Just wondering, are there any women, girls here?
All listening tests here are done by men. Women probably hear different, but I think that there are no women here.
What do you think about this?

"Want to come with me home and see my collection of Oggs"?

(Couldn't help it. And yes, I understood why you asked. But I doubt that there are any women on this board)

Ahahahaha.


I think so too, there are probably some (emphasis on some) lurker readers, but other than that, I also think there are not any women here.

This could get very silly!!

We could start talking about things like Dynamic Linked Libido, for instance!!



john33

Go through the members list, private message everybody whose nickname sounds as if it could be a female's and find out for yourself

Relitavism rears its ugly head...

99% of anatomical structure is identical in males and females, including the ear. It is possible, I suppose, that there might be some slight physiological differnece in the brain that could cause women to FOCUS on a certain range of sounds more than men (perhaps the baby-voice frequencies) or certain types of sound more than men (for example transients).

But even if this were the case, there is only one way it could affect our testing: that is if women could hear artifacts that men could not and vice versa. I have never heard of such a thing.

But if it were the case then we would have to make two versions of lame:
(1) Female-optimized, a.k.a "flame"
(2) Male-optimized, a.k.a. "Mame" as in "maim"

But in such a hypothetical case men could not effectively develop "flame" so there is nothing for us to do about it anyway.

CONCLUSION: Lame development should continue the way it is...
The last thing we need right now is to get lost in the dispute over exclusionary feminist epistemologies...

Hehehe. Me and my guttermind.

Based on your naming convention I hope that there will never be a female-optimimized Ogg encoder

At the end this question was considered only as a joke.
But you should have in mind this:

http://www.acoustics.org/press/151st/Murphy.html

It is proven that in average women hear better than men. So we definetly need them for testing.

Wow, a 5-year old thread resurrection?

Anyway, there are probably some girls here (Chastity, are you still here?), but certainly not much. We did lose a very active female member when JEN was banned, though.

Overall, this topic reminds me a bit of this blog item on Gambit's site:
There are no women on the internet.

Edit: This thread is also relevant, although I fear about 6% of HA's population.

Oh? Why was she banned?

IIRC there's a quite new poster, based on her actual name (well, actually the name as listed on her C:\Document and Settings\<username> path), 85% possibility of being female.

I think being female is generally reason enough.

J/K. I guess I'm not at liberty to say; such things are between the individual member and the admin team really.

I wonder if a member had a nick like "bustyteenwithloosemorals" they would get more help?

I think, women do have a lot of more importend things to do than to care about -q6 or -q7! Which leads to the question: How can there be anything more importend?

Even if I talk to some of my male friends about HA-stuff they get annoyed rapidly. To talk to a girl about this would be the best way to repel her. (Never tried, does anybody has any experience?)

But the most importend thing: You can't get vorbis in a pink version!

From my experience: Female sounding members of internet communities get definitely a lot more answers. It's simply all about breed and sex and survival of our genes

Another question is: Is the internet = unemployed europeans?

Well, she'll surely got more, much much more, PMs

Or is that PMS ?



Hmmm... "BarelyLegalBabe"

Most women I've known think that an mp3 files with lots of artifacts, distortion and pops (due to jitter) sound just fine. I guess they focus more on the music than on the details of the sound.

They might hear different. It has been proved that men and women see different, if memory serves me right men tend to perceive colours with a slight higher red tone.

My mom still likes my dad's MCs recorded in 1950.

Very probable



Uhm, I remember that I have seen a woman here somehow, but I can't recall the nickname. She was from argentinia or some other latin american country and had something about a rio karma in her signature, if I recall correctly.

I think there's a semi-OCD factor or perfectionist impulse driving the strong/continuing interest in the perceived quality of the output of "Audio" equipment. On a personal level.

Think of areas that are similar (but perhaps less computer geeky) such as car audio and home theater. Then think about the gender disparity in the culture (aka forums) that revolve around those interests.

-brendan

Well it has got to do with women psychology.

We males are sometimes too enamored of details and lose all the big picture.

Like artifacts. We are soooo wanting to have transparency we went to the trouble of ABX-ing everything.

I have given up on trying to get transparency. I encode things to Vorbis -q 1, even -q 0, and force myself to not ABX them. Of course I still keep the higher bitrates safely archived, but now I'm more enjoying my songs as I no longer try to find artifacts.

Hmm... does that mean I'm developing my more feminine side?

I believe that it has been said that males are more prone to autism, and that every person is in some way autistic, it is simply to what degree (with males generally being further up the scale).

This explains why men tend to have hobbies like stamp collecting, etc. We are all slightly compulsive to some degree.

On the other hand, women dig clothes and shoes. They love 'em.

Well, I dig clothes and shoes, too. As long as they're black, that is

Did any of you actualy read the link I posted?
Women do hear better!
It may be true that there are more man than women which care about sound quality. But I hope that there are also some women that care about sound quality and that have good hearing. They should be pretty important when somebody develops and tests audio compression.
And all I see here is only guys posting. And only off topic replies.

So once again and more precise:

Are there any women/girls here that care about sound quality?

I think the responses you have received merely prove the fact: NO.

Irrespective of the "off-topic" (not sure that you can be off-topic in the Off-Topic forum) replies, if there were females here who were active members and interested no doubt they would have replied. The OT reponses have actually managed to keep this topic from drowning yet still we have no female response.

We cannot magic them from thin air. More's the pity.

Maybe more precisely, yes there are women/girls out there who care about sound quality, but not like us males. For instance, I don't really think they will ABX something that they enjoy; if they already enjoy what they hear, they don't really care whether it's actually transparent or not. They don't fuss over the small details.

@muaddib: I can think one explanation why women has better sensitivity in HF: They are less exposed to sounds damaging to your ear.

I do not attend concerts or put myself into any situation where I think I might damage my hearing with loud noise----but I still managed to lose a good chunk of my HF perceptual range by doing lots of ABX tests with UDIAL & Headphones.

(I used to be able to detect lowpass in full-range music up to about 17.5khz, now I can only hear up to 15.7khz[this is in reference to lowpass values in music, NOT test tones])

I know it's kind of off topic, but udial and hf hearing loss reminds me of something I wondered about a few days ago.
I wonder if alarm clocks could be partially responsible for hf hearing loss.
Many alarm clocks produce annoying hf impulses on high levels and are often located quite close to the ear. Many people hear them every day, their whole life long.

What do you guys and/or girls (if any ) think about that?

I put my alarm clock on a table, 2 meters from my bed, so i definitely have to stand up to hit the snooze button. This makes me more awake than a simple arm movement. Nonetheless, i often still hit it 2, 3 times before i eventually get up...

my alarm clock is foobar2000. there is no way that my foobie will damage my ears

I don't use an alarm clock. I'm old. I'm retired. I get up when I'm darn well ready. Anyway... Blewout my hearing in the '60s.

I did that several times. And still overslept. Funnily, when I wake up, somehow I found the alarm clock stored in the table's drawer. And I'm sure I had it perched on top of a pile of books before I went to bed

To come back on topic:
Imagine you want to burn a CD for a woman with music she likes.
Unfortunately you have no other source than a P2P copy of a badly ripped (perhaps with glitches) CD that has been encoded with Blade @ 96kbps CBR "pure stereo" (or something similarly gross). With an ugly feeling in your stomach you talk yourself into burning it. (At least: a CD is better than no CD.)

To your surprise you find out: With high probability she will like your CD (if she likes you, too) and doesn't care the tiniest bit about the quality. In the end she can sing along and dance around while the song plays and she knows that the CD shows her your attention (for her). That's what counts.

Perhaps that sounds a bit stereotypically and overstated but I found it to be like that more than once.

Regards,
weaker

That sounds very similar to what I do. However I've acquired the nasty habit over the years of being able to actually sleep through the alarm clock sound.

Agree. Women's brains are wired differently than men's. They are more active for emotions, while men's are more active for intelligence. I'm not saying that men are more intelligent than women. But men's brains seems to be more involved in deep thoughts, hence men's near-universal capability of doing more than one thing at a time (if it requires deep thoughts). Women, on the other hand, when flooded with emotions, will suspend their logical part of the brain.

( Strangely, though, it is men who suffers from emotion-disorder more than women. Perhaps because of those bottled-up emotions. But I digress )

This fact alone nullifies the advantage of women's better hearing against men's. While men can focus totally on ABX-ing, women most likely will recall some memory of the song they're listening too, and thus masking the possible difference she should hear from ABX. It requires intensive discipline for them to carry out ABX successfully.

It seems that women's better hearing is very suitable for their role as nurturer of the family. They can easily hear, over the din of house chores, whether their children are screaming because of excitement or because of terror.

"Hmm, this sample I encode using the new LAME alpha I compiled from source not one hours ago is particularly difficult to AB... oooh, nice shoes!"

Exactly, Synthetic Soul

That's the women's drawback of being able to multitask their thoughts

I think that'd apply also to most men you know, no? It's just that most people don't pay attention to details or aren't picky.

Recently i've been looking for some info at the cdfreaks forums, i'm not sure how many female members are there, but there are two omnipresent moderatresses who i guess would be instatly banned here on HA for TOS#5 violation .

Well, yeah, to a certain extent. But I haven't seen girls complaining about the quality, whereas I've seen, granted, only a few men that do.

Digga is a female, isn't she?

IIRC Digga's avitar is a picture of Christina Aguilera.

I think that just makes him either horny or aurally challenged, not female.

Are you sure?

Maybe... I don't know.

But once I asked her(him) directly about that, and she(he) said "woman".

Also, there's something in her(his) posts that makes me asume that it might be a true answer.