Very true.
And your hearing varies depending on the time of day, physical and mental state.
Audiophiles Who Don't Trust Their Ears...
- Thread starter Andre Marc
- Start date
And your hearing varies depending on the time of day, physical and mental state.
Hola Chicos from Costa Rica. I am going to chime here with some thoughts that we have to consider:
1) Sound is logarithmic.
2) The absorption coefficient given for any room varies every 5dB, making any measurement to be non lineal.
We can spend hours of discussion about this, and you are right with your points of view, and I could be right with mines too.
You can fool you ears with tricks, but they are the final judges of your quality sound after all.
I think that the music played through any system is like the food. We do like it different, the seasoning of it varies a lot. And my liking could be not necessary the same what you like. As an example, you find audiophiles that love the bass energy of the instruments, and this means, shaking the room...and others might like it with less intense bass. Its a kind of a seasoning. But what we like most, is to have that wonderful musician(s) playing for us, in our room. The feeling, the emotional moment, the magic in the air, when was made the recording, we want to live that again. And this is granted on our systems, of course, having audio quality gear for this purpose.
If we could not tell differences in the audio chain, we will be listening a Sanyo or Sony system. I do trust in my ears, or should I say in my liking, my taste for the music and how I do reproduce it. Also I do know that out there are much better audio components than the gear that I have. So, what really matters, I am a very happy user of my system and I do like a lot what I have. I get goosebumps, and sometimes I have watered eyes due the emotional feeling of the musician(s) that my ears are sensing or listening.
I wish to all, a very happy listening, and please continue to seasoning of quality sound for the pleasure for your ears!
1) Sound is logarithmic.
2) The absorption coefficient given for any room varies every 5dB, making any measurement to be non lineal.
We can spend hours of discussion about this, and you are right with your points of view, and I could be right with mines too.
You can fool you ears with tricks, but they are the final judges of your quality sound after all.
I think that the music played through any system is like the food. We do like it different, the seasoning of it varies a lot. And my liking could be not necessary the same what you like. As an example, you find audiophiles that love the bass energy of the instruments, and this means, shaking the room...and others might like it with less intense bass. Its a kind of a seasoning. But what we like most, is to have that wonderful musician(s) playing for us, in our room. The feeling, the emotional moment, the magic in the air, when was made the recording, we want to live that again. And this is granted on our systems, of course, having audio quality gear for this purpose.
If we could not tell differences in the audio chain, we will be listening a Sanyo or Sony system. I do trust in my ears, or should I say in my liking, my taste for the music and how I do reproduce it. Also I do know that out there are much better audio components than the gear that I have. So, what really matters, I am a very happy user of my system and I do like a lot what I have. I get goosebumps, and sometimes I have watered eyes due the emotional feeling of the musician(s) that my ears are sensing or listening.
I wish to all, a very happy listening, and please continue to seasoning of quality sound for the pleasure for your ears!
Last edited:
Appreciation of audio is a completely subjective human experience. Measurements can provide a measure of insight, but are no substitute for human judgment. Why are we looking to reduce a subjective experience to objective criteria anyway? The subtleties of music and audio reproduction are for those who appreciate it. Differentiation by numbers is for those who do not." — Nelson Pass
Hello, Don C. That quote was the first thing that popped into my head when I first saw this thread.Don C...a quote by Mr. Nelson Pass said:
Tom
Brilliant stuff, measurements are useful but also still rather limited in their scope, the 5 per cent of us that see them as everything are a valuable but also a very vocal minority... to diminish the function of listening and to invalidate it as a primary way of assessing how we listen is just fundamentally losing sight of the principal purpose and us just forever letting the tail wag the dog... errr, woof.
Probably best to read his views elsewhere than the above mention on their product page to get the full picture: http://www.herronaudio.com/images/Measurements.pdf
How many people give thumbs to this version?
How did you read that from this: "We go back and forth from listening to measurements until we eventually decide to ship."
You can't just pick and chose random sentences and take them out of context. That is a politician trick.
Subjective is the opposite of objective, which refers to things that are more clear-cut. That Earth has one moon is objective — it's a fact. Whether the moon is pretty or not is subjective — not everyone will agree. Facts are objective, but opinions are subjective.
Subjectivism is the philosophical tenet that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience". In other words, subjectivism is the doctrine that knowledge is merely subjective and that there is no external or objective truth.
We often confuse the two.
Subjectivism is the philosophical tenet that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience". In other words, subjectivism is the doctrine that knowledge is merely subjective and that there is no external or objective truth.
We often confuse the two.
I quoted the sentence that directly disputes your view of what he said. And I post the whole thing before that. And provided a link to the article.
In contrast the original quote that I responded to was a one-liner taken out of a much longer write-up. Why is that not a politician's trick?
Greg I'm not sure anyone is disputing the difference between objectivity and subjectivity but rather that if our purpose is in building an experience then subjective assessment is just way more practical and directly applicable here. To utilise objective assessment and then transfer that to experience requires an extra step of synthesis ie identifying and then relating a cause to it's effect rather than just giving a value to the experience directly. The objectifying helps clarify some things but doesn't do so well at coping with the variability of the algorithm of human perception. Subjective evaluation is always most pertinent to the subject. To make a subjective assessment more universal we would need to apply a unified field assessment of human behaviour which would be handy but not yet described.
Not to be pedantic, but you only emphasized half the sentence, trying to imply they stop at measurement. However, 'back and forth' means they could stop when they like the sound, but the measurements are the same. The whole article is that while measurements have their place, they aren't the final word.
I haven't seen, or read, the 'much longer write-up'. So I can't answer that question.
Anyway, it is Friday night, and that is when I listen to my stereo. I turned the amps on before I left for work today, and my ears are telling me it sounds great. Based on past experience, as it gets later, and quieter outside, my ears will tell me it sounds even better. So this is where my focus is now.
Fair enough
My point is expressing a subjective opinion about audio equipment does not necessarily make one a subjectivist. I see it characterized here as such on a regular basis.
With you 100% on that, the idea that if you don't subscribe to being only objective in assessment that you must therefore be purely a subjectivist is just a crazy and unhelpful distortion. When surveyed here about how we assess gear 95 per cent identified as being holistic using both subjectivity and objectivity and a handful said they used objective methods only (measurement). Nobody identified themselves as being purely subjectivist.
Listening tests must be performed by methodic.
Main pinciple of "Objectivism"/"Science" and same terms is repeatability of experiment.
Main pinciple of "Objectivism"/"Science" and same terms is repeatability of experiment.
But of course harmonic distortion = intermodulation distortion on real music, and it will vary depending on the content e.g. maybe adding a nice edge (if you like that sort of thing) on a solo voice but an overall mush on a symphony orchestra. It makes you think that, perhaps, such effects might be better deployed using a separate effects unit so it can be adjusted?
What is it that makes you think this? After 50+ years of development using transistors, it hasn't been done satisfactorily already? If we believe there is still some sort of problem with amps then I would say we should be looking beyond this particular 'paradigm'. Class D amps designed using nothing but cold, hard, maths may be the answer. And perhaps we should be looking to lessen the load on our poor, struggling amps and maybe applying one amp per driver.
Does it ever occur to audiophiles that by trusting their ears regardless of their mood at that moment, and implicitly trusting their talk-the-talk audio heroes, they are on a never-ending road of frustration? What if they found a system that did things only by the book objectively, and decided to give it a chance, even if it didn't float their boat at first? (There aren't many such systems, admittedly, but the new Kii springs to mind as a possibility..?) Is it remotely possible that their ears need educating, or at least have become accustomed to an odd sound? My grandfather's TV had no green in the picture, as far as I could tell, but he swore that it was a great picture and "a good set". When I read audiophiles' glowing opinions of their systems I often think of this!
"Anecdotally, it appears that preferences break out roughly into a third of customers liking 2nd harmonic types, a third liking 3rd harmonic, and the remainder liking neither or both. Customers have also been known to change their mind over a period of time.
***
Nevertheless, whether you prefer 2nd or 3rd order type amplifiers, let's agree that we wish to minimize the total amount of distortion. And assuming that we have to put up with some distortion let's also agree that we prefer 2nd and 3rd harmonic components over 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and so on.
***
Negative feedback can reduce the total quantity of distortion, but it adds new components on its own, and tempts the designer to use more cascaded gain stages in search of better numbers, accompanied by greater feedback frequency stability issues."
Nelson Pass
https://passlabs.com/articles/audio-distortion-and-feedback
You should read the entire white paper.
I
***
Nevertheless, whether you prefer 2nd or 3rd order type amplifiers, let's agree that we wish to minimize the total amount of distortion. And assuming that we have to put up with some distortion let's also agree that we prefer 2nd and 3rd harmonic components over 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and so on.
***
Negative feedback can reduce the total quantity of distortion, but it adds new components on its own, and tempts the designer to use more cascaded gain stages in search of better numbers, accompanied by greater feedback frequency stability issues."
Nelson Pass
https://passlabs.com/articles/audio-distortion-and-feedback
You should read the entire white paper.
I
Similar threads
- Sticky