ABX testing vs. unconscious perception/decision, enjoyment, and so on, Split from “xiphmont—‘There is no point to 24/192’”/TID:93853 (TOS #5) Options

[icstm]

SOME THOUGHTS

All this talk about skin “hearing” music, “feeling” the vibrations of the music etc raises for me a separate debate.

Whilst I completely agree that ABX is an excellent tool for spotting consciously detectable differences (ie respondents must be wilfully aware of the difference to make their choice) what about our unconscious decisioning? Just the other day their was a BBC documentary “out of control” which they were explaining how your unconscious mind is often calling the shots and influencing the decisions you make.

So we have 3 different types of tests:
1) Signal waveform analysis (as was used to check to see if JPlay was doing anything or FLAC v WAV using Audio DiffMaker
2) ABX audio testing (man in the middle) for checking for conscious discrimination of different samples
3) Enjoyment factor (or some other form of what some philosophers call qualia)


I am not saying to know that our skin reacts to sound or anything like that however I can believe that there is more to our enjoyment of music than just what our ears hear, for example I was at a classical concert yesterday and we slipped from the back to some seats in the front where we could feel the power of the music more in our bellies. Is this just due to the increased volume and would our ears have provided our brains with sufficient information if I had desensitised my stomach – I am not so sure. Now clearly in this example I was conscious of this effect, but there may be others I was not and yet still added to my overall enjoyment.

So even assuming that enjoyment is a wholly conscious act there could be unconscious inputs that the brain turns into conscious states. However these states could be impacted by the ABX test in 2 ways:
A. Not enough time is allowed for in playing the samples for these unconscious inputs to take effect
B. The act of enjoying a concert vs the act of trying to spot differences mean the brain is trying to do different things and thus doing the second might not require the same inputs as used in the first (I assume we are happy that the outputs of those 2 exercises are likely to be different and in a different form

Now bear in mind that for this thread I am in the 16/44 is sufficient for playback camp – I am still saying I am not fully satisfied that tests (1) and (2) are sufficient to provide complete proof. It is a bit like evolution (as some other poster mentioned). There is some proof for the theory, there are many wholes (for example in the fossil line) however there is no proof for any other theory...

This post has been edited by icstm: Mar 16 2012, 12:39

[googlebot]

If your primary listening situation is sighted, and not blind, and if seeing the music coming from a nicely furbished, expensive amp & HD source alters your perception of the sound, go for it! That alteration is real and modern science would not disagree. You will very likely not be able to tell it apart from a regular CD player and amp, when blindfolded, but you are usually not going to be listening while being blindfolded. So what?

This post has been edited by googlebot: Mar 16 2012, 20:16

[Porcus]

If your primary listening situation is sighted, and not blind, and if seeing the music coming from a nicely furbished, expensive amp & HD source alters your perception of the sound, go for it! That alteration is real and modern science would not disagree. You will very likely not be able to tell it apart from a regular CD player and amp, when blindfolded, but you are usually not going to be listening while being blindfolded. So what?

I have a better suggestion:
I am fairly certain that the FIFO buffer makes my DAC immune to any jitter from my $chickens**tmoney digital output. Knowing that the mumbojumbo segment of self-proclaimed audiophiles will have spent $$elephantsize on some oversensitive ill-constructed DAC, just because it 'reveals all the differences' between digital outputs, and then spent $$mammoth on a dejitter/reclock box which basically has a RAM the size of a 90's telephone, that gives me the pleasure of 'Gawd, what a bargain knowledge can buy' any time I hook up to my fb2k, and if I want to listen to Mahler or funeral doom, I can switch to 'heck, what has mankind come to be?'.

I know I shouldn't pull a 'my placebo is better than your placebo' without supplying the ABX logs to prove it, so let me stick to 'your placebo is not better than mine, and mine is much cheaper'.

[googlebot]

I am fairly certain that the FIFO buffer makes my DAC immune to any jitter from my $chickens**tmoney digital output.

It's nice, that a simple FIFO component is able to boost your musical enjoyment and assurance. It certainly is placebo, though. A FIFO can buffer samples, but the clock rate must still be reconstructed from the S/PDIF input signal, and is thus prone to jitter. S/PDIF doesn't transmit timing information as a discrete value but implicitly and eventually analog.

[splice]

... the clock rate must still be reconstructed from the S/PDIF input signal, and is thus prone to jitter. ...

Er... not directly. The output clock is derived from the state of the FIFO buffer. It does vary slowly, but short-order intersample variations on the clock derived from the input S/PDIF signal are effectively suppressed. Consider the FIFO as a low-pass "jitter filter" with a cutoff frequency set by the size of the FIFO.