Maximizing accuracy IMO is the starting point not the end game. And frankly I think there is a bit of a Toole/Olive group think about accuracy for speaker/room combinations that I find problematic, inconsistent and lacking in the end results. As for accuracy I am most of the way there. Planning to get as far as possible in that regard when I get back home in March. But I am an advocate of euphonic colorations. That’s where the last 5% lives
Does Everything Make a Difference?
- Thread starter Ron Resnick
- Start date
You will have more in common with the guys over on Headfi, they DSP the feck out of everything.
To which Analog Scott replied, “That’s simply not true. It is a failure to detect a difference. And that does have significance.”
Well, not necessarily. Your argument is over simplified. As I stated recently there are perfectly good reasons why an audio test fails to reveal what it’s supposed to reveal. Too many things can and do go wrong. There are too many variables. Who can devise a perfect controlled blind test procedure? Does everyone agree on the perfect test procedure?
Here are some examples of what can go wrong in any test, controlled double blind tests. Thanks to George Tice for some of these.
-The listener’s hearing is not up to the level he thinks it is.
- There are errors in the test system. E.g., out-of-polarity, etc. Whoever dictates what system the test is performed on controls the outcome. I.e., The Amazing Randi.
- The test system doesn‘t have the necessary resolution, dynamics or transparency to reveal the truth.
- The components of the test, including cables and power cords were not sufficiently broken and/or warmed up.
- The instructions, if any, were not followed.
- Unfavorable weather conditions
- The listener is overwhelmed by doubt and skepticism.
- Unknown variables.
The truth is acquired slowly over time by many tests on many systems by many listeners. Conclusions in order to achieve real significance must be repeatable and they must be transferrable.
Last edited:
I don’t think any of this is linear and straightforward let alone at all easy to capture in metrics or measure or at all two dimensional in any aspect. At times small changes in a system can be experienced as night and day differences in terms of engaged experience even if there isn’t an attached giant overall measurable sonic difference.
At times incremental shifts (the nature of which can be just as hard to exactly pin down) emerge as tipping points into an apparent rightness… equally two different presentations can be markedly divergent but similarly neither are right… and at other times even small shifts can be experienced more as musical landslides… so maybe not all differences or sonic changes are created equal.
This for me is perhaps more tied in identifying changes that come as tipping points of experience… that are made more possible to identify by my benchmarking against a holistic total reference such as in recalled performances of live acoustic music rather than in separating and analysing the fragments by pulling out some parts of a fragmented analytic within a synthesized soundfield and in just choosing in a blindfolded way through some disconnected non distinct sonic preferences.
Having the experience of live music in our retention can give us a phenomenal whole reference to pick out and recall something as being more believably right even if the distinct change in itself is still overall quite subtle. If the reference is our recalled experiences of live acoustic music then judging phenomenal shifts when everything comes together and by having achieved rightness can be based on a fine tipping point of balance into some more apparent and believable whole rightness. Maybe the nature of musical experience is better retained as the whole mood experienced rather than in the specifics of all the parts. Perhaps the sum of our mood is the meter we should be reading.
Sometimes an analysis considering where change needs to come in a system is the challenge of listening to any separated fragments of sound… when you listen holistically identifying things are just indeed more right (or not) becomes immediately obvious when measured against retained sum experiences as opposed to building against a checklist of potential corrections… even if it’s hard then to completely specify exactly all that was changed to get into the rightness. That point where performance gestalt comes together… sound blends into more meaning. That the achievement of flow state can be the proof of success in rendering the underlaying truth in a sonic as well as a musical performance. The size of any of these steps may vary.
Little differences can be about opening up to a more true microdynamic shading or allowing some additional level of nuance to come through more believably and these can be accessed in even small shifts in frequency balance, things just clicking into place in terms of coherence with speaker positioning or a successful tube rolling choice that shifts the experiential envelope into something where suddenly both the flow and the dynamic angularity in presentation are both more reliably recreated… and navigating to that point solely analytically without engaging also in our instinct about what is the right way forwards is harder without having great music performance to establish the perceived qualative nature of difference… knowing when it’s in the performance and the music and to experience something in a certain way that relates to the musicians can be the way finder for me.
It would be near impossible to catalogue all the fine and complex shifts that have taken place along the way, some large and obvious, some hard to distinguish but you do come to know when things are right. I feel that finding rightness is a curious journey involving complex layers of change… some external and some internal… and some of them are just harder to separate out and define but if the success of the music is your navigational pole and if maximum musical engagement is your wayfinder the baseline for the sum worth of a change isn’t always a correlation for how obvious that change is… it’s in what comes out of the change.
At times incremental shifts (the nature of which can be just as hard to exactly pin down) emerge as tipping points into an apparent rightness… equally two different presentations can be markedly divergent but similarly neither are right… and at other times even small shifts can be experienced more as musical landslides… so maybe not all differences or sonic changes are created equal.
This for me is perhaps more tied in identifying changes that come as tipping points of experience… that are made more possible to identify by my benchmarking against a holistic total reference such as in recalled performances of live acoustic music rather than in separating and analysing the fragments by pulling out some parts of a fragmented analytic within a synthesized soundfield and in just choosing in a blindfolded way through some disconnected non distinct sonic preferences.
Having the experience of live music in our retention can give us a phenomenal whole reference to pick out and recall something as being more believably right even if the distinct change in itself is still overall quite subtle. If the reference is our recalled experiences of live acoustic music then judging phenomenal shifts when everything comes together and by having achieved rightness can be based on a fine tipping point of balance into some more apparent and believable whole rightness. Maybe the nature of musical experience is better retained as the whole mood experienced rather than in the specifics of all the parts. Perhaps the sum of our mood is the meter we should be reading.
Sometimes an analysis considering where change needs to come in a system is the challenge of listening to any separated fragments of sound… when you listen holistically identifying things are just indeed more right (or not) becomes immediately obvious when measured against retained sum experiences as opposed to building against a checklist of potential corrections… even if it’s hard then to completely specify exactly all that was changed to get into the rightness. That point where performance gestalt comes together… sound blends into more meaning. That the achievement of flow state can be the proof of success in rendering the underlaying truth in a sonic as well as a musical performance. The size of any of these steps may vary.
Little differences can be about opening up to a more true microdynamic shading or allowing some additional level of nuance to come through more believably and these can be accessed in even small shifts in frequency balance, things just clicking into place in terms of coherence with speaker positioning or a successful tube rolling choice that shifts the experiential envelope into something where suddenly both the flow and the dynamic angularity in presentation are both more reliably recreated… and navigating to that point solely analytically without engaging also in our instinct about what is the right way forwards is harder without having great music performance to establish the perceived qualative nature of difference… knowing when it’s in the performance and the music and to experience something in a certain way that relates to the musicians can be the way finder for me.
It would be near impossible to catalogue all the fine and complex shifts that have taken place along the way, some large and obvious, some hard to distinguish but you do come to know when things are right. I feel that finding rightness is a curious journey involving complex layers of change… some external and some internal… and some of them are just harder to separate out and define but if the success of the music is your navigational pole and if maximum musical engagement is your wayfinder the baseline for the sum worth of a change isn’t always a correlation for how obvious that change is… it’s in what comes out of the change.
Last edited:
I thought you are analog Scott.
His evil twin, Digital Scott, has hijacked his account...
Isn't this a self-delusion? It may be a happy self-delusion (the audiophile is thrilled to rate as "huge" or "amazing" the sonic improvement due to a big expenditure) but it is self-reports about this phenomenon for which the Hyperbole Police Department was founded.
Your Belgian chocolate shop probably doesn't use any artifical flavorings...that's why they are so good.
The science behind flavors is that you use natural flavors (i.e extracts) rather than synthetically produced flavors. It is impossible for science to manufacture a perfect replica of a flavor or scent from nature. Too many compounds and many of the smallest ones remain unidentified. The problem is getting proper extracts are expensive (again your Belgian chocolate) and you would never use such expensive things in inexpensive items like candy and soda.
Not incompetence, imperfection. Go look at amplifier measurements on Stereophile, both tube and SS. Both have a lot going on. I am not saying all of these designers are incompetent in terms of making a working product; however, they might be incompetent in terms of knowing what sounds good to human listeners, which are the final arbiters of good sound...not an oscilloscope. There has been a significant body of work done on psychoacoustics and the impact of the noise and distortion found in these plots. The audibility has been demonstrated and correlations made with specific patterns.
As I said, I have done level matched, single blind experiments where good listeners were able to nearly always tell not only if there was a change accurately, but with some pre-test training, they could tell which item was under test. When i reviewed for Positive Feedback, I always level matched to within 1dB, although it wasn't practical to do blind tests most of the time. I demonstrated to my satisfaction with some blind tests that I have the sensitivity in hearing/processing to tell the differences in cables, amps and preamps. Since then I trust when I hear a difference that I probably hear a real difference. I also believe in living with something for weeks or months and seeing if the initial satisfaction remains or not.
Ron, Why do you assume it is a “sonic improvement due to a big expenditure”. Graham did not say anything about cost. It could be as simple as proper cartridge set up, or speaker toe out, or taking out fancy footers. All of these, in my experience, can result in dramatic improvements.
it seems of late that the hyperbole police have been defunded.
Last edited:
You are assuming some kind of linear model that doesn't exist, Ron. When tiny high order harmonics can negatively affect the sound then it is clear that some strong non-linearities abound. Something big like a speaker change may not even have an Amazing or huge sonic improvement but cleaning up the power might have a much larger impact, as in my example below.
I am reminded of the time I was a dealer for KR Audio and I was in their room with Cessaro in Munich (2008?). The whole time I kept wondering why the sound was not better than it was...it was a bit bright and gritty and somewhat flat soundstage and imaging. I was sitting there talking with a guy around 18:00 in the evening and suddenly the music totally drew my attention away from the conversation. The sound became...well...amazing, the grit and brightness were gone, there was more powerful bass and the soundstage and imaging became 3d. It was literally from one moment to the next a transformation. I thought to myself, "Hey what hell is going on?" Then I realized that the show stopped at 18:00 and we were basically the only room around that was still playing music...most of the others had shut off. I realized then that most likely the power had gotten significantly cleaner and it was having such an impact on the sound quality. This was not hyperbole...this was literally "I wouldn't want this system" to "Where's my checkbook".
It was no wonder that Living Voice brought their own huge battery bank with power inverter etc. to the show to be completely off-grid. Kevin Scott had rightly figured out that the power at the Munich MOC was not that great and downright horrible with 100+ hifi systems polluting it.
They did. They were quite explicit about which ones and why. A couple of my favorite ones that I would have picked as least likely to use artificial flavors had artificial flavors.
Nope. The science is about understanding the chemistry and doing careful, gasp, double blind taste tests
Perfect is an absurd notion given all natural flavors vary widely. No two bananas, no two strawberries, no two plums etc etc taste exactly the same. It’s about fooling people. And it is not only possible to fool people with artificial flavors it’s done with a great deal of regularity.
Where do you come up with this? Accurate chemical analysis is chemistry 101.
you are just making this up now. I’m pretty confident you are quite unfamiliar with Leonidas. But anyway…
Please show me one example of Stereophile measuring the DC of any component’s internal power supply and finding levels of noise that demonstrably bl the d system not to he audio signal. Let’s not limit it to Stereophile. You are going to have to cherry pick some really cheap gear to find an example. And a power cord ain’t gonna fix it. Not to mention how wierd it would be to put a five figure power cord on a two figure piece of audio gear.
Would have loved to have seen the test protocols. The lack of double blindness is an issue.
Maybe Ron, but aren’t we in the process of refining and building our expectations and if the plan is to use expectation to then go on to nimbly suspend disbelief isn’t it going to take some level of faith in our own part to commit and believe that we can ever let go of disbelief and that in searching for this mix we learn to identify what rightness is.
These are abstracts sure, but rightness certainly isn’t an unfamiliar construct… recording relies on recognising what a keeper is, it is not just one person in the room knowing what rightness is, it’s about gestalt and the balance of the form, it’s fit and flow and the overall structure of the whole and this isn’t some elusive build, rightness in form creation is often a very shared appreciation. The difference between right and not yet right can be quite small.
Very much it’s about any of these changes or all of them. I made a minor change to my setup in the last few days that resulted in what was in reflection a small shift in the way the bass resolved. Perhaps it made the bass just seem a bit more of a piece and formed just a slightly better foundation. At a stretch I’d have described the shift initially as just a bit more dynamic down low, a bit more resolved and immediate… however the more music I have played over the last few days the more obvious it’s become that it was a really solid move in how of a piece and whole the system comes together and sounds, in its own it’s a small shift in tone and resolution but whatever little bit of alchemy there is in optimising its just delivering more connection and being more engaging, more lifelike. The main reinforcement for that shift is how the music is more seductive and how my concentration is even more committed. I’m not here every week having epiphanies, I’m more guarded than that but I do see feeling that things are right is a tipping point that slides you out of looking to amend things constantly and just puts you more deeply into the zone.
Where do I come up with my understanding of chemistry? I have a Ph.D in Analytical Chemistry, so I think I know quite well what the state of the art is with regard to deconvolution of natural products.
I did research next door to a lab at UC Riverside where they were doing analysis of natural oils with 2 dimensional Gas Chromatography. They would use orthogonal methods to take a cut in the analysis, trap it with a cold trap and then reinject this onto another column with different selectivity. A 5 second cut would have literally several thousand compounds...most of which they could not identify. It was like this through a whole 1 hour run...so you are talking about literally millions of compounds in something like olive oil.
My point is that you, as a non-expert, have no clue how complex natural products are and the sheer magnitude of trying to account for the number of compounds in such a product. Chemistry 101 my ass...many a Ph.D thesis has been written over this kind of stuff. It is not possible to make something this complex synthetically beyond using some main and some minor components to get "close' to the natural taste.
I live in Switzerland, so while I am not particularly familiar with your Belgian chocolate I am quite familiar with Swiss chocolate and what they put into their excellent chocolates, which is natural...not synthetic.
Yes, natural flavors vary wildly, this is why people are very selective in what they use and often employ organoleptic detection on things like gas Chromatography. This allows for consistency with trained humans but it doesn't mean they know everything that is going on in the natural product.
Expensive stuff rarely uses synthetic flavorings because they simply don't taste right.
Ingredients and origin (spruengli.ch)
Origin (laderach.com)
This is literally the best chocolate I have ever had. Only natural ingredients.
The interpretation of what we hear from reproduced music is equally as complex. There are all kinds of subtle and not-so subtle additions and subtractions to the signal before it reaches your ears. This is further compounded to how your ear/brain machinery interprets what it the sound is. This is why it is so hard to predict how something will sound based on looking at measurements. At best so far, there has been some correlation but it has a high variability.
The least surprising things in audio, and in life, is that we all have different tastes. My brother-in-law has that same reaction to peas. Yet, they are quite popular in many parts of the world.
Other than being a huge fan of Gene and Amir apparently, who the heck are you?...
I feel no need or desire to explain myself to you.
You're some new guy (might as well be new since you've been a member for 7 years with only 34 posts) that came on here and all you do is argue EVERYONE'S point of view. That to me is a troll.
I will say this about the "sound of cables". If YOU can't hear a difference in cables, either your system is lacking, or your hearing is lacking... Probably both in your case.
My thoughts exactly ! Or someone hacked a older unused account !
Maybe Amir !
Last edited:
Similar threads
