Misleading Measurements

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1 hour ago, PeterSt said:

But I don't think those objective leaning people know what's all going on for audibility, nor that they know what to listen for. They just don't listen at all, once their perception of that threshold is beyond their belief-of.

 

There's an interesting discussion going on at ASR where Amir has against his and others' expectations found that a speaker which was favoured in a Harman study and produces beautiful Spinoramas sounds bad. Many are calling bias, so entrenched are they in their beliefs regarding audibility that they refuse to accept the obvious. They've been Tooled to accept that nothing other than tonal balance matters...

 

1 hour ago, PeterSt said:

So really, I work the other way around and this is quite explicit: I perceive differences and next I try to work out what they are caused by

 

Good observation is good science. Ignoring observation is dogma.

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6 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

That’s only a controversy if one expects one’s person subjective opinion to be used to judge how something will sound to anyone else.

 

I disagree. It's not a matter of how it sounds (taste/subjective) but of identifying shortcomings (observation/objective).

 

9 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

His measurements are testable and repeatable, his one sighted speaker test, not so much. At least not without investing a few million $$$ into a research study, similar to what Harman did.

 

Like I said, I am ever more inclined to believe that corners were cut in Harman's research. Methodology, small samples, untrained listeners...

 

7 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

This is just a simple case of argument by authority when people start believing that Amir has some super-human powers. He doesn’t.

 

I am not convinced that Amir is a particularly experienced listener but I find it perfectly possible for the Infinity to produce audible distortion(s).

[semente]

13 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

You seem to be missing the point. One person's sighted opinion doesn't invalidate detailed, repeated, published and peer-reviewed scientific studies.  Even if that one person is Amir, or even if it was Toole himself. The fact that some people on ASR are calling Amir to task on this is the right thing to do. There's no controversy here, and Amir knows he can't defend his personal preference. Here's what he said:

 

 

If you get anything out of my BIAS thread, you'll realize how many things can go wrong when biases are not properly controlled. Even if you're a trained listener with years of experience. There were no controls used in Amir's listening session, so why would anyone expect the result to be objective and rise to the level of useful evidence?

 

Amir expected the speaker, which performed well in a Harman study, to perform but it didn't. Yes the test was sighted and Amir saw the measurements prior to listening but they're not better nor worse than other speakers' which he liked in the past.

 

Is it so difficult to conceive that there could be a problem?

Are you that biased against listening assessments that are not of the ABX type?

You put a lot of trust in the detailed, repeated, published and peer-reviewed scientific studies; I see scope for flaws and corner cutting and even commercially driven bias and personal taste.

 

Meanwhile a pier-reviewed paper about Covid 19 (hydroxichloroquine) published in none other than the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine magazines has just been found void and retracted...

Trust science, yes, but not blindly.

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4 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Measurements are misleading just like statistics.

 

This particular case is not so much that measurements are misleading but whether a couple of measurements are enough to characterise audible performance; I defend that they're not.

Life would be very easy if a spinorama could characterise loudspeaker performance in full and predict preference. But this is the real world...

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17 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Publishing measurements that are meaningless to the consumer, with absolutely zero interpretation, can only be a disservice.

 

I agree.

But if an audiophile is unwilling to take the trouble of learning how to interpret measurements that is his own fault and loss.

Measurements and listening are complementary tools for performance assessment and both are indispensible for system building.

Measurements are the difference between a trial-and-error method which may occasionally lead to the fortunate accidental upgrade and taking control of your choices. They also help you to steer away from snake oil and hype, and to focus on what is essential.

 

17 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Take for example, all the specs produced via measurements and published for components. There is no interpretation done, just specs published. These specs are really measurements. Posting this stuff can't help a consumer.

 

Specs don't help the consumer not because they lack an interpretation – any evolved audiophile should be able to make his own elations – but because they're presented in an over-simplified manner.

For example a speaker manufacturer specifying frequency response of a speaker as 30Hz - 30kHz vs 34Hz–23kHz, ±3dB (on axis); 36Hz–20kHz, ±1.5dB, (on axis); 36Hz–10kHz (30° off axis); LF cutoff, –10dB: 29Hz

But more importantly a ±3dB range can accomodate very different curves from a nearly-flat curve with a simple tilt to a very bumpy zig-zag across the spectrum.

The same is true for other averaged specs like THD.

 

Things get even more complicated when you look at things like bass loading and dispersion (room interference) or the interaction between speakers and amplification.

It's the job of the evolved audiophile to learn the basic of how things work. If one is serious about it. Otherwise we're just throwing money into a bottomless chest... Box-swappers.

 

17 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

It's really just a bunch of guys having fun with themselves, looking at the lowest measurements etc... Joe Sixpack can't be helped by this, even with zero interpretation. 

 

I disagree.

I don't care much about Amir's comments or conclusions (I draw my own and sometimes disagree with his interpretations) but I am convinced that once one are able to roughly correlate measurements with listening then one can safely dismiss speakers from a worth-listening-to list.

 

If Joe Sixpack want's it easy then he can use What Hi-Fi?'s star ratings. That's what I did when I was my late teens when I embraced this hobby.

He can follow the SINAD and Preference Ratings.

Or he can just spend his life navigating through endless amounts of gear in hope of hitting that accidental upgrade... No different that playing the lottery.

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4 hours ago, PeterSt said:

- Improve your listening skills;

 

Alt-objectivists (ASR is full of those) don't "believe" in listening. They accept only ABX comparisons which are very low resolution unfit-for-purpose affairs.

 

Mostly because Harman has "proved" with their research experiments that not much was audible or important aside from tonal balance... (dumb, dumber, dumbest or perhaps deaf, etc.)

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3 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

A better measuring product measures better with a particular tool and FWIW. That may or may not mean it is "better" in whatever way depending on what the goal is and how validly the measure reflects that goal ...if at all.

 

I am not sure what you mean but I agree with @PeterSt that "a better measuring product is better engineered", as long as you are considering a product that performs better across a comprehensive set of measurements.

There is no point in having a time-coherent speaker if the response curve is completely ragged, the dispersion is all over the place and nasty driver break up resonances are very audible...

[semente]

58 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Did you participate in Archimago's THD blind test? THD/SINAD are not the wrong thing to measure, they are a very simplified, average number approximating a much more complex non-linear behavior. As a first order approximation, these might be useful, but certainly not enough for a careful analysis of a device. Other measurements are required for that.

 

Oversimplification seems to be quite common. The Spinorama comes to mind.

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11 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

No way!

 

Organic Nepali Golden Black

 

https://youngmountaintea.com/products/nepali-golden-black

 

:~)

 

Interesting, it comes from a region not that far from Darjeeling (where my favourite tea is grown).

Might give it a try at some point.

 

Did you guys know that tea is being grown half-way between the US and continental Europe, right in the middle of the Atlantic?

 

https://gorreana.pt/en/

[semente]

9 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

Without euphonic distortion, all DACs and amps sound the same.

 

It's the same with unpleasing distortion.