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Topic: The Philips Golden Ears Challenge (Read 13413 times) previous topic - next topic
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The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Yesterday i did read about some online-challenge offered by Philips at Achimago's blog.

https://www.goldenears.philips.com/en/challenge.html

It really makes fun going thru it. The interface is well done without to much latency on the samples. It took me more than one hour but really was time well spent. The challenges are not to hard and equipment should play no role with something like insanely silent parts. I used my X-Fi XtremeMusic with HD-590.
Everyone honestly ABXing here at Hydrogen should have no problem reaching certified Golden Ear status.
The only really hard part for me was the frequency boost and cut test. It needed a bit 'learning by doing'

I hope this is no old news. Have as much fun as i had

Cheers!
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #1 –
I took me almost 3 hours but I did it, I have golden ears 

The frequency bands boost/cut part was hard as hell.

I used an E-mu 0404 Pci card and Sennheiser eH250 headphones.

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #2 –
Congrats!
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #3 –
Thanks for posting. A fun test and finally some blind-test recognition from a serious manufacturer.
It's a good thing to register before starting the test. I got stuck in level bronze, one audio sample wouldn't download. Registered users don't have to start all over in case you don't make it to the end the first time.
Can hardly wait to make it to the golden level. I suppose there will be some PCM vs. DSD right ?

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Kees de Visser on
I suppose there will be some PCM vs. DSD right ?

Funny you mention this. One person clearly hearing DSD being better as PCM posts on another forum that the use of the interface already overstrained him, so no result.
I wonder how many SATA cable and bit rot hearers will fail with this
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #5 –
My first account got stuck, so I re-registered as HydrogenAudio22220 (my member no.).
Would be fun if more members would do the same as a tribute to this golden-ear forum
Thank you Wombat and thank you Philips for an entertaining evening.

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #6 –
Has anyone else found the bug in this?

I won't describe it yet, but I am a bit surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #7 –
Quote from: StephenPG on
Has anyone else found the bug in this?

I won't describe it yet, but I am a bit surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

They ask at one point for the female song which one has added highs but the samples where flipped  to my surprise. There i didn't think about it to much and thought it is my bad english misinterpreting the question. Do you mean this one?
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #8 –
No, it's on all the A,B,C tests and once noticed it makes it very easy to pick the right one!

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #9 –
Quote from: StephenPG on
No, it's on all the A,B,C tests and once noticed it makes it very easy to pick the right one!

No idea.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!
 

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #10 –
Hmmm, where did my reply go?

i posted how the next sample starts immediately when listening to the bad sample. Otherwise the next sample wont start playing till the current sample finishes

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Nimos on
Hmmm, where did my reply go?

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showforum=41
...because "u" and "r" are not English words.

For future reference, it you can generally find your posts by clicking on your username drop-down menu on the top left of any of your posts, or clicking options under your username while viewing your profile, or by using the search function.

Quote from: Nimos on
i posted how the next sample starts immediately when listening to the bad sample. Otherwise the next sample wont start playing till the current sample finishes

Do you enjoy being the spoiler?

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #12 –
Quote
Do you enjoy being the spoiler?


The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #14 –
That frequency challenge is a beast to get through. I did the challenge using severely rolled off Sennheiser HD 418's, every time I couldn't hear a change I knew damn well it was up in the upper bands 8 or 16, and really had to strain to detect boost/cut. But I got through it, now I am afflicted with golden ears . The other one that was a pain was the early mp3 one, for some reason the 128kbps mp3 was really tough for me, while the others I mostly breezed through. I echo other sentiments, kudos to Philips for this, it was a lot of fun, and taught me quite a bit about how headphones SHOULD sound, what is linear, and what is not, as well as perceptual artifact detection.

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #15 –
Quote from: Nimos on
Quote
Do you enjoy being the spoiler?


?? I made my friends take the challenge and boast to them how i got near golden ears that i can pass these tests with cheap gears.
they believed me??

regarding the frequency gold challenge, i wonder how you people managed to complete the test. I am not able to pass even the first test. Other challenges are relatively easy for me.

Sorry for the single letter words. I am typing from my mobile and i am used to it.


I got through the entire challenge without knowledge of your spoiler. Using crappy HD 418's.

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #16 –
It took 3 hours but I got Golden Ears, according to Phillips.

Didn't know about the spoiler until I came here to post my results.

Did it on laptop audio into a Sennheiser HD-280 Pro headset..

The mp3 challenge was actually pretty easy.

The frequency challenge was a total bear. It was easy to tell a boost vs cut, but my issue was always guessing 1 band off.. Thinking it was 2k when it was 1k, etc..

The high frequency cut off challenge was also difficult for me because I can't hear above 12kHz and that's where the last tests cut off. I eventually managed to pick out some subtle differences to rely on in my hearing range but it took a LOT of listening and concentrating to pick them out.

The rest of the test wasn't hard at all.

Thanks for pointing this out.. I saw it yesterday at work and waited until I had some down time today to do it.

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Batman321 on
The frequency bands boost/cut part was hard as hell.
That's the part I'm currently stuck at, then it's the quiz.

I am kind of surprised the mp3 artifact was part of the silver test, that's one of the parts where I had my troubles. Other than that, I seem to have no sensitivity to reverb and noise. I can hear the difference in the training part, but only hardly manage to pass the actual challenge. Everything else was pretty much obvious.

I think I will leave that frequency boost/cut part for tomorrow when I'm less tired... so silver ears so far for me, using roccat kave (which afaik isn't anything special quality wise).

The Philips Golden Ears Challenge

Reply #18 –
It looks like we need to add a new feature to HA forum.
like we assign group name to a member, we should assign a badge that says 'Golden Ear'.;D

My idea would be that we should use this test or that we should create a similar challenge that provides score for each of these tests for an individual. The score can be used to then recommend a codec or device to that person.

say for eg, if a person cannot pass the Mp3 128k test, we can recommend him not to rip mp3s above 160 or 192k.
Any member asking about audible artifacts in lossy codecs and recommended bitrates be directed to this test.