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The flaws of blind listening tests


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7 hours ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Possibly.  Do you have a link to those?

 

The first rig, I can't locate that post as yet. Related ones are

and 

 

 

For the current NAD combo, steps taken are listed in posts in my languishing :) blog, link in my signature; entitled, A More Ambitious Upgrade - Parts 1 to 18.

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9 hours ago, Taz777 said:

 

That's why it's a hobby for me - it's the same as cycling, photography, etc. All are wallet-emptying but thoroughly enjoyable and absorbing. It's a top-down approach for me - start off with a sound in your mind that you are seeking and then hook together the tech that delivers that sound.

 

Top-down is a good term to use - you know what you're after, and you do what it takes to achieve that. You and Blackmorec have purchased your way to that goal, which is a perfectly valid approach - I have a technical bent, and am by nature an inveterate fine-tuner; I achieved a high standard in a startling, unexpected way - this had an impact which set my course, ever since. I'm also a cheapskate, :D, so it pleases me to get the results with the lowest cost methods possible - this has the extra benefit of teaching me a great deal.

 

The sound that I'm after is what's on the recording - nothing of the rig itself should be audible. The content  that was captured has everything to deliver a powerful, immersive listening experience - all that is required is to 'release' that musical detail with the highest integrity.

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2 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

No matter what you do, or how many disciplines you are trained in, or cross-trained in, "there [will always be] areas [related to sound reproduction] where [you will] have limited knowledge."

 

As examples: consider that "hearing" requires understanding the basics of acoustics, neuro-physiology, AND cognitive psychology.

 

equipment design can require digital electronics, analog electronics, AND vibration analysis.

Vibration analysis, full ballistics testing would be better, its easier as well, you just tip the broken components out of the case.

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2 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

John,

I appreciate your opinion. However, IMO the issue in this instance is neither a question of difficulty of expression nor a lack of expertise. Rather, It has to do with repeating the same nonsense about good and bad recordings, including the notion that tweaking playback equipment can convert bad recordings into good ones, absolutely convinced that he is right. For example:

 

I will avoid further frustration by simply ignoring his posts. :)

 

But I won't ignore yours, ^_^. The silliness in your thinking is that you're deciding what is a bad recording, by how it sounds on your rig ... the filter of the weaknesses of your system taints what you hear; you have no way of knowing what "the recording really sounds like".

 

Understanding what's possible with playback has taken me years, decades. Like virtually all in the game, I was firmly convinced there were poor recordings that would always be awful to listen to ... but I kept being proven wrong - over and over again, So, I've "given up" - I accept defeat - that recording that sounds really terrible right now, I know can be presented in a clear enough light, to be fully enjoyed - sometime down the track ... ummm, this is a good news story; why fight it, :P?

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15 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Instead of getting mired in a bunch of gobbletygook language (akin to wine-tasting language, but with even less meaning), it is much more effective to understand what is expressed in the 'artistic' language in purely technical terms.  There is NOTHING that can be described in the language of 'feeling' that cannot be described in clear, technical terms.  Sometimes it can be difficult to describe reality instead of feeling -- but it can be very beneficial to do so (or at least, try.)

 

 

The limitation in what you're saying is that the psychoacoustic element is largely ignored, or inadequately understood. Only the most recent research into human hearing is getting a better handle on how the brain operates, with explanations for "how" tied up in the whole 'mystery' of human awareness.

 

What my first "competent" rig did was to throw up a completely convincing sound field - it was literally impossible for me to make myself register that the speakers were the source of what I was hearing - the 'illusion' was rock, solid. Now, this exact same setup could 10 minutes later fall off this high perch, and sound just like an ordinary hifi, just another pretty decent audio combo - and nothing obvious had altered in this time frame. So, what the hell was going on here?!! ... and to this day I still haven't got a fully comprehensive answer.

 

Part of the answer is that the mind "fills the gaps"; when the sound is good enough, the brain adds the extra needed to complete the picture, and a 'mirage' fully forms. But to comprehensively explain that, with a fully technical explanation, is still some time off ...

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3 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The limitation in what you're saying is that the psychoacoustic element is largely ignored, or inadequately understood. Only the most recent research into human hearing is getting a better handle on how the brain operates, with explanations for "how" tied up in the whole 'mystery' of human awareness.

 

What my first "competent" rig did was to throw up a completely convincing sound field - it was literally impossible for me to make myself register that the speakers were the source of what I was hearing - the 'illusion' was rock, solid. Now, this exact same setup could 10 minutes later fall off this high perch, and sound just like an ordinary hifi, just another pretty decent audio combo - and nothing obvious had altered in this time frame. So, what the hell was going on here?!! ... and to this day I still haven't got a fully comprehensive answer.

 

Part of the answer is that the mind "fills the gaps"; when the sound is good enough, the brain adds the extra needed to complete the picture, and a 'mirage' fully forms. But to comprehensively explain that, with a fully technical explanation, is still some time off ...

 

This is wrong. The better the system is the minor flaws will be more noticable. Which psychoacoustic literature you are referring to?

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21 minutes ago, STC said:

 

This is wrong. The better the system is the minor flaws will be more noticable. Which psychoacoustic literature you are referring to?

 

That's the conventional thinking ... however, what actually happens is that the flaws in the recording, and the detail of the actual recorded event are more clearly presented, projected. What is needed is to 'trick' the brain into only registering that greater detail of what the mic's picked up, and to discard the recording, mastering, etc, flaws - this is the Cocktail Party Effect being actively exploited; you are aiming to have the brain ignore what is not interesting - all the "defects" in the recording.

 

Again, this is Auditory Scene Analysis research; this has evolved to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_auditory_scene_analysis, which is making machines mimic the automatic processing that humans do.

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

The limitation in what you're saying is that the psychoacoustic element is largely ignored, or inadequately understood. Only the most recent research into human hearing is getting a better handle on how the brain operates, with explanations for "how" tied up in the whole 'mystery' of human awareness.

 

What my first "competent" rig did was to throw up a completely convincing sound field - it was literally impossible for me to make myself register that the speakers were the source of what I was hearing - the 'illusion' was rock, solid. Now, this exact same setup could 10 minutes later fall off this high perch, and sound just like an ordinary hifi, just another pretty decent audio combo - and nothing obvious had altered in this time frame. So, what the hell was going on here?!! ... and to this day I still haven't got a fully comprehensive answer.

 

Part of the answer is that the mind "fills the gaps"; when the sound is good enough, the brain adds the extra needed to complete the picture, and a 'mirage' fully forms. But to comprehensively explain that, with a fully technical explanation, is still some time off ...

You gotta realize that the 'psychoacoustical' issues are also able to be expressed in technical terms.  All of this isn't rocket science nowadays -- it might have been 50-70yrs ago, but not today.

Part of an 'educated ear' is to be educated as to how to talk about what you are hearing.  This aspect of 'listening' is one reason why my DolbyA decoder works so well...  I can often interpret what I hear -- even with my 63yr old ears, and determine what kind of technical remedy is needed.  Sometimes (more often than I'd like), I run into problems that I don't know how to interpret -- and that is motivation to learn something new.   It is best not to use diffuse or obscure language, or to obfuscate by bringing in new topics.  NONE OF THIS IS ROCKET SCIENCE ANYMORE!!!  If I thought in obscure terms or push something off to 'psycho acoustical' when it isn't necessary, then nothing would have gotten done...  It is also not to push-off (for example, my DolbyA project) as simple -- it has over 50FIR filters, over 20IIR filters (probably 2-3X those numbers -- havent counted), some of them dynamically change their Q/FC on the fly.  The DolbyA expansion attack/decay times are necessarily dynamically calculated because of the unfolding of the original feedback to feedfoward design.   When someone talks about a defect in a simple amplifier, preamp, RIAA curve this or that, noise, stereo image, or whatever -- I wonder why they cannot express such simple matters.   Think about the complexity of something that is over 50x more complex with10x that in interactions.  THAT is complicated, and never been as successfully done before.

Do you remember that old phrase 'KISS' (and I don't mean to be disrespectful -- just reminding people to keep things as simple as possible!!!

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Just now, John Dyson said:

You gotta realize that the 'psychoacoustical' issues are also able to be expressed in technical terms.  All of this isn't rocket science nowadays -- it might have been 50-70yrs ago, but not today.\..

 

Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA) is very recent, only 20 years old, and vigorously being investigated - in part, it's about how humans look for patterns in what they hear, and if what they hear matches well to stored patterns, then the sound "gets a tick". Precisely how close the match has to be is the yet to be answered question ....

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Just now, STC said:

 

 

This is irrelevant to what you raised. Cocktail effect is the functioning of the brain to filter out unnecessary sound and focus on the sound you want to hear. It is nowhere says that you brain could somehow magically tinker with a bad recording to make it sound better. 

 

The "unnecessary" sound are the flaws in the recording - they are completely unrelated to the sense of the musical event that was captured. The "magic tinkering" is that your brain smoothly, adroitly, rejects those sounds as being "the next conversation" at the cocktail party - you don't hear them, subjectively.

 

I've had systems slip in and out of the required state hundreds and hundreds of times - when one can literally make it happen, on cue, then you've got something ...

 

Just now, STC said:

 

Totally irrelevant to what you are claiming is possible. This involves algorithm which will not materialize by resoldering the wires like you do AND hardware which the NAD which you are working on is even capable of.

 

 

What the brain reacts to are low level anomalies in the sound - these "give the game away"; distract your mind too much. Therefore, you tweak to remove those 'defects' - it's an exercise that can be repeated as much as one wants.

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8 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

 

That is not the impression that I get from reading most of your lengthy replies. ;)

 Please remember also, that this is an Audiophile site, where members should not be required to learn " Engineer Speak" in order to convey their messages/thoughts to qualified Electronics Engineers.

 However, quite a few members do have some experience in this area, despite not being qualified E.E.s , and a few like myself also have friends who are qualified E.E.s

EEs cannot read minds -- they can try to understand rather than blow-off someone as silly, just like an 'audiophile' shouldn't  feel threatened because there are people who REALLY know what is going on in the digital processing/circuitry/physics (e.g. acoustics), and human hearing (or at least know enough necessary to deal with the various audio issues.)  The subject of audio is multi-disciplinary, but doesn't require all that much in-depth knowledge in detailed medical or neurological fields.  Statistics for gathering and processing information -- for problem solving/quality testing -- is usually MUCH MORE OFTEN important than things like the Fletcher-Munson curve (it is sometimes helpful to know those things also, however.)

It is best for ANY of US to avoid the notion that they are some kind of pioneer in audio -- a lot of people have 'been there/done that'.  It is definitely more of an issue of enjoying the listening EXPERIENCE, and if there is something wrong that really bugs you -- then get help from people (or vendors) who are not going to take cruel advantage of you.

Trying to work together rather than 'pulling' back is important to solve the perceived problems.  For example (not to digress) but for example, the matter of 'jitter' often described as some kind of transfer of FM/PM noise through a digital system that is resynched at every step is 'nonsense', but the HONEST EE understanding that there might be a real problem somewhere is really necessary to solve the problem.  (BTW, most of the time the problem is analog ground/circuit noise -- but that is neither here nor there.)

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2 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Trying to work together rather than 'pulling' back is important to solve the perceived problems.  For example (not to digress) but for example, the matter of 'jitter' often described as some kind of transfer of FM/PM noise through a digital system that is resynched at every step is 'nonsense', but the HONEST EE understanding that there might be a real problem somewhere is really necessary to solve the problem.  (BTW, most of the time the problem is analog ground/circuit noise -- but that is neither here nor there.)

 

I agree 100% with this, but not the earlier part of your post, :). Unfortunately, that "neither here nor there" is just about everything - if one wants the best standard of playback ...

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19 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

I feel, at least from my reading, that there's a bit of a gap between the leading psychoacoustic research and the understanding of psychoacoustics by audio electronics engineers.  But I'd be happy to see where I'm wrong.

 

One other area where I feel we're not quite all the way there yet is modeling the behavior of full audio systems made up of individual audio components and connections, analogously to the way we model audio circuits made up of individual circuit components and connections.

The real problem that you are talking about has to do with the environment and transducers, less so the digital/analog signal processing.  There are aspects of conversion of spatial representations (to improve perception), and there has been a lot of work in that area -- including software to implement some of the ideas.  However, there is a huge amount of silliness in the transducer arena, and I don't trust their accuracy  at all for my work .  This is why, when all else fails, use statistical techniques to zero in on the best solution.   For my own purposes, I cannot even think about using speakers in a room -- not accurate enough.   My headphones aren't perfect, but give me repeatable results.  About human hearing -- my ears are the most frustrating variable in my work.  Even though I take PERFECT care of my ears, I still have to deal with various kinds of fatigue, blood flow issues, tinnitus/etc.   Very frustrating indeed, but I have learned to remove part of those errors from my process.

Still as an absolute -- I know that my hearing is far from perfect, but since I use what I have intelligently, I can gather super useful information from it.

 

So -- I agree with you from the standpoint transducers and rooms -- proper coupling (from both the physical tranduction and spatial representation) to the human hearing system is not well understood by very many people.   That is outside of the scope of my work, and I tend to utilize whatever resources that I can get from the transducer manufacturers.  As an absolute, they cannot be trusted, however.

Used to be, you couldn't trust the accuracy of amplifiers either (with lots of distortion -- including the beloved even order warmth), but nowadays true near-perfection is avaiable at reasonable cost.

 

 

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1 minute ago, fas42 said:

 

I agree 100% with this, but not the earlier part of your post, :). Unfortunately, that "neither here nor there" is just about everything - if one wants the best standard of playback ...

Do you mean that EEs can really read minds?   It is the responsibility for both parties to be mature and understand their limitations.  This can make it easier to communicate.  However, that might be too much to ask when people have bought-in to an emotional position.

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49 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA) is very recent, only 20 years old, and vigorously being investigated - in part, it's about how humans look for patterns in what they hear, and if what they hear matches well to stored patterns, then the sound "gets a tick". Precisely how close the match has to be is the yet to be answered question ....

When doing an audio system -- the neurological 'pattern's, hearing structures need not be understood -- that is the purpose of the production/recording/playback mechanisms to provide transparency of the original arti'sts intent.  How it works inside of the brain/body is outside of the scope of anyone but researchers.  As it is, we have a stereo/quad/10channel or whatever signal with the intentional design of an artist/recording engineer/God or whomever :-).

 

We know that correctly designed/utilized  electronics are now perfect, the digital signal processing as a tool (not always how it is used) is perfect, so we need to know where problems need to be solved.   What else is left?  the coupling of the signal to the hearing system.

 

Right now, we have headphones (which can provide a perfect 1:1 relationship), and we have speakers (which are only loosely and imperfectly coupled.)

The other things include how to deal with the issue of spatial relationships -- do you trust the artist/recording engineer to produce a proper stereo (or other) signal, or do you want to somehow modify it from the original artists design?   That kind of thing is YOUR choice for what makes you 'feel good' :-).   No-one can read anyone's mind -- gotta communicate the desired changes to the original audio, or perhaps describe the defects in the 1:1 mapping of the artists stereo signal to the headphones.  (For larger numbers of channels, there needs to be a specification of the mapping -- e.g. where the speakers are, how to map the signal to the headphones, etc.)   Those are the perview of the originating source (which might include Dolby with their fancy encoding systems.)   They (for example) will prescribe how to utilize their signals.

 

More often than not -- when looking at the matter of some of the desire for audiophile perfection -- some of this stuff seems more like an extreme extension of 'tone controls'.  First, just 'bass', the 'bass/treble', then 'loudness' controls, then paremetric or multiband equalizers,  then 3BX, 4BX, 5BX, then messing with spatial relationships/etc.  Forever and ever.  Guess what? perfection is impossible, but it can be fun to tweak!!! :-).

 

John

 

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On 1/10/2019 at 6:59 PM, mansr said:

"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert." 

I like your statement.  That is why I TRY not to take strong positions and equivocate.  It isn't being wishy-washy, but too often, appearing to be 'too absolute' will cause a shutdown of communications.  In these kinds of discussions it is best to TRY to be mature (not always successful) and altruistic (don't try to make money from people.)

 

John

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32 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Do you mean that EEs can really read minds? 

 

Ummm, no ... :)

 

32 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

 

It is the responsibility for both parties to be mature and understand their limitations.  This can make it easier to communicate.  However, that might be too much to ask when people have bought-in to an emotional position.

 

From my position, there is a self inflicted limitation in many people's thinking, in that they have rather primitive view of how people register the sound of music playing. For example, there is standard myth that there is something special about the sound of live, acoustic sound - and that it is impossible to replicate the sensation of this, especially using a simple stereo setup. IME this is completely wrong, people have convinced themselves of this "fake fact", and hence have limited their expectations of what playback can and should do.

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33 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

When doing an audio system -- the neurological 'pattern's, hearing structures need not be understood -- that is the purpose of the production/recording/playback mechanisms to provide transparency of the original arti'sts intent.  How it works inside of the brain/body is outside of the scope of anyone but researchers.  As it is, we have a stereo/quad/10channel or whatever signal with the intentional design of an artist/recording engineer/God or whomever :-).

 

We know that correctly designed/utilized  electronics are now perfect, the digital signal processing as a tool (not always how it is used) is perfect, so we need to know where problems need to be solved.   What else is left?  the coupling of the signal to the hearing system.

 

Right now, we have headphones (which can provide a perfect 1:1 relationship), and we have speakers (which are only loosely and imperfectly coupled.)

The other things include how to deal with the issue of spatial relationships -- do you trust the artist/recording engineer to produce a proper stereo (or other) signal, or do you want to somehow modify it from the original artists design? 

 

 

All the complexity of that, and the mapping you then mention, is quite unnecessary: the hearing mind untangles all the detail, and creates an internal illusion of what was mastered. That is, if the playback chain is of a sufficiently high standard.

 

Now, one can disagree with those decisions made in the mastering - the obvious one, currently, is the absurd levels of dynamic compression applied so often; this  presents AS IF THE MUSIC IS SHOUTING AT YOU, ALL THE TIME!! Very wearisome, so if one is inclined and the material is worth the effort, then modifying the recording to largely reverse this is worthwhile.

 

For myself, the presentations of older, pre-loudness war recordings are fine - I can go with what they put out for the consumer.

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3 hours ago, John Dyson said:

There are engineers who understand how to solve defects/imperfections/whatever, once they are accurately expressed.

It is important for both the 'wine tasters' AND those who REALLY know how to make the wine to try to communicate.  And, please stay away from SNAKE OIL salespeople who benefit from making the 'wine tasters' dependent on them.  There are a lot of honest engineers (and technicians) who won't try to sell snake oil (e.g. 'solving' essentially over-blown jitter problems, fixing kinds of distortion that don't exist, or mis-describing a problem&solution that has been solved for 50yrs!!!)

 

John

 

So what if the wine taster refuses to accept what the engineer tells them? 

 

For example, "we don't know everything yet" or “there's a mechanism unknown to science going on that you can't measure which explains my subjective response". 

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

I've had systems slip in and out of the required state hundreds and hundreds of times - when one can literally make it happen, on cue, then you've got something ...

 

If you are slipping in and out then it got nothing to do with engineering (or the magical tweak as you call them). The beauty of engineering is that when you slip out you just revert to the previous state. Not very difficult and will not take 30 years to do that. The stuff you are describing is more appropriate under human psychology forum discussion. 

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