Misleading Measurements

[fas42]

48 minutes ago, 992Sam said:

 

For example, is there intrinsically better sound from a piece of audio equipment that is made of the highest grade transistors, capacitors, resisters, transformers, and other components vs a similarity engineered piece of equipment, only using the lowest grade components available?    

 

Yes, it will be of better standard - but if the unit using the low cost components is built with the same care then subjectively it will be highly satisfactory, for the money.

 

Quote

OR.. better yet... if were replaced all of the wire in our high fi systems with lamp chord, and those black (rend and white ended) RCA cables that came with the $99 DVD player that CostCo sells...   would our systems sound then same?  Especially under load?

 

No ... most certainly not. Introducing, deliberately, a distinctly weak link will mean that the SQ is dominated by that weakness - a rough guide should be that the qualities everywhere in the system are comparable.

 

Quote

 

While I've never tried this experiment directly, it's almost self evident that as with most things in life... you get what you pay for, and that stuff that measures well, will usually work well, but not always... as those measurements might not be looking at the entire picture (or sound as the case might be).

 

In audio, the entire picture is never  looked at. Which is why million dollar systems can sound bloody awful! ... 🤪

[fas42]

1 hour ago, danadam said:

Can you give a few examples?

 

Myself is a good example - I was banned in a very polite, almost apologetic way, because I was swimming against the stream - only those who clearly have the same agenda as the majority are tolerated indefinitely ... too disruptive to the general "vibe" of the place doesn't go down well ... 😉.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, sandyk said:

How would you know Frank ? 

You would probably need to go to Kuwait or somewhere to see those in solid gold cases, then pay an exorbitant price  to hear them !

 

Try going to YouTube, and type in "million dollar audio system" in its search - you'll find such are in plentiful supply; I saw one reference to $6,000,000 - not much gold around them, 😉.

[fas42]

People can't wrap their heads around the fact that if a YT clip of a high end system playing doesn't sound good, then it's not the fault of YT. Being there in person listening the system that was recorded, the faults that are so obvious in the video are still there; but are usually "swept under the rug" because other aspects of the sound of the playback, live, are more 'impressive' - human hearing doing its usual compensating thing. On a video clip, there is nowhere for the problems to hide, 😉.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

 It's because no productive discussion can occur the way this forum is structured. Objective discussions are alive and thriving elsewhere, even in a complete absence of subjectivists.

 

I find the really productive discussion to occur when people attempt to come to grips with what causes playback to be subjectively engaging or not, in spite of what measurements show. The two sides in the endless audio arguments unfortunately both believe in 'magic'; for the first lot it's expensive doodahs accompanied by meaningless claims, for the other lot it's meaningless numbers derived from expensive instruments.

[fas42]

8 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Yes, Frank, you are completely above the fray, believing in no magic at all ;)

 

 

Actually, I'm a great fan of good ol'  Arthur C. Clarke - you know, the 3 laws stuff,

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Elon Musk is a great practitioner in this arena, constantly doing things, that say NASA says, "can't be done!" ...

[fas42]

6 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

You do realize that ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ is a relative term, right? It has to do with the level of knowledge and understanding.  The less understanding, the easier it is to believe in magic. I’ve stopped believing in magic in audio a long time ago. It’s basic engineering and science. No magic.

 

That's right. It's engineering and science. Note that I left out the word "basic" - 'advanced understanding' is what's often missing in audio ... a good example is the hangup by the objectivists that the level of interference mitigation used in consumer gear is good enough - it's trivially easy to demonstrate that this ain't the case, if one knows how to organise this, and what to listen for. This is the 'magic' that needs to be dealt with, but pretending it's not there doesn't help things ...

[fas42]

I use a fairly simple metric - does the playback provide the same ease that live, acoustic sounds have in the listening ... an easy test: wind up the volume a few notches - do people in the room start to frown, move around edgily in their chairs, show signs that they would prefer to somewhere else; send you glances which mean "turn it down a bit ...". These are all giveaways that the distortion and noise levels are getting too obvious, too irksome - and so few rigs can do this, with any recording you happen to throw at it.

 

Saying, "Effortless listening!" is actually extremely meaningful, but no-one knows how to measure this, in conventional ways.

[fas42]

18 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

As you may have heard @992Sam say a few times already: everyone hears differently and prefers different aspects of sound and distortion. So, why would your metric of what sounds good to you apply to me? How do I know that you don't prefer an excessive amount of distortion that you think sounds wonderful and transparent to you only? It's perfectly fine for you to use your metric for your personal enjoyment. There's no reason to keep telling me about it, because I'll never experience it in the same way you do. That is the meaning and definition of the word "subjective".

 

Right, so you can't distinguish live, acoustic music making from that produced by well measuring, ordinary audio gear - if the source of the sound is hidden from view ... got it!! 😜

[fas42]

46 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

I can, but I don't know if you can. And that's the point -- your experience is nothing like mine. What you hear is a mystery to most people, even though you keep talking about it all the time. There's nothing objective to what you're reporting or to your metric. It's purely subjective. 

 

And my point is that's how simple it is ... normal audio playback makes it trivially easy to decide if the sound of, say, a piano coming form a room is the real thing, or merely playback. Turns out that when enough of the distortion clues are absent, that it becomes essentially impossible to pick, at least at a casual level of listening - and that the transition in this subjective experiencing is mostly not gradual; it operates like a switch in the brain - it's either on, or it's off. Then the exercise of refining the capability of a rig is to push it beyond this critical level of quality.

 

If a system can be developed to work reliably at this level, then objective assessments can be made - how many people are unable to judge reliably whether they are being fooled or not.

[fas42]

3 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Simple? Let's try to be objective here. Publish some DBT tests that demonstrate that your metric is useful to anyone but you.

 

 

Let me get this straight ... you want to have DBT tests done that determine whether people prefer an audio system that "sounds like the real thing", versus one which always sounds like a stereo hifi?

[fas42]

11 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

No, to determine if your metric helps with actually tuning a system so that others find it better. You know, something that actually helps improve the system for others, something that has a predictive value.

 

Audiophiles come in different shapes: there are those who aim to get the very best, conventional measurements happening, and that then whatever comes out of the speakers is, The Truth; also, those for whom the rig is a metric, which they use to separate "good" from "bad" recordings; and then there is another category who want to gain maximum enjoyment from whatever recording they put on, "measuring" is not part of the deal. What I do will be useful to the last group - for the others, my methods are not really relevant.

 

So far, people around me appreciate what I do. If the playback sounds bad, then that's a signal to me that the chain is faulty - you fix the fault, and the result is that the playback no longer sounds bad. To me, this automatically means "it's better" - others may not find such an approach useful, because, their interest is to see audio playback in a different light, as above.

[fas42]

2 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

Objectively, your metric is meaningless, Frank. Everyone here, every audiophile ever, tries to get what sounds like the most realistic sound reproduction. This is not a revelation you are trying to make it out to be.

 

Getting the "most realistic" reproduction is what people say is part of the deal. However, as soon as it doesn't sound realistic, the excuses come flooding out: bad recording, acoustics of the listening area are wrong, speakers need to be shifted around, pointed in another direction, DSP correction is needed, need to get a better mastering of the album, etc, etc. Every one of those reasons is 'wrong', in my book ... that's the 'revelation' ...

 

2 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Many here will tell your their system is transparent, realistic, wonderful sounding. In fact, I think I’ve told you this about my system a long time ago: I’ve been extremely happy with it for over 20 years, with very minor tweaks.

 

 

Being happy with what you have is what matters - I won't hold a grudge against you for doing that, for 20 years +, 😉 .

 

2 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Using your metric doesn’t help anyone but you, since there’s no way to judge who’s achieved the ultimate nirvana and who is still far away and needs to do more work. What’s more, your metric doesn’t tell anyone what’s wrong or what needs to be adjusted. It’s a subjective judgement of quality. Perfectly fine if you use it for yourself, not at all useful to help others. 

 

The ultimate is that every recording that you have, works a treat. 'Difficult' recordings separate the men from the boys - I try these out on an unknown setup; and if they make a mess of it, then definitely it's "needs to do more work" time.

 

Experience, trial and error, all play a part in 'debugging' a rig - there could be many dozens of reasons why a system sounds "off"; best practice is to look at each possibility in turn, work your way through them; every setup will be unique. Which makes it impossible to specify what needs to be done as a simple set of steps.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

So you too hear amazing sound coming out of the built-in laptop speakers? ;)

 

 

If laptop speakers are good enough to make it quite clear that two versions of a track that by all respects should be identical, because the music data is identical, when played back via a very ordinary software tool, like Audacity - as I mentioned in another thread - then they are good enough to show up differences for more normal reasons 🙂.

 

Sound playback can listened to, to find something out - or, to enjoy what the musical message is about; to immerse oneself in the creativity of the musicians ... if something gets in the way of allowing the latter to happen, then I, for one, revert to the former mode of listening ... it's all about focus, you see ... 😜.

[fas42]

12 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

No thanks, Alex, I’ve seen and heard your evidence before. I have no interest in going down this path again. But do ask Frank to do a blind test, if you really want to know the answer. 

 

Quite unnecessary - I had zero expectations of there being anything there; in fact, I queried Alex about the quality before I listened to a bar - Audacity was showing very severe limiting, clipping of the track, a "sea of red"; he said to proceed as is.

 

Just import both versions in, and solo first one and the other, while playing continuously - back and forth, back and forth; as obvious as someone pulling the leads off the tweeter, so to speak.

[fas42]

15 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

Frank, your imagination is very well documented here. Do a proper controlled DBT showing that you can get a p-value of less than 0.05 from 15 tries. It should be trivial to do based on how big the differences you claim are. But leave me out of it — this is not something I‘m the least bit interested in. Just like I don’t need to keep checking if Santa exists every few months.

 

And the trouble with doing such a test is that immediately people with the desire not to be curious about what's going on will either:

 

a) Completely ignore it, pretend that it never happened - if I just turn my back on it, it will eventually go away ...

 

b) Be certain that the testing was stuffed up; that there had to be a 'tell' - and frantically dive into every corner, of everything, to ferret it out

 

c) Turn around, and insist that 20 people get the same result - if that fails, insist that 200 people get the same result - if that fails, insist that 2,000 people get the same result - if that fails, ...

 

😝

[fas42]

Just now, pkane2001 said:

Yes, Frank. Being objective is much harder than just believing things with no real evidence.

 

Oh, there's real evidence all right ... people don't follow a certain path for 30 years if they don't keep getting clear feedback that their activities are producing positive results. If I could just walk into a room which had an audio setup blessed by the Benchmark company, say, and experience excellent subjective performance, I would be the happiest man in the world ... unfortunately, we are not quite there yet, 😉.

 

 

[fas42]

3 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

Like the fact that the files names Alex used telegraphed the expected results? 

 

🦄

 

Ahh, so you're certain that the names are a tell - okay, which is the "better version"?

[fas42]

3 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

Would it be asking for too much to use at least a shred of something objective in your arguments in an objective forum, Frank?

 

Tell me, if I walked into your place, and changed parts of the rig you normally listen to for pleasure, quite drastically, so that many measurements were now better than before; and none were worse - that you would be 100% happy with that 'upgrade', and to listen to the 'improved rig' forever more - because "the numbers were better"?

[fas42]

On 11/14/2020 at 2:24 PM, manueljenkin said:

 

1. Most of the people from objectivist cult speak for themselves, but frame it in a way as if it were universal truth for everyone. Not everyone needs to have the same needs or interests as they do. Armchair opinions, thinking every audible parameter is covered with a limited subset of measurements (most of them static or steady state) form a major part of such conversations. Oh you prefer a different amp topology or design? They claim that you MUST be hearing and preferring distortion,  completely dismissing every other possibility. As of today, we can't CONCLUDE things, especially relating to audibility limits, with the limited set of measurements being done generally.

 

This is a key point - "you MUST be hearing and preferring distortion,  completely dismissing every other possibility" ... closing off thinking to the chance that other parameters are being missed; the wanting of the audio world to be a neat, tidy box of predictable behaviours, with no unknowns, either known or unknown ... 🤣.

[fas42]

23 hours ago, sandyk said:

Yes, and incidentally, Teresa should also be able to check these supplied files out for herself directly from the DropBox player WITHOUT needing to download them and use up her communal bandwidth, as can our K1W1 member.   

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ak9tyqrpglq1w9/Tyros 3 - The Power Of Love (Instrumental)HF.mp4?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a8koifix231idw3/Tyros 3 - The Power Of Love (Instrumental)LF.mp4?dl=0

 

Sorta "telling", Alex, that not a single other person has given you feedback on this ... whichever way they hear it, 😉 ...

[fas42]

A thought on whether differences, in general, are audible ... first of all, do it at a decent volume! I have found it laughable at times, the softness that some audio people listen to payback at - wind it up so you get the intensity that live music presents, and just about anything you do will alter the qualities of the sound ... I was thinking of this during a round of elevated volume of the active speakers we had going here, just before - it made it so obvious that conditioning of the mains still wasn't good enough yet; requiring disconnection of all other devices on the circuit to get rid of an edge, an 'offness' in the sound.

[fas42]

Well, I got around to listening the 3rd instance of the files Alex provided, and things had changed! At first there seemed to be a difference between the two original uploads, but this faded, and at the end all three were coming across as sounding close enough to identical.

 

But, things had changed on my laptop! Yesterday I installed a piece of software which added to the kernel of Windows, which allowed a capture of streaming audio; a restart was necessary to bring it on line. And, some instability, hopefully transient, was now introduced - trying to play a file using Media Monkey crashed Windows 10 - first time ever on this laptop. Plus, every so often the System process, the Windows kernel, goes into some strange space, spinning its wheels for no obvious reason, chewing up about 30% CPU - it was doing this this morning, and nothing one does seems to be able to throw it out of the loop; eventually it goes away, or I do a reboot.

 

Which could all add up to changing what I was hearing ... to be blunt, I don't want this sort of 'complexity' in the mix - too many complications already; I want this one to be at at the bottom of the pile ... sorry about that, Alex 🙂.

[fas42]

6 hours ago, manueljenkin said:

Well we have an outlier here I guess 😅. I used to "believe" usb cables should make no difference to an ASR certified dac 😛 and once in a while used to troll the believers, now I'm on the other side of the club 😁. Maybe we could apply uncertainty/probability based estimates to this quote!!

 

Nothing helps like having a rig right on the edge of either sounding brilliant, or nothing special - I have never had a system so clearly in one camp or the other as the one 3 decades ago, and it makes one highly sensitive to what's going on. And so you learn that the slightest tipping of one factor, in a certain direction, can be absolutely critical - it always, always comes comes down the thinking, I'm Removing Badness, in how one approaches optimising a setup.

[fas42]

8 minutes ago, sandyk said:

This does not explain away the differences you reported hearing previously between ALL 3 versions of the TOTO-Africa file.

 

Perhaps capturing streaming on your laptop is not going to be as good a listening experience as local music playing, although if your Internet is now fast enough, it will give you a chance to listen to more variety and help guide your music purchasing habits.   

 

 

All 3 versions of your Tyros files were downloaded, and played in Audacity, from local files imported into the program. As were the Toto files. But, this morning my laptop was in "different shape" - was this enough to throw what I was hearing? ... I've had this happen, many many times ...