Is it worth it?

[fas42]

It most certainly matters ... people want the recordings they play to sound good to them - unless their addiction is to the shininess, and sheer spectacular look of their rig, 😉. So, they will generally spend lots of money, and devote huge amounts of time, to getting it to "sound good".

 

Being purely objective about it has failed ... that is, you can combine a set of components which all have brilliant numbers - and it doesn't pump out, "magic sound". And you know the latter exists, because you have heard such from at least one system you have come across, in your audio journeys ... . Your quest is to replicate the quality of that experience, and you will do almost anything, try almost anything, to make it happen. Which is why we have the great divide between objectivists, and subjectivists, 🙂.

 

"Pretty basic stuff" doesn't dictate, I repeat, doesn't dictate the subjective quality of the presentation - human hearing is incredibly sensitive to anomalies in the sound, and once it hears them, it can't unhear them. It just turns out that you have to be tremendously fussy about everything, to make sure that the flaws in the reproduction are at the lowest levels possible - this is what's necessary to achieve the quality of 'specialness' in what you hear.

 

Interference, no matter how bizarre or unlikely the route is to the key areas of the playback setup, is a particularly pernicious influence - because it dulls, saps the life out of the playback. Trying to explain that this effect "can't possibly be!" is never going to work - because people regularly experience otherwise. No matter how much you want the business of audio reproduction to be a straightforward, push the buttons process, it's not going to be such, until the components themselves, as an overall thing, are engineered and implemented better ...

[fas42]

2 minutes ago, March Audio said:

Frank, your post is reasonable and polite, but doesn't it just exemplify one aspect of what we are referring to?

 

You believe these things but cant present one shred of evidence to support them.

 

"Being purely objective about it has failed ... that is, you can combine a set of components which all have brilliant numbers - and it doesn't pump out, "magic sound" "

 

So show us a component that measures objectively very good and sounds bad.

 

So, what are the shreds of evidence that "prove" that objectively high scoring components produce 'inspiring' sound ... see, you have inserted a subjectivist POV in your reply, "measures objectively very good and sounds bad" - if you going to be objectivist about it, you need to demonstrate, by some means, that it in fact "sounds bad" ...

[fas42]

Quote

If one has to work this hard to get an objective discussion going, then this is just not the place for it

 

Why it doesn't work, is that the objectivists have an agenda - no matter what they actually say, inside they are absolutely certain that the subjectivists are wrong, dead wrong - and they won't back down on that, for anything.

[fas42]

1 minute ago, March Audio said:

Chris, with the greatest of respect can you please explain why PeterST was allowed to be repeatedly highly offensive towards me, repeatedly use ad hominem, call me a wanker and a shit?

 

 

 

Hmmm ... this is the problem ...

 

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Showing results for 'wanker' in content posted by PeterSt.

 

 

 

 

 

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   "It's the best" - Subjective or objective statement?

   PeterSt replied to joelha's topic in General Forum

   ...riginally Posted by Audio_ELF I'm not sure tossed (in UK) really has any different connotation towanker ! And if you're going to wear your shoes keep them off the bed at least! :-) What people all not write WikiPedia pages full with :Wanker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This one...

[fas42]

6 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Your a big part of the problem though Frank. You can’t let anything go. If objectivists don’t want you in the discussion, you need to ignore it. 

 

Why I respond to posts, as in the OP,

 

Quote

If I try and point out that maybe, just maybe someone who has worked on stuff has a better idea than someone who read about in on Wikipedia, I get shouted down until the thread is closed.

 

is that only half the story is told - a technical explanation for how something is done does not then "prove" that there can't be a causal link that impacts SQ ... those links are indeed part of the objective world, but there is a general refusal to accept that they could exist.

[fas42]

10 hours ago, idiot_savant said:

@Summit

As for guitars, they are musical instruments so will have a character. My problem is that if we start thinking of hifi in this way, we are surely moving away from the “fi” bit - surely we are trying to reproduce whatever the artist intended, rather than mucking about with it?

 

 

If we are using an audio system to create a new sound, from a recording, then we have given up on accuracy ...

 

If we are trying to reproduce whatever the artist intended, this I regard as an impossibility - or an extremely long piece of string, 😉.

 

What we can reproduce accurately though, is what is precisely on the recording - if this is nothing like what the artist(s) intended, tough titties - he can go away and cry in his sandwich if he wants to, 🙂.

[fas42]

It's pretty clear that most people haven't experienced a setup that is so 'transparent' that it becomes easy to hear the individual tracks that were laid down in a complex mix - the acoustic of each of say a dozen different sound elements sits in the space in front of you, all on top of each other; completely different, individual, unique - but easily identifiable and standing out clearly from the others. Almost certainly not what the mastering engineer wanted - but that's what's there, on the recording ... and that's one of the signatures, of accuracy ...  🙂.

[fas42]

On 6/7/2021 at 2:03 AM, PeterSt said:

 

This is always about noise, but with the "noise" between quotes because it is not noise but some discrete signal element.

People with a bit less knowledge will tell us that backgrounds are darker and that kind of thing. This indeed tells me nothing except that something will be different.

 

 

 

Peter is one of the very few who understands how pernicious this noise/interference thing is - nearly all rigs, no matter how ambitious, how expensive, have lots of audible artifacts in the sound; experience allows one to almost instantly identify these degradations - but, unfortunately, this is a long, long way from getting them fully under control ... some means of measuring it happening is but a tiny part of actually solving it ...

[fas42]

23 minutes ago, March Audio said:

In an objective forum thread that "understanding" has to be demonstrated to have an actual effect in the audio output (dac/amp/whatever).

 

As I mentioned earlier saying "I hear it therefore it is" counts for nothing.

 

So, if I stated that I believed that noise was degrading the audio output in some way, to a point where it was audible, how should I measure it?

[fas42]

8 hours ago, Summit said:

 

Only you have experienced a transparent setup. We get it, but don't buy it. 

 

With a bit of effort one can find, on audio forums, etc, a number of instances of people who have experienced high levels of transparency - that's why I used the term, "most people"; rather than, "no-one else" 🙂.