons of others I trust and not some nerd with a scope. Certainly OK to have skepticism around whether pure objective analysis is enough to determine quality (seems like you prefer "opinion" of self and others). One is free to decide. But the comparison with wine tasting, a multimodal experience of perceiving a substance produced by complex biochemical reactions controlled but originating in nature to the electrical engineering efforts of sound reproduction hardware leaves much to be desired. I would not consider the vague similarities between the two to be within the ballpark as the differences are even more striking! Ralf11, sullis02, semente and 1 other 3 1 Archimago's Musings: A "more objective" take for the Rational Audiophile. Beyond mere fidelity, into immersion and realism. R.I.P. MQA 2014-2023: Hyped product thanks to uneducated, uncritical advocates & captured press. Link to comment
Popular Post Archimago Posted April 14, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 14, 2018 For your consideration as one of a number of voices in The Audiophile Consumer and Technical Union (TACTU) : On the joy of numbers... Yet more on that audio "Subjectivist" vs. "Objectivist" debate. sullis02 and crenca 1 1 Archimago's Musings: A "more objective" take for the Rational Audiophile. Beyond mere fidelity, into immersion and realism. R.I.P. MQA 2014-2023: Hyped product thanks to uneducated, uncritical advocates & captured press. Link to comment
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