If you go to many concerts, your preference will be more correct than one who doesn't. If you don't it won't be.
Introduction and Listening Biases
- Thread starter Ron Resnick
- Start date
If you go to many concerts, your preference will be more correct than one who doesn't. If you don't it won't be.
I thought it was one of the tenets of audiophilia that preferences cannot be judged as being "correct". The preferences of the man who has never been to a concert in his life are just as correct as those of the man who goes every night. To say that some preferences are more "correct" than others is to suggest that audio is based on some sort of objective accuracy. That view is way out of date.
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To word it definitely, those who go to concerts will tend to have some preferences, which may differ from each other. But the range of that preferences will be more the 'correct' set, as opposed to those who don't go, and whose preferences fall outside that range. In other words, it is very easy to hear a 'wrong', while the 'rights' can fall in a range
Exact reproduction of the physical properties of the real event is not possible, and is not the objective of sound reproduction.
It seems me 1) and 3) as being now debated are not alternative, but complementary.
And 2) and 3) are connected - I think that those who defend 2) is because they seriously belief it maximizes 3) or at less has higher probability of it. Perhaps a few do it on a philosophical basis.
So we have 1)-3) and 2)-3)
IMHO the main type of music selection Ron presents us falls in the category where it is very improbable and difficult to build a reference using non-amplified performances - I give extra points to a system that shows the movements of the singer approaching and getting far from the microphone or moving it, as I feel it more "realistic". Many times solo singers use the microphone to enhance their performance.
For those focusing on classical, chamber music and jazz thinks are different.
It is one of the reasons why Ron should be congratulated for giving us his musical preferences and examples of recordings that illustrate his listening biases.
It seems me 1) and 3) as being now debated are not alternative, but complementary.
And 2) and 3) are connected - I think that those who defend 2) is because they seriously belief it maximizes 3) or at less has higher probability of it. Perhaps a few do it on a philosophical basis.
So we have 1)-3) and 2)-3)
IMHO the main type of music selection Ron presents us falls in the category where it is very improbable and difficult to build a reference using non-amplified performances - I give extra points to a system that shows the movements of the singer approaching and getting far from the microphone or moving it, as I feel it more "realistic". Many times solo singers use the microphone to enhance their performance.
For those focusing on classical, chamber music and jazz thinks are different.
It is one of the reasons why Ron should be congratulated for giving us his musical preferences and examples of recordings that illustrate his listening biases.
Exact reproduction of the physical properties of the real event is not possible, and is not the objective of sound reproduction.
It seems me 1) and 3) as being now debated are not alternative, but complementary.
And 2) and 3) are connected - I think that those who defend 2) is because they seriously belief it maximizes 3) or at less has higher probability of it. Perhaps a few do it on a philosophical basis.
So we have 1)-3) and 2)-3)
Yes, I think that is true. But I also think that maximising (2) will lead to a higher probability of (1)! And yes, I think that I am one of the ones who does it on a philosophical basis. I am delighted to find that even though I stick to (2) as strictly as I can, as far as I can tell, it gives me good (1) and (3). But this could always be expectation bias. If so, does it matter? I would say it doesn't, unless I am hoping to impress other people with my system. In which case a sound that I have convinced myself is appealing may not cut the mustard - unless I can persuade them to adopt my philosophy whereupon the system will suddenly sound a whole lot sweeter to their ears.
It is important to remember that attending a live concert is one thing, and that the reproduction of the recording of that concert is another.
All we have when we listen at home is the reproduction, the file,CD, vinyl record whatever.
Keith.
All we have when we listen at home is the reproduction, the file,CD, vinyl record whatever.
Keith.
Does this mean that all reviews are, basically, useless? Based on listening it is just personal preference, and based on measurements it is meaningless because everyone has their own preferences. The natural conclusion must be that 'anything goes'. It is hard see on what basis audiophiles could conduct meaningful discussions, nor on what basis a piece of equipment could be regarded as good, bad, or indifferent.
I am not saying these are my views, simply going where a particular argument takes us.
I think Tim has said it before: 'subjectivists' never live up to their name, because they don't just declare that they have found a perfect system that their ears love, but they rate equipment as good and bad, and whether it is better than yours
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Hi Ron,
I would like to say first and foremost that I really enjoy your posts and writing style. It is obvious to me that you have a great passion for this hobby and enjoy sharing your thoughts, observations and experiences with our membership. I could only wish to be as expressive and eloquent with my contributions.
I hope you won't mind that in my own simplistic style I give you a sense of what my take on your biases/preferences are.
My personal primary concern is 3) Create a sound subjectively pleasing to the audiophile
The other 2 are less meaningful to me as I don't believe they can be obtained no matter how good the system. I do believe that the better the system, the closer one can get, but to make it part of the objective seems futile and a retailers dream for constant buyer upgrades. Does that make sense?
Your musical interests mirror mine scarily so. Haha! Additionally, I'm also a huge fan of live recordings whether they be acoustic or electric. I just love the energy. And I would be remiss not to mention Progressive Rock...perhaps my fave genre of all.
I'm 95% analog as well and this is not for lack of trying to enjoy digital. I just cannot connect with it to the same level as analog.
With cables I've taken to setting a limit of 15%.
I would like to say first and foremost that I really enjoy your posts and writing style. It is obvious to me that you have a great passion for this hobby and enjoy sharing your thoughts, observations and experiences with our membership. I could only wish to be as expressive and eloquent with my contributions.
I hope you won't mind that in my own simplistic style I give you a sense of what my take on your biases/preferences are.
My personal primary concern is 3) Create a sound subjectively pleasing to the audiophile
The other 2 are less meaningful to me as I don't believe they can be obtained no matter how good the system. I do believe that the better the system, the closer one can get, but to make it part of the objective seems futile and a retailers dream for constant buyer upgrades. Does that make sense?
Your musical interests mirror mine scarily so. Haha! Additionally, I'm also a huge fan of live recordings whether they be acoustic or electric. I just love the energy. And I would be remiss not to mention Progressive Rock...perhaps my fave genre of all.
I'm 95% analog as well and this is not for lack of trying to enjoy digital. I just cannot connect with it to the same level as analog.
With cables I've taken to setting a limit of 15%.
Learn to understand the measurements included in the Stereophile reviews.
Keith.
Johnny, Thank you for your very kind praise. I am glad you enjoy the reviews!
I think each of the three philosophy objectives is equally valid. I would never argue that one is somehow inherently better than the other two.
Yes, we certainly seem to have musical interests and equipment preferences in common.
I think each of the three philosophy objectives is equally valid. I would never argue that one is somehow inherently better than the other two.
Yes, we certainly seem to have musical interests and equipment preferences in common.
Hi Ron,
I'm also looking forward to you sharing more of your experiences and thoughts along your audio journey. Qualifying what you experience when listening to gear and putting these experiences into thoughts isn't an easy job and has potentially real value for both information as well as entertainment to many of us here. Is it you plan to do a series of intensive formal reviews as well as reporting on your experiences in short auditions as well.
Without getting too OTT on labeling but also wondering if you think it might also be useful for you to discuss your thoughts on standards for what actually constitutes a review when it comes to Ron's Reviews. To outline the process in terms of how much listening time you feel you would need to put in and in what circumstances and variety of conditions are required for you to feel comfortable with the notion of calling an assessment of your experience of gear as a review rather than just something that could perhaps be better described more as initial impressions. Even I suppose is it important for us to differentiate this in these assessments?
I figure that there are no specific laws on compliance in this but would love to get your thoughts on what standards you figure we could set in terms of the transparency and the rigour of fairness in any procedure to give even more validation to our assessments. When do we call what we do a review or is it even important to make that distinction and does this help with the ultimate quality of transparency of what we write.
How full of an understanding do you feel that you can reasonably get in terms of the ultimate performance of a piece of gear from say a short audition of a piece of gear in the context of an unfamiliar system and within an unfamiliar environment. How complete an understanding can you gain from only assessing from just a few pieces of music and how also do we separate our experiences in this brief and singular period. How do we even just differentiate from our specific mood on that one listening occasion. I'm just devil's advocating on this because I'm sure you know how easy these findings can be misunderstood or conflated and hijacked by others in their quest to champion what's best.
I love our forums for the kind of debate and awareness they bring but also find it occasionally frustrating when some people go on regularly slinging off or forever overly zealously promoting a component or system infrastructure claiming some kind of universal what's best and what's not best based upon perhaps just one or two listening experiences often in someone else's system.
I'm reasonably sure you'd probably agree that the amount time spent listening to a broader range of types of music could be needed to give a fuller and fairer understanding of what gear sounds like and should maybe also be a component in how valid and complete our interpretations of any gear's performance is. Subjective review is better served by time and range of assessment.
I wouldn't be the only one to have trialled plenty of gear that shows up in a very positive light on first (and second and third hearing) only to realise that we can be drawn early on to qualities that are initially seductive only to find that through time that these same qualities lack balance and become constraints rather than strengths. If I have an initial positive audition of a component I then usually try and get auditions on gear at home and try for a minimum of at least a week to get some reasonably more complete notion of what the gear can and can't do.
Before I would feel comfortable writing something that would approach a structured review I'd hope to have lived with that gear for many weeks.
Could it be more reasonably helpful and accurate to describe any short assessment as a listening impression and when we do something more substantial and more intensively over a greater period of time within the control of our own system entitling then these as reviews. Hopefully you'll be doing plenty of both.
It'll be excellent if you can give us many impressions as well as reviews on a range of gear as it seems you are going to be having some brilliant experiences along the way in your next phases of system building and you are articulate and have a sense of commitment having championed fairness in reviewing for some time so am looking forwards to what you find and share... it all adds to everyone's understanding, and it does take us out of the dark and into the light.
In anticipation of some great reads to come...
Best wishes on your writing enterprise
Graham
I'm also looking forward to you sharing more of your experiences and thoughts along your audio journey. Qualifying what you experience when listening to gear and putting these experiences into thoughts isn't an easy job and has potentially real value for both information as well as entertainment to many of us here. Is it you plan to do a series of intensive formal reviews as well as reporting on your experiences in short auditions as well.
Without getting too OTT on labeling but also wondering if you think it might also be useful for you to discuss your thoughts on standards for what actually constitutes a review when it comes to Ron's Reviews. To outline the process in terms of how much listening time you feel you would need to put in and in what circumstances and variety of conditions are required for you to feel comfortable with the notion of calling an assessment of your experience of gear as a review rather than just something that could perhaps be better described more as initial impressions. Even I suppose is it important for us to differentiate this in these assessments?
I figure that there are no specific laws on compliance in this but would love to get your thoughts on what standards you figure we could set in terms of the transparency and the rigour of fairness in any procedure to give even more validation to our assessments. When do we call what we do a review or is it even important to make that distinction and does this help with the ultimate quality of transparency of what we write.
How full of an understanding do you feel that you can reasonably get in terms of the ultimate performance of a piece of gear from say a short audition of a piece of gear in the context of an unfamiliar system and within an unfamiliar environment. How complete an understanding can you gain from only assessing from just a few pieces of music and how also do we separate our experiences in this brief and singular period. How do we even just differentiate from our specific mood on that one listening occasion. I'm just devil's advocating on this because I'm sure you know how easy these findings can be misunderstood or conflated and hijacked by others in their quest to champion what's best.
I love our forums for the kind of debate and awareness they bring but also find it occasionally frustrating when some people go on regularly slinging off or forever overly zealously promoting a component or system infrastructure claiming some kind of universal what's best and what's not best based upon perhaps just one or two listening experiences often in someone else's system.
I'm reasonably sure you'd probably agree that the amount time spent listening to a broader range of types of music could be needed to give a fuller and fairer understanding of what gear sounds like and should maybe also be a component in how valid and complete our interpretations of any gear's performance is. Subjective review is better served by time and range of assessment.
I wouldn't be the only one to have trialled plenty of gear that shows up in a very positive light on first (and second and third hearing) only to realise that we can be drawn early on to qualities that are initially seductive only to find that through time that these same qualities lack balance and become constraints rather than strengths. If I have an initial positive audition of a component I then usually try and get auditions on gear at home and try for a minimum of at least a week to get some reasonably more complete notion of what the gear can and can't do.
Before I would feel comfortable writing something that would approach a structured review I'd hope to have lived with that gear for many weeks.
Could it be more reasonably helpful and accurate to describe any short assessment as a listening impression and when we do something more substantial and more intensively over a greater period of time within the control of our own system entitling then these as reviews. Hopefully you'll be doing plenty of both.
It'll be excellent if you can give us many impressions as well as reviews on a range of gear as it seems you are going to be having some brilliant experiences along the way in your next phases of system building and you are articulate and have a sense of commitment having championed fairness in reviewing for some time so am looking forwards to what you find and share... it all adds to everyone's understanding, and it does take us out of the dark and into the light.
In anticipation of some great reads to come...
Best wishes on your writing enterprise
Graham
Seriously my bad if this came across as at all rude because 100% this isn't the intention, I love what Ron is doing and champion anyone who throws themselves into the ring of assessment but it is a good thing to also actually take some of the weight off any expectations for us to limit the scope of our findings and judgement.
Without being at all too serious but the word review has a kind of traditional expectation about quality and validity of process.
I thought here we have a great opportunity to discuss how we do subjective assessment as this is not an easy thing to well. We can all get a lot out of Ron's energy and his efforts.
Without being at all too serious but the word review has a kind of traditional expectation about quality and validity of process.
I thought here we have a great opportunity to discuss how we do subjective assessment as this is not an easy thing to well. We can all get a lot out of Ron's energy and his efforts.
Do we not also have the memories of live music events that we have attended? They are often used as the basis upon which we can form a judgement about how close the sound of our systems come to the real thing. Those memories are our reference.
Peter you sit in a certain seat, in a particular concert hall, surrounded by a number of fellow patrons, listening to a piece of music performed by soloist, quartet, chamber full orchestra whatever....
To recreate what you heard you would need to record the performance from that particular seat , using a dummy head or simple pair of crossed microphones, even then the recording would not be anything like the live performance.
At home all we have is the recording of an event and all we can hope to do is to reproduce that recording as faithfully as possible.
To recreate what the artist and engineers intended.
Keith.
As I said in an earlier post, there are ways you could attempt directly to recreate a more 'live sound' using a DSP-based approach, multichannel speakers, synthesising acoustics with head tracking etc. Relying on arbitrary distortion and phase & timing anomalies to do it (which is all we have if we employ only boutique audio components..?) seems rather hit and miss. OR we just try to reproduce what's on the recording plus a little ambience from our own room - it works for me.
Dear Graham,
Thank you for writing. I think you raise several very fair questions. I will give you my initial views. Ultimately I think most of these questions do not have clear right or wrong answers.
1) definition of review versus impressions: I agree that a review of a single component in circumstances in which I assimilate that single component into my existing well-known audio system is very different than a review in which I listen to a largely unfamiliar system for only a few hours. I would never say that defining the former as a "review" and defining the latter as "impressions" is wrong. But it is a matter of definition. With the disclaimers and caveats I have been careful to write I do consider my write-ups to be "reviews."
It is not clear to me that spending multiples more time with a component will necessarily yield a different conclusion than initial conclusions. In fact, and I will leave this to the people who understand the intersection of acoustics and psychology, I think that such immersion might give rise to other issues and misleading tendencies such as "assimilation bias," which is my term for tending to like that with which we get accustomed.
We do not know what the graph of listening time versus observational accuracy looks like. Does doubling the listening time increase the accuracy by 50% or by 5%?
Your view assumes a correlation between time spent with a component and accuracy of analysis, and I am just not sure what that correlation is. I, personally, do not believe that the observations I report would change if I listened to the systems for multiples of time longer.
2) an unfamiliar component in an unfamiliar system: I totally agree this is a big concern. We know that unless a new component is inserted into one's own, home reference system -- unless you change only one component at a time -- the value of the review is highly questionable because it is impossible to know which unfamiliar component is the driver of a particular sonic attribute I am hearing and attempting to describe.
I try to mitigate these issues by evaluating, thus far, only planar speakers with which I feel am familiar and comfortable. (I very deliberately did not write a review of the Rockport Altair or Arrakis.) Also, I try to be very circumspect about certain thoughts, and I explicitly describe certain impressions as "guesses."
Even with your valid concerns in mind I nonetheless believe the reviews in the format in which I have been conducting them have real value. Even though I am auditioning unfamiliar speakers in an unfamiliar system I only write descriptions and comments when I intuitively believe them to be truly correct. I can only do my best, which I always promise to do.
I try to be circumspect about attributing sonic attributes to the speakers or, perhaps, for example, to the amplifiers. At Avantgarde we listened to three different amplifiers on the Trios with Basshorns. Although unfamiliar with each component, I feel I could make very valid comparative observations about the relative characteristics of each of the amplifiers we auditioned.
I believe my observations, even based on only a few hours of listening, are valid. People familiar with planar speakers and, in many case more familiar with the speakers I have reviewed than I am, have seconded many of my observations.
3) wider variety of audition music: the one thing I can keep constant are my audition tracks. I audition with music I love and have played dozens and hundreds of times. Different people might come to different conclusions with different music. I help readers to calibrate their views against mine by reporting the tracks I used for audition, and disclaiming that my main interest is vocals and not classical or jazz or house, etc.
4) no "bests": I believe that by remaining comparative (relative) and not absolute the reviews retain their subjective observational value. I would never make the patently illogical mistake Peter Breuninger made in his review of the Kronos turntable in which, after comparing the Kronos to only two other turntables, he declared the Kronos the best turntable in the world. By keeping the reviews comparative to what I am auditioning and to other components with which I have long familiarity, I think I can keep the reviews legitimate and accurate. At most, I will say merely "the best I have ever heard."
Yes, but we also have our memories or what instruments and voices sound like, or the recording would be unintelligible and have no meaning to us.
I second Tao comments - the real value of these very interesting reports in mainly informative about system capabilities and entertainment. I read them as reports on systems, not reviews of isolated pieces of equipment.
It is probably a question of semantics on the use of the word review (we had threads about what should be a review in WBF in the past and posters had very different opinions), but IMHO unless you live with a piece of equipment in your system for a couple of months you are not able to carry a formal review.
Yes... but a microphone recording a violin for example , might have been suspended above the musician, recording much more of its high frequency spectra, the recording may sound quite different to your recollection of that instrument.
At home you will only have that reproduction .
Perhaps multi channel recording and reproduction will enable one to perfectly recreate the original performance and acoustic in ones own living room .
That is going to be my next experiment.
Keith.
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