Subjective vs Objective opinions, post your favourite links / experiences Options

[2Bdecided]

We're an objectivist audio community here. We don't necesarily believe that everything can be measured (psychoacoustic codecs prevent that anyway), but we do believe that subective opinions should be backed up by rigorous tests, intended to remove all possible bias from human subjective judgements and opinions.

I think this is a good thing. I read the following from Dibrom in a recently locked thread:

If we simply let people go around making claims without challenging them, we would be no further than the --r3mix days, and likely much worse even given the larger number of people that participate in these forums.

You seem to focus only on the negative aspect here (I think I know why....) and completely disregard the benefit that has been wrought by this attitude. Yes, some people might get scared off in the process, but overall, this attitude is more helpful than harmful -- much more so in fact. There have been numerous cases were real problems have been even more emphasized and brought to bear through the increased scrutiny these types of situations bring about.

I very much agree with this.

Look at the opposite case: look at most Hi-Fi magazines. They advice people on buying $1000s of equipment (not just choosing between free audio codecs!), yet their advice is usually unscientific. The listening is done sighted, and without any control conditions. Objective measurements are presented as being inferior and/or removed from what people actually hear. Manufactuers claims are repeated verbatim. Opinions are stated as fact, and little is ever questioned.

Most significantly, there is no sense in which the influence of the magazine is used to improve the state of the art. They simply comment, often in a virtually meaningless, marketing driven manner, on products which they decide to review. Rather than helping people to buy better Hi-Fi, and leading the manufactuers to build better Hi-Fi, they do the opposite: People are confused as to what really does sound better, and often buy overpriced junk; while manufactuers spend less time (and money) improving the sound of their equipment, and more time following the latest trend or marketing gimmic. The result is that it's all too easy to spend $20,000 on a Hi-Fi which sounds absolutely bloody awful!

The equivalent here would be to spend weeks encoding your CD collection using a command line and/or encoder that was pretty poor compared to the best that's been acheived, and is available for free. But we don't allow that. We don't let people claim that X is better than Y, when it isn't. We don't let people claim that Z has magical properties. We do testing, and we try to move forward. And that is a good thing.

The latest thread with Xerophase was a good thread IMO. Maybe it took two pages to express something that we should have said to him in one posting - but we were interested, he was interested, and we've got a useful result. We've learned something. By following the rulse of the forum. And by being polite and encouraging him to join in with how we do things here.

There's a lot in the "tone" of how you do something. Whether we accept unsubstantiated claims is not up for debate - we do not. But the manner in which you coax these people into doing things the right way is very important.

We've got to allow people who don't know any better (and sometimes even those of us who do!) to make unsubstantiated claims at first, so that other members can point out that they're unsubstantiated, and suggest a fair way of testing them. This doesn't mean we accept unsubstantiated claims as truth, but it does mean that people sometimes need to be allowed to post them as a starting point for discussion and investigation. "I think X" is an unsubstantiated claim, but it's OK if it leads on to "How can I test if it's true?"

We are an objectivist audio community.

If you have any good objectivist/subjectivist links, links showing the importance of evidence, proof, and blind testing against feelings and opinions, or the opposite side of the argument, feel free to post them.

Cheers,
David.

http://sound.westhost.com/cables-p2.htm

http://skepdic.com/blondlot.html

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/

[Axon]

You know, that's really funny - I actually started off lurking in the DIY corner of HeadCase, and then too migrated to Head-Fi before taking permanent residence here. I bought in to the whole subjective headphone amp thing, kit and kaboodle, before selling out piecemeal. (.. although not without realizing that I really should replace my $300 headphone amp with another DIY jobbie one of these days, because of some audible issues!)

I kind of wonder if this is some kind of trend, with Head-Fi basically feeding HydrogenAudio - kind of like how Ayn Rand books tend to feed libertarianism (though the two things are very substantially different). The headphone amp market in particular is.... very curious. It's the cheapest way for the average joe to buy in to "the good life" of high fidelity - and so it's also the cheapest way for said joe to dismiss it as mostly claptrap. All jokes about Patrick82 besides, you see far, far more pro-DBT statements on Head-Fi that on virtually all other audio forums save here.

I hypothesize (and I'm not sure I can back this up) that the relative inexpense of the headphone field allows headphone people to be generally more open to DBT techniques, insofar as they have less emotional investment in their monetary investments in audio. If true, this could have all sorts of deep implications. For one, it is in our best interests to ensure that low end gear is as high a quality as possible - and it is in the high-end world's best interest to denigrate it and ensure it is as poor as possible. (Read what you will into the relative lack of interest spent on low end gear in many mags, the pathetic quality of low-end turntables sold by high-end manufacturers, etc.) It means that, insofar as the audio world has shifted over to be more headphone-centric, pro-DBT sentiment increases - but if the market swings to the other direction, towards speakers, it may decrease.

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Anyways, to actually respond to the OP, I sincerely believe most of the good arguments for blind testing of audio are exclusively found somewhere on the archives of this site.

[krabapple]

It means that, insofar as the audio world has shifted over to be more headphone-centric, pro-DBT sentiment increases - but if the market swings to the other direction, towards speakers, it may decrease.

By rights it should not, since the usual psychological confounders act during formation of loudspeaker preference too, as Sean Olive showed in his JAES papers.

However, if DBT for most audio gear is hard for the consumer to set up, DBT for loudspeakers is almost impossible, which makes arguing for them seem even more quixotic, to some. (I say 'almost' because I know of one person who actually claims to do DBTs of loudspeakers...he also builds his own loudspeakers, relying heavily on Toole/Olive-type published work -- look up user 'WmAx' here and on audioholics)

This post has been edited by krabapple: Mar 23 2009, 15:47