Acceptable Responses when Impossible Claims Are Made??

[fas42]

10 hours ago, tapatrick said:

 

Keep it to the claim, not the character of the poster. It's pretty difficult to discern why someone posts something because we are complex creatures who cannot be fully appreciated through this medium. Who knows someone might have smoked something strong or in their system a synergy might have fallen into place and are driven to express it to fellow audiophiles. Time will tell.

 

 

A lot of the fighting would disappear if people would take the effort to understand that getting optimum sound is removing obstacles to the potential of the rig being realised. The mindset is normally that I have to keeping adding better and better 'things' to my system - because that's the only way I'm going to hear the "good stuff". And that's wrong. Big time, wrong ...

 

"Synergy" doesn't exist - it's a weasel word expressing the fact that the right things have been done, usually purely through luck, and the system is now producing far less of the usual artifacts that disturb one's hearing - you fluked "creating a piece of software that has far less bugs in it than usual"; and hence it's always satisfying to use - it can be relied upon to nearly always behave itself.

 

Having a barney because someone says a gizmo makes the sound better is completely misunderstanding what's going on - much of the tweaking, and "silly stuff" is playing with, experimenting with, workarounds which compensate for the lack of robustness of the setup; if the drive belt in your car keeps going bad, because the manufacturer didn't get the design of the engine right in the first place, then you will very likely do some crazy things, to try and keep the car on the road.

[fas42]

The OT stated "someone posts a claim that cannot possibly be correct"  - if someone says that they used a "silly tweak" which just happened to be a workaround for some system misbehaviour, where is the "cannot possibly be correct" component in that?

[fas42]

On 12/13/2019 at 9:38 AM, gmgraves said:

Does that mean that if people talk about an aural or electronic phenomenon that my background and experience tells me cannot be, that I won’t hear a real phenomenon because, subconsciously, my background tells me that it can’t be real? The truth is, I don’t know and I can’t know, and neither can someone on the other side of the question. One hears (or doesn’t hear) what one hears (or doesn’t hear) and that’s the reality of it. Our brains don’t tell us when It obfuscates reality by overlaying it with our personal baggage. 😕

 

And that's a pretty good summary - you hear what you hear, but if you are determined not to accept some significant cause and effect linkage, then you will have every excuse under the sun ready to draw out and lay on the table ... "it was the speakers, the room, too much alcohol, jet lag, etc, etc, etc, ... "'

 

I always enjoy coming across the article, now and again, about how scientists kept on treading on some key data, "because it doesn't make sense!" - and rejecting it, "experimental error, faulty instruments, contaminated apparatus, inexperienced staff, just one of those weird anomalies, etc, etc, etc ..." ... because discarding it was by far the easiest option, at that time. Once the group think factor kicked in, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, and confirmation flooded in, from all sides ... 🙂.

[fas42]

An underlying claim that disturbs many people is that hearing is highly adept at picking up anomalies in sound, stuff that doesn't make sense to the listening brain - but, the mind works both sides of the fence; it will "fill in the gaps", compensate completely automatically for gross 'misbehaviour' which it finds reasonable, yes, allow itself to be fooled ... but on the other side will zoom in with laser intense precision to nail something "being wrong", that does not c-o-m-p-u-t-e.

 

The "outrageous claims!" are all about appeasing that other side of the fence, processing laboratory part of the brain ...

[fas42]

Awww, George ... I was just getting to like you ...

[fas42]

Golly gosh, I've just discovered a new phrase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_inertia ...good thing no-one in the audiophile world is tainted with such a unpleasant sounding condition...

[fas42]

1 hour ago, tmtomh said:

 

A tweak can correct or remedy a problem y, with a system. But a tweak of one problem cannot compensate for other problems in the system.

 

Correct. So the process is, remedy one discovered problem; and listen. The chances are very high that there are other problems still remaining - indicated by the fact that there are still issues with the SQ. So you explore again, and determine the next area that can be improved ... repeat this medication until healthy, 🙂.

 

1 hour ago, tmtomh said:

 

And to bring this back on topic, I would say that explaining as clearly as possible what the logical flaw is in a flawed claim is an example of an acceptable response when an impossible claim is made.

 

Agree.

[fas42]

18 hours ago, tapatrick said:

I probably agree with you but not totally getting your drift... and what’s a ‘weasel’ word? 

 

I work back to front to nearly everyone else in audio - most see a system as not sounding good enough, because they haven't got a good enough DAC, amplifier, speaker, room - tick the appropriate box(es), 😉. My experiences have told me that the components within the system, and room, are intrinsically good enough, unless severely compromised - so a highly cost effective DIY approach is to work out where poor design, implementation, below standard hardware are bottlenecks, and remedy those areas with some low cost additions, replacements or workarounds.

 

Most people do this already - the world of tweaks is where the action is 🙂; but it helps a great deal if you know precisely what you're aiming for - to be able to listen to playback, and easily pick misbehaviour. So "synergy" is merely a way of saying that the misbehaviour is at very low audible levels, by a combination of circumstances, or good luck - it's a "weasel word" because it creates an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said about the components, when in fact it has almost nothing to do with the real reasons for the better SQ.

[fas42]

The subject of cables is pretty straightforward - to me, 😉. It's one of the most obvious bottlenecks in a system, because the degree of robustness is very poor - think of it as a link between two nodes or points in an electrical circuit, and compare its properties to that of a track on a circuit board - in every possible way, the latter is vastly superior to the former, electrically and physically - just the length of the cable puts it at a severe disadvantage, alone.

 

My thinking is that you make the cable have an integrity as close as possible to the copper trace on the board - which is the reason why I always hard wire, or equivalent, everything; that is, there is a logical reason for doing this, "strange thing", 😉.

[fas42]

7 hours ago, semente said:

 

From what I gather synergy usually means a lot more trying that two wrongs make a right than trying to achieve electrical compatibility.

 

I wouldn't call it electrical compatibility - it's electrical robustness one is after; where I see so many losing the plot is that they think that it's a virtue that the rig becomes so sensitive that the slightest twitching of one's little finger is enough to change the SQ - giving them a thrill, through sitting continually on a gizmo merry go round. My POV is that real end goal is for the setup to disappear, and doing anything further either 'positive' or 'negative', outside the now robust system, makes no difference to the subjective experience

 

Good 'synergy', that is, a system which doesn't call attention to itself, for the wrong reasons, is the automatic outcome of working through system weaknesses - the recording, whatever it happens to be, becomes the dominant factor in what you hear - as it should, 😉.

[fas42]

12 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

I I think synergy is more than that. A system that doesn’t call attention to itself doesn’t sound like an aspiration. Synergy is when the performance of 2 or more components complement one another such that the performance of all components is markedly improved.  In the flesh, synergy should result in a $5,000 system outperforming an average $20,000 system.  The numbers are irrelevant but the principal is that synergy elevates performance to a new level not generally achieved by the same components in non-synergistic systems.  Synergy is most usually discovered experientially where components are tried together and the resulting sound is far better than the components are generally known to produce in other systems.  

 

I suspect you misunderstand what I'm saying ... "calling attention to itself" means that one is aware of the 'mechanical parts' of the rig, rather than the content of the recording; the goal is that playback setup is completely invisible as part of the sound environment - the musical event being presented completely dominates 'your world', especially because it can be raised in volume to match the real world counterpart.

 

What you call "synergy" is merely what the recording actually sounds like, without the baggage of rig weaknesses dragging down the experience - the "supa dupa" system is not making the recording sound fantastic; the recording always is fantastic, irrespective of what it sounds like on a lesser system - what one wants to do, at least in my case 😛, is to get rid of the junk that's getting in the way of hearing that potential ... 🙂.

 

Why "where components are tried together and the resulting sound is far better than the components are generally known to produce in other systems" occurs is because the audio industry can't get its act together, and devise ways of measuring what's going on, and expand its understanding of how the human brain reacts to hearing various sound anomalies. 'Poor' combos of gear means that degrading interactions between the components are dragging the SQ down much lower than it needs to be; a good combo just happens because this issue is much less than normal, usually more by luck than intent.