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Topic: Article: Why We Need Audiophiles (Read 498149 times) previous topic - next topic
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Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #150 –
Quote from: krabapple on
'Holographic' audio reproduction on the other hand is a matter of things like room acoustics, channel configuration, and recording quality, not some amazing mental quirk.

The personal anecdote I posted earlier in this thread was an attempt to demonstrate that hearing a "holographic" soundstage most probably *is* a mental quirk.

Playing the same LP on the same system in the same room, just one time out of many I happened to hear a "holographic" image. The fact that it only happened once, was from an LP (with all that medium's known flaws), using speakers well known for their *lack* of imaging ability, strongly suggests to me that it's nothing to do with the reproduced soundfield, but in the mind.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #151 –
Quote from: ScottM on
Quote from: botface on
Do musicians have better ears than the rest of us? Probably not.


Probably so, some of them.



I'd argue the reverse. A musician is more likely to have suffered work-related hearing damage than, say, a typical office worker. That's not just rock musicians who spend too long next to a Marshall stack - the sound pressure levels coming from a violin (for example) are enough to impair the hearing mechanism of the player long before they get good enough to consider themselves a musician. The same applies right through the orchestra... not forgetting the damage caused by rehearsing and performing with a large orchestra itself.

However, a musician's listening skills should be distinctly better at determining changes in music than most non-musicians, because it's an ongoing part of the training process for any working musician. Even the ones who don't spend hours and hours formally training their ears to spot different musical intervals, chords, rhythms and developing relative pitch learn these things on an ad hoc basis. It's a different training process than might be used to develop good audio listeners (a musician needs to be able to spot the difference between a Maj7 and a 7sus4 chord, where an audio listener needs to learn to be able to spot the prospective artifacts from a poor codec or a badly-designed crossover) but it seems possible that the development of critical listening skills in one musical sector is, at least in part, transferable to others.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #152 –
Let´s face it: people buy new techniques when they are cheap & convenient. If they offer good sound quality it is a side-effect, nothing more (there are exceptions). So many people are happy with their original iPod earphones though they sound like crap. Adding to this, they can´t hear any difference between a CD and a MP3 from that CD - but they don´t even bother because they have other things to do (caring for the kids, going to work, painting pictures... I don´t know). They want their music fast and good sounding - MP3 offers exactly that.

Basically the techniques used in modern systems is chosen for the customers, they don´t choose themselves. It´s like fashion. Did you ever see "The Devil wears Prada"? Meryl Streep says some very true (if not cynical) sentences. One of them basically says that the fashion the "normal" people are wearing today was chosen for them by some high-flying designers years before. This fashion used the years to be downgraded to mainstream. I believe that with Audio it is the same, the techniques we are using today were chosen for us by engineers, designers and marketing people - all of them with the desire to make loads and loads of money with us. Audiophiles used some of these techniques years before they were introduced to the mass market. As an example I would like to take Sony. They produced some special CD drive for their High-End-players in the mid 90s´.  A few years later they downgraded this special drive to the mass market.

Another example: MP3. Developed by the Fraunhofer institute it rose to prominence in the late 90s´ - but some people are actually forgetting that lossy formats were introduced in 1992 with MiniDisc & DCC. They didn´t sound like the original but good enough to be transparent to the casual listener. MiniDisc still exists. Why? Because it is fast and convenient. DCC died very soon because it was slow. Eventually even MiniDisc will die simply because MP3 is more convenient and offers the same sound quality.

As for objectivity vs. subjectivity: I myself am a mixture of both. I´m buying expensive cables, I do paint the edges of my CDs, I upsample, I believe in 24/96 being superior and in the Hypersonic effect. I know that MP3 can sound transparent, still I´m using WavPack lossy. I also know that the whole Jitter discussion is overblown, still I do a lot of stuff in order to suppress it. On the other hand I never believed in tubes or vinyl. I´m sure that for some people I´m counting as an Audiophile (or a mad person) though I´m not considering myself actually being one. Anyway, I´m convinced that the techniques used by audiophiles today (not Vinyl) will be used 20 years from now for the mainstream market. I´m sure we will have for example 24/96 on every medium with most of the music. Not because of the reason that it may offer a sound improvement but it just will be as convenient as the techniques used today, it will be the standard (the mainstream won´t hear anything - but they wouldn´t hear the difference between 16/44.1 to 12/32 simply because they are not interested) MP3 will be dead by then, only to be replaced by something else. Also in 20 years from now the audiophile will have something new to promote...

And so the cycle starts again.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #153 –
Quote from: krabapple on
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Many of the individual ABX test runs in the lossyWAV thread (and also the 16-bit thread) were inconclusive on their own, but if added together and treated as one big run, became more conclusive. I'm not sure how statistically valid this is... (snip)
You're not sure how statistically valid it is...well, that's what statistics are for, eh?  It becomes important at some point to crunch the actual numbers, rather than rely on impressions that 'lots and lots' of tests have supported the difference.  I also made reference to a p<0.1 for good reason...heck, Pio even discusses it in the HA sticky on ABX.
I've used the statistics. I've downloaded the spread sheet. I've studied the discussions on the difference between ABXing a pre-selected number of trials vs ABXing until the "probability of guessing" indicator goes below 5% (which breaks the stats - the displayed "5%" is wrong in this use case).

My comment, "I'm not sure how statistically valid this is", is raising cautious concern over whether the apparently innocent practice of adding together the results from multiple ABX runs of the same codec with the same settings with (sometimes) different samples is also breaking the statistics. I suspect it is - like the "ABX until you hit 5%" case, I think the "add together all the results from samples that show a problem" case means you haven't actually hit 5% when the stats say you have. Why? Because there's an element of self-selection - if you can ABX a sample, it goes in, while if you can't, it doesn't. That innocent act, unavoidable when testing codecs, breaks the stats if you simply add all the results together. The only way to make it right is to keep the results separate (and remember they weren't statistically significant separately), or to get other users to repeat the results (for some samples, people did - for others, they did not).


Now, you have just proven my earlier point: I was hinting at a rather complex point of ABX statistics, but you assumed I was hand waving, and hadn't even tried the stats.


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Quote
There's endless praise for lossy audio in this thread, despite there being many successful ABX results of 320kbps mp3 documented right here on HA!

Yes, and please put that in context: very few can consistently 'succeed' at that, and very few find it anything like 'easy' in the first place.  And often some training to hear mp3 artifacts specifically is involved. That points to mp3 technology being pretty fucking amazing these days.  But does it point to the self-proclaimed 'audiophile'  being RIGHT when they claim they can always tell any mp3 from source.. as they often do?

OK, so here's what I really think: In the audiophile world, just as in the lossy audio world, there are a very few people with good and/or trained ears, who can actually hear subtle problems - and can hear the absence of subtle problems.

However, the vast majority of people in the audiophile world, just as in the lossy audio world, aren't nearly so sensitive. With the vast majority, there's no difference between the Emperor's new clothes, and a genuine, subtle, audible improvement. They cannot differentiate. They can't really hear either of them, but to appear that they know what they're hearing, they pretend to hear both. "The MAD mp3 decoder sounds so much better". "fb2k sounds so much clearer". "the red speakers sound punchier". etc etc etc. A lot of people are reporting that they hear differences where no such difference exists.

But that doesn't mean that no difference exists. 320kbps mp3s can be ABXed. The Emperor has clothes in this case - but very few people can see them!

And, importantly, throughout large swathes of the industry, I suspect many of the really smart people know damn well when the Emperor has clothes and when he's naked - but for various reasons it would do them do good at all to shout out "the kind is in the altogether!" so they keep quiet. But note that: the sensible people keep quiet. The people who can really hear keep very quiet about the things that make no difference. I guess I've seen this more from inside academia, talking quietly to bright people away from commercial pressures - but also talking o people in the commercial world when they've taken their "marketing hat" off. What you see printed in the audiofool press, or spoken at shows sponsored by cable manufacturers, has no bearing on what people who really "get it" think and hear.


What other holy cows can and cannot be ABXed? I don't know. But I've had discussions with Arny on here before, and he's pointed to the results at http://www.provide.net/~djcarlst/abx.htm to show something couldn't be ABXed, and I just look in derision at http://www.provide.net/~djcarlst/abx_md.htm which shows that first generation minidisc couldn't be ABXed. First generation minidisc!.


It's interesting to me that I point to 320kbps mp3, and you come straight back at me with a reason why that example doesn't really matter. What was the name of this arguing technique - it cropped up in another thread with creationism vs Dawkins - how you can never prove something true/false if the other side keep moving the goal posts.

And then we've had several posts laughing at the idea that an iPod is ABXable from a CD12, and then a sensible member quietly mentions that you can hear the background noise.

The absolutely rabid anti-audiophile attitude growing on this board is terrible.


I'm 100% convinced that any real difference should be reproducible in a DBT given a sufficient time scale. I'm convinced that when people report hearing the difference during a DBT, but the results are actually random, it proves placebo / self delusion.

However, to go from this basic science, to dismissing the audibility of things where an ABX has never been attempted, and concluding that an iPod with high bitrate mp3s is the peak of audio perfection, or at least more than good enough, when there's clear ABX data and objective data disproving this - this is worse than nonsense. Where is the scientific basis for these statements? What on earth are people doing on HA making statements that are completely disproven by ABX results?! The fact that people will happily trot this nonsense out in an argument discredits them and this site.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. I know most people can't hear anything wrong with 128kbps mp3. These people are equally welcome on HA, but their failed ABX tests do not invalidate other people's successful ABX attempts.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #154 –
Quote from: Gag Halfrunt on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Now there's a blind test I'd like to see (!) - an iPod vs a Linn CD12.

Both sides of this debate find that idea laughable for opposite reasons. So it's a great test case.


Do you expect them to sound different?


That's immaterial.

I suspect this is the kind of thing that needs to be repeatedly run and re-run to 'demonstrate whether there is - or is not - a difference'. The problem with challenging dogma is that it doesn't crumble at the first challenge.


AFAIK the first CD player versus CD player DBT was done by my associates and myself for a feature article in Stereo Review in the late 1980s. We compared the much-maligned CDP 101 to Sony's latest-greatest and other players and found trivial to non-existent audible differences.  Tom Nousaine did a similar test about 14 years later, with similar results.

The recent JAES article comparing so-called hi-rez to CDP audio produced similar results.

For about 8 years I owned and operated a web site known as www.pcabx.com that allowed people to hear or not hear differnces like these.

Sooner or later people have to stop expecting people to re-invent the wheel for them!

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If we come on strong with 'been there, seen it, done it' to a bunch of people who not only haven't, haven't and haven't, but think they have... you just run up against the faith. You have to keep challenging this to get the message across. Gradually, you overturn the previous mind-set.


How many times do we need to open Lincoln's grave before we believe that his body is still in it?

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Or we just keep drawing up the same battle lines.


The ability of greedy and/or poorly-educated  audiophiles, salesmen, and journalists to mislead people again and again seems to be unending.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #155 –
2Bdecided. ABX is not the last resort for everything. It is a fantastic tool to evaluate non linear or psycho acoustical processes like lossy compression or the non-impact of audio voodoo. ABXing, although hard to implement, is also a great tool to for speaker evaluation, were still not enough purely objective metrics exist.

But DACs and output stages are different. There only mission is to do their job while staying completely out of the signal path. It is not hard to built them as completely linear, neutral elements until far above (any) humans' hearing capabilities. And this is perfectly measurable for any given pair of frequency range and signal to noise ratio. You can't measure wether a unit's colorization (speaker, tube saturation) is sounding good or bad, but you can measure wether there is any colorization at all.

The only problem is that many people don't have enough background knowledge to interpret the results. The iPod has certainly an acceptable frequency response and signal to noise ratio. But the latter is a ratio and no absolute statement about noise. A sensible enough headphone may pick up noise, wether from the iPod or the best DAC in the world. This does not matter when feeding an external amplifier (where you can turn the iPod's volume up until it can play within it's full range without perceivable noise) and less sensitive headphones.

So you may not get happy with an iPod when you only have very sensible headphones and listen to very low volumes. But this doesn't say anything about it's capabilities to drive a high end system (high impedance, adaptive sensitivity = volume knob) perfectly within its full measured signal to noise ratio.

So it is good to have people prove that units are actually not ABXable, but I have seen enough to completely trust measurements as long as we are speaking about supposedly linear and non colorizing elements, for example DACs and output stages in general. Speakers still do have some not accurately definable color, lossy compression is non-linear and psycho acoustical, so here this does not apply.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #156 –
Quote from: Ron Jones on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
If I whip out a parametric equalizer and tweak back in a reasonable semblance of natural bass response, have I forever damaged the overall sound quality?

Technically, I feel you have.


If you want to worry about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I've got nothing for you.

You obviously have no compelling clue about the practicalities of doing real world audio, while right now that is very much of my life.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #157 –
Quote from: Canar on
Hm. My own experiences with the iPod are that it's a touch on the noisy side...


The first question is: "Is your Ipod operating within spec, or is it somehow broken"?

The second question is, "Have you found anything that is actually quieter when doing a comparison that is fully apples-to-apples"?

Seems to me like you are a good candidate for the following simple "Tweak":

Get an in-line attenuator and adjust the effective sensitivity of your earphones to suit your needs for noise-free listening. Or, obtain earphones that are simply less acoustically efficient.

The basic problem that you are worrying about has been around for at least 50 years that I know of. It is very easy to set up a monitoring system that will have an audible noise floor with virtually any piece of equipment.

I think I first experienced with my own equipment  using a pair of Telex headphones and an Eico ST-70 back in 1962 or so. But I worked for an audio store and I had encountered it with the store's equipment before that.

The effective solution that I  found way back then was to build an in-line attenuator and adjust the effective sensitivity of my earphones to suit my needs for relatively noise-free listening.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #158 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Now there's a blind test I'd like to see (!) - an iPod vs a Linn CD12.

Both sides of this debate find that idea laughable for opposite reasons. So it's a great test case.


Do you expect them to sound different?
If they don't, then very little does.


I don't know of any reason why an iPod playing a given audio file would sound different from a CD12 playing the same basic file (obviouisly reformatted), all other things being equal.  Do you?


Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #159 –
Quote
The ability of greedy and/or poorly-educated audiophiles, salesmen, and journalists to mislead people again and again seems to be unending.


I am in complete agreement with you. I would say all three contribute poorly to the lack of understanding in the field. Audiophiles "think" they know what they are talking about and sell a sales pitch to the advertisers and ignorant journalists pick up the stories from these "experts" and report them to the greater public without ever questioning the validity of the story they are writing about! That's we see enough of these stories on the internet.
budding I.T professional

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #160 –
Reminds me of Homer Simpson wearing a poncho and riding through Springfield while listening to "Uptown girl" through a bullhorn. When people tell him that he ain't a hippie and that's not hippie music he always responds: "but, but the poncho!".

It's probably about the same with the CD12 sounding the same.

"but, but the separated power supplies"
"but, but the massive enclosure"
"but, but the the lathe shaped tray"
"but, but the optional dither"
"but, but the price tag"
....

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #161 –
Quote from: Gag Halfrunt on
Quote from: ScottM on
Quote from: botface on
Do musicians have better ears than the rest of us? Probably not.


Probably so, some of them.



I'd argue the reverse. A musician is more likely to have suffered work-related hearing damage than, say, a typical office worker.
<snip>

However, a musician's listening skills should be distinctly better at determining changes in music than most non-musicians
<snip>

My own anecdotal experience supports this.  My musician/teacher friend and I were discussing how he couldn't hear the mosquito tone the kids sometimes use on their cellphones.  He couldn't hear it.  I whipped out the laptop and we found one online.  He couldn't hear it, but i could... barely.  I'm ~3 years older than him (37).  We then used a signal generator to informally test his hearing threshold.  Turned out he was right around 13KHz.  A tone at ~13K which was very loud to me, was just barely perceptable to him.  He was shocked.  His immediate response:  "I'm wearing earplugs when we jam from now on."

His skills at listening to and picking out subtleties in music are far superior to mine, which supports what's been said previously.

When we have some time, i'll have to see how he is at picking out lossy codec artifacts.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #162 –
Quote from: rpp3po on
But DACs and output stages are different. There only mission is to do their job while staying completely out of the signal path. It is not hard to built them as completely linear, neutral elements until far above (any) humans' hearing capabilities. And this is perfectly measurable for any given pair of frequency range and signal to noise ratio. You can't measure wether a unit's colorization (speaker, tube saturation) is sounding good or bad, but you can measure wether there is any colorization at all.
But the history of audio is that we have a measurement, we make it perfect, and then someone invents a new way to wreck the audio which is invisible on that measurement. So we invent a new measurement that catches the new problem, and go round again.

The point of ABX (or similar - e.g. ABC as used in psychoacoustics) is to know where "inaudible" is on a given measurement scale, and/or whether the measurement misses something entirely.


I think we can get all known problems "inaudible" for a relatively modest outlay, but the idea that this happens routinely on most audio equipment is just fiction. Designers are ignorant, or just don't bother - it's not like most people can hear the difference anyway.

Cheers,
David.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #163 –
Test of absolute hearing threshold, and tests of the ability to hear one sound in the presence of another (i.e. masking) can give quite different results.

Some people trash their ears but learn (and/or have an innate ability) to listen carefully.
Other people have ears which work very well, but apparently can't listen.

You can train people on various listening tasks (e.g. noise masking tone), but all equally (highly) trained listeners with identical absolute hearing thresholds will have very different masked threshold levels, and quite different spectral shapes to the masking curves.

Psychoacoustic codecs use general models; individual listeners vary greatly.


In my (limited!) experience, musicians and DJs often measure above average for masking thresholds - I don't know if they hear/listen well because they are musicians or DJs - or if they are musicians or DJs because they already hear/listen well.

Cheers,
David.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #164 –
Quote from: gerwen on
My own anecdotal experience supports this.  My musician/teacher friend and I were discussing how he couldn't hear the mosquito tone the kids sometimes use on their cellphones.  He couldn't hear it.  I whipped out the laptop and we found one online.  He couldn't hear it, but i could... barely.  I'm ~3 years older than him (37).  We then used a signal generator to informally test his hearing threshold.  Turned out he was right around 13KHz.  A tone at ~13K which was very loud to me, was just barely perceptable to him.  He was shocked.  His immediate response:  "I'm wearing earplugs when we jam from now on."

His skills at listening to and picking out subtleties in music are far superior to mine, which supports what's been said previously


Exactly my experience. Severe ear damage is rampant and endemic among both classical and rock musicans. 

Most of the musicans I know listen to pimary home audio systems that would be an embarassment to me if they were the system in my car.

Good musicans are about musical values and the better informed audiophiles are about sound quality values. Occasionally you find both in the same place, but that's just the statistics of intersecting sets doing their job.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #165 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
AFAIK the first CD player versus CD player DBT was done by my associates and myself for a feature article in Stereo Review in the late 1980s. We compared the much-maligned CDP 101 to Sony's latest-greatest and other players and found trivial to non-existent audible differences.  Tom Nousaine did a similar test about 14 years later, with similar results.

The recent JAES article comparing so-called hi-rez to CDP audio produced similar results.

For about 8 years I owned and operated a web site known as www.pcabx.com that allowed people to hear or not hear differnces like these.


The problem is that Stereo Review is no more, 'real' people don't read the JAES and you talk of your website in the past tense. The Audio Critic struggles to put out more than one review every three months. So the audiophile sites and mags have the upper hand, now. If non-audiophile audio concepts are presented with off-hand belligerence, some of those who seek an alternative to high-priced woo will simply go away dissatisfied. Or, they go to the likes of SoundStage and Stereophile, which both present a thin veneer of objective credibility by publishing measurements alongside their subjective psychobabble.

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The ability of greedy and/or poorly-educated  audiophiles, salesmen, and journalists to mislead people again and again seems to be unending.


'Greedy' - there's nothing you can do about. 'Poorly educated' is a different matter... and that's what you singularly fail to address. You seem to conflate genuine ignorance with with willful ignorance. It's beholden on those who present an objective alternative to the subjective reviews to re-educate and deprogram those who are willing to be re-educated and deprogrammed. That's an ongoing concern... otherwise, step aside and let the subjective types 'win'.

What you present is akin to a high-school science teacher who says 'Why bother teaching this stuff... I did all this in high-school'. You won't teach everyone; you'll be lucky to teach a tiny fraction. But it's the only way to chip away, and make the unending, ending.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #166 –
Quote
But the history of audio is that we have a measurement, we make it perfect, and then someone invents a new way to wreck the audio which is invisible on that measurement. So we invent a new measurement that catches the new problem, and go round again.


There have been basically two kinds of basic measurements - frequency response and nonlinear distoriton, and they have remained inviolate for over 75 years.  The techniques for measuring them and characterizing the results of those measurements has been completely evolutionary. The meausrement thresholds have improved dramatically, but we've been able to measure them at or below the audible threaholds for at least 40 years.

For example, TIM was just high frequency nonlinear distortion misidentified as being something new when it wasn't. Jitter is just flutter and wow revisited.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #167 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
But the history of audio is that we have a measurement, we make it perfect, and then someone invents a new way to wreck the audio which is invisible on that measurement. So we invent a new measurement that catches the new problem, and go round again.


What would be an example in the last 20-30 years?

Regarding pure reproduction for stereo things are pretty much solved (ex speakers). The only thing remaining is spatial capture/reconstruction, reverbation, etc., but that's neither a question of DACs, nor storage, nor output circuitry, nor amplification.

Edit: ABK was faster.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #168 –
Quote from: Gag Halfrunt on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on

The ability of greedy and/or poorly-educated  audiophiles, salesmen, and journalists to mislead people again and again seems to be unending.


'Greedy' - there's nothing you can do about. 'Poorly educated' is a different matter... and that's what you singularly fail to address.

If I fail to properly educate people, if I have failed to do so in the past, then you are not even a blip on the most sensitive radar. Just judge me by the stadards of your own performance.

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You seem to conflate genuine ignorance with with willful ignorance.


How so?

I've been giving relevant and reliable information for decades - possibly since before you were born. ;-)

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It's beholden on those who present an objective alternative to the subjective reviews to re-educate and deprogram those who are willing to be re-educated and deprogrammed.


Which is why I am ever more selective about where I focus my efforts these days.

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That's an ongoing concern... otherwise, step aside and let the subjective types 'win'.


You misundersand me greatly, and this is just another example. I *am* a subjective type - only my subjectivism is tempered with the concept of reliablity.

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What you present is akin to a high-school science teacher who says 'Why bother teaching this stuff... I did all this in high-school'.


And onward steadily for the next 45 years.

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You won't teach everyone; you'll be lucky to teach a tiny fraction. But it's the only way to chip away, and make the unending, ending.


You simply don't know who you are castigating.

Is that ignorance willful? ;-)

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #169 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
But that doesn't mean that no difference exists. 320kbps mp3s can be ABXed. The Emperor has clothes in this case - but very few people can see them!


Don't count me into that. My digital music players are loaded with .wav files whereever possible.

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And then we've had several posts laughing at the idea that an iPod is ABXable from a CD12, and then a sensible member quietly mentions that you can hear the background noise.


I can put enough amplification downstream of a CD12 so that its background noise can be heard. I'm sure of that as long as I have even one functional mic preamp in my possession! ;-) 

AFAIK, nobody has actually produced evidence that the background noise of a CD12 is any different from that of an iPod, all other things being equal, particualrly when identical recorded media is actually playing.

If people are whining about a slight noise heard under sitautions that are rare in the real world, a faint noise that is completely masked by the noise floor of any real-world recording of music, then there is IMO nothing to talk about. That would be yet another discussion about angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #170 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote
But the history of audio is that we have a measurement, we make it perfect, and then someone invents a new way to wreck the audio which is invisible on that measurement. So we invent a new measurement that catches the new problem, and go round again.

There have been basically two kinds of basic measurements - frequency response and nonlinear distoriton, and they have remained inviolate for over 75 years.  The techniques for measuring them and characterizing the results of those measurements has been completely evolutionary. The meausrement thresholds have improved dramatically, but we've been able to measure them at or below the audible threaholds for at least 40 years.

For example, TIM was just high frequency nonlinear distortion misidentified as being something new when it wasn't. Jitter is just flutter and wow revisited.
But you've just defined (or categorised) the world to suit your argument (and FWIW inter-channel cross-talk fits neither of your categories).

Jitter may just be wow and flutter revisited, but I didn't see any wow and flutter measurements catching it early on, did you? From the first CD player onwards, wow and flutter was "unmeasurable" (quote from many a spec sheet!).


And as for "we've been able to measure them at or below the audible threaholds for at least 40 years" - subscribe to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America for a few years (it need not be 40!) and see how many new auditory thresholds are discovered in that time!

Cheers,
David.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #171 –
deleted - I need a delete post button

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #172 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
(and FWIW inter-channel cross-talk fits neither of your categories).


Tell me one device in the last 20-30 years where this audibly mattered.

Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Jitter may just be wow and flutter revisited, but I didn't see any wow and flutter measurements catching it early on, did you? From the first CD player onwards, wow and flutter was "unmeasurable" (quote from many a spec sheet!).


It was measurable from day one by comparing input data to output data after D-A-D conversion, just the cause for differences wasn't known - or justifiably cared about. You don't need to know the cause of every equivalent of a needle drop (100m away) in your sub 100db noise floor.

Quote from: 2Bdecided on
and see how many new auditory thresholds are discovered in that time!


Thresholds that anywhere matter in the domain of digital to analog conversion and output circuitry? That would be news to me. Who cares about a newly discovered masking threshold when even the masked components of a signal are perfectly captured and reproduced by commodity gear (exclude lossy codecs)?

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #173 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
If I fail to properly educate people, if I have failed to do so in the past, then you are not even a blip on the most sensitive radar. Just judge me by the stadards of your own performance.


Ok, I was using my new form of pluralis majesticus - the Royal 'You'. Probably should have been 'one'... my bad.

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You seem to conflate genuine ignorance with with willful ignorance.


How so?

I've been giving relevant and reliable information for decades - possibly since before you were born. ;-)


A proportion of audiophiles are scientific illiterates, these are genuinely ignorant people who simply lack education in the subject. However, a proportion of audiophiles are not scientifically illiterate, but choose to bury their knowledge in pursuit of odd-ball audiophile claims, They I class as willfully ignorant.

If someone says "my cables sound have more microdynamics when they are used in the right direction", can you tell whether that person is genuinely or willfully ignorant? 

The fact that you have been giving reliable information for decades is entirely irrelevant to this. This might be the putative "microdynamics" person's first encounter with anyone involved in audio who didn't take such a claim at face value. The surviving mags and websites certainly make those claims (because they have pages to fill and adverts to sell). The surviving dealers support the idea that cables sound different (they have cables to make money from) and the audiophile forums believe that too (because they are run by the faithful). If they are then treated like a dolt for simply holding a position that they genuinely thought to be a valid one, without any attempt at explaining why their position lacks validity, what would you expect as an outcome?


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You simply don't know who you are castigating.

Is that ignorance willful? ;-)


No, it's a position of genuine ignorance. Or rather it was. I did some looking around. You have 'form' and I can see why trying to win people over might seem like throwing a brick at a curtain. My point is that you should never stop trying.

Article: Why We Need Audiophiles

Reply #174 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
If you want to worry about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I've got nothing for you.

Read the rest of my post, please. I never said anything about "worrying" about any signal undergoing these processes. Anyone who would have actually read the entire post would have known that.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
You obviously have no compelling clue about the practicalities of doing real world audio, while right now that is very much of my life.

This feels like a pretty blatant personal attack. This is entirely unwarranted, unnecessary and unappreciated (not to mention completely baseless). I've never even so much as attempted to attack you or anything that you may or may not hold dear, so I don't understand where the animosity is coming from. We don't even seem to have any differing opinions, for Christ's sake!

If you want me to clarify anything that I've said, I'd be happy to do that. I feel I've been clear, but I'm either A) wrong or B) being deliberately misinterpreted. The former I can understand. The latter I most certainly cannot -- especially here of all places.