Here we are, talking about the actual topic of the thread. Or shall I say, here we were.
Measurements and the Correlation of What We Hear
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Here we are, talking about the actual topic of the thread. Or shall I say, here we were.
Interesting paper on measurements verses the listening experience.
http://firstwatt.com/pdf/art_dist_fdbk.pdf
http://firstwatt.com/pdf/art_dist_fdbk.pdf
We ARE talking about measurement being a cornerstone of knowledge, until we can measure something that's happening in a meaningful way we don't truly understand what's going on. If, on the other hand, the measurement process throws up a result which runs counter to our experience or belief systems up to that point in time then we enter into a whole new level, realm of thinking.
In other words, there are these aspects to measurement: firstly we need to measure to understand something known, and secondly anomalous measurements lead to new understanding, bringing to light the unknown ...
Frank
The original post was concerned with relating measurements to subjective observation, not trying to reconcile apparently contradictory measurements.
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Hi Frank,
Maybe someday all preamps,amplifiers,tuners,speakers,and DACS will sound the same. Nothing is impossible is it? Sorry to say that hasn't been the case so far in my lifetime. Science will solve the puzzle soon,it hasn't yet, but I think it can be done,except for one thing. That thing is that we consumers must have a break through our selves,open our minds and realize that this hobby is complicated by our long held beliefs of what is possible in sound reproduction.
There are no contradictory measurements that are part of the conversation as far as I'm aware. But measurements may contradict what our experience has led us to conceive as being true, it doesn't need to be as grandiose as a complete belief system. I have had this very thing happen to me a number of times in respect to audio, believing in certain widely held ideas of how parts operated in combination with each other, but through virtual measurement, using Spice, unexpected behaviours were observed which would most certainly have a negative influence on the sound, and so I engineered a solution to that. Lo and behold, the subjective experience improved and it didn't require a physical measurement process to justify my actions.
Progress is made in at least 2 ways: having a known effect and measuring to determine an unknown cause; or accidentally measuring an unknown effect and then adjusting a known cause to mitigate that interaction.
BTW, the Putzey paper is an excellent read, thanks for that ...
Frank
Not mentioning any names, of course ...
Roger, what I'm finding to be the big pain is that the closer you get, the harder it becomes. Just one little, tiny, tiny thing can bring the whole lot down, and working with cheap gear only makes it harder. But they do say, no pain, no gain! If I had just fancy gear sounding pretty spiffy a lot of the time I wouldn't be so motivated to force it to perform better.
One nice result of getting the sound quality up is when unrelated people ring up about whatever while the music is going full bore, and they comment on how fantastic it sounds, this is usually to my wife. Even over a miserable standard telephone, there are enough auditory clues getting through to signal to people not interested in hifi that the sound has that "real" quality about it ...
Frank
Not mentioning any names, of course ...
Roger, what I'm finding to be the big pain is that the closer you get, the harder it becomes. Just one little, tiny, tiny thing can bring the whole lot down, and working with cheap gear only makes it harder. But they do say, no pain, no gain! If I had pretty fancy gear sounding pretty spiffy a lot of the time I wouldn't be so motivated to force it to perform better.
One nice result of getting the sound quality up is when unrelated people ring up about whatever while the music is going full bore, and they comment on how fantastic it sounds, this is usually to my wife. Even over a miserable standard telephone, there are enough auditory clues getting through to signal to people not interested in hifi that the sound has that "real" quality about it ...
Frank
Well Frank I must say, I don't think one must spend a king's ransom to achieve a very good level of reproduction. I won't get into the how's,but good design,coupled with quality components that have proven themselves to measure and perform to increase clarity and dynamics is a good recipe to start with. The vintage of the equipment is not necessarily a barrier,good design trumps age.
Roger
Pause a second ... Have you measured a gear before and after recap? I would think that after recap certain parameters would have changed , else.. really, how do you think the sound changed? Something must have changed , else how do you explain the change?
Think about how an utter rejection of science this statement is "
If it has any physical impact it is measurable, this is as plainly as I can put and there can be no debate to that unless we get ourselves in thinking that electrical components can have magical properties ... Hardly the province of audio discussions, rather that of metaphysics or Esoterism.
I continue to think that it is important to continue to find ways to correlate measurements to perceptions, I am certain we haven't entirely correlate our measurements to verifiable and repeatable perceptions. It seems however that a good portion of the High End Audiophiles community is not comfortable with the idea. It seems too "mechanical" to reduce the powerful emotions we have toward our gears to a set of numbers.
I think that the response to music is what may prove to be difficult or maybe, just maybe, impossible to measure. Our gears and what they do to the signal OTOH are physical constructs ... measurable constructs.
What I don't see in current published measurements are:
1. how a component handles the voltage swings. I personally think rise times and such still fall short because they don't account for....
2. how components will react under different circumstances (different gear, electrical environment, acoustical environment, etc.)
One can always say you go with an entire family of products from the same manufacturer or have gear especially made or voiced for each other but in my opinion this really isn't foolproof either. I mean, firstly it's a huge assumption that they really have things down from A to Z. More importantly, design and construction are still human pursuits. Somebody's ideas of what sounds good WILL work their way in there and it doesn't mean these are ideas we actually agree with. Without even considering preferences, it's all a big crap shoot really.
1. how a component handles the voltage swings. I personally think rise times and such still fall short because they don't account for....
2. how components will react under different circumstances (different gear, electrical environment, acoustical environment, etc.)
One can always say you go with an entire family of products from the same manufacturer or have gear especially made or voiced for each other but in my opinion this really isn't foolproof either. I mean, firstly it's a huge assumption that they really have things down from A to Z. More importantly, design and construction are still human pursuits. Somebody's ideas of what sounds good WILL work their way in there and it doesn't mean these are ideas we actually agree with. Without even considering preferences, it's all a big crap shoot really.
Yeah got to agree.
Waveform synthesis these days is incredibly advanced.
Bruce this should be of interest to you and hopefully others, I have more offline info but would need to sort it and then hunt it online.
One of the papers goes back to 1982 and defines very well timbre parameters, one aspect modern research covers is the envelop of a waveform including its partials-harmonics (attack-sustain-decay) and the perception of the pitch-timbre,etc.
Such work also extends to the study of why we prefer musical chords to single note (again was given a research paper on this which fits into this others,will need to hunt it amongst my stuff though).
Anyway these two do a good start, even though they do not go into the more recent aspects of the time domain-envelope of a complex waveform and instruments.
INSTRUMENTAL TIMBRE AND RELATED ACOUSTICAL PHENOMENA IN THE PERCEPTION OF MUSIC:
http://www.zainea.com/instrumentaltimbre.htm
Hearing sounds introduction by Institute of Sound and Vibration Research with sound examples thats fun:
http://wwwnew.isvr.soton.ac.uk/SPCG/Tutorial/Tutorial/Tutorial_files/Web-hearing-harmonics.htm
Hope some find this interesting, if I get the time will try to track down others.
The other one for now is the info by Bill Whitlock that I posted in another thread recently that touches on time domain-envelope/phase/etc.
Acoustics and Psychoacoustics:
http://www.billbuxton.com/AudioUI02acoustics.pdf
Cheers
Orb
If someone asked me to pick the sound of the DAC (or amp or preamp) that I'd heard last week in a lineup I doubt if I could do better than chance.
There's no way I could tell you if things sound better these days as compared to last year or five years ago... I suspect I'm not alone here
There's no way I could tell you if things sound better these days as compared to last year or five years ago... I suspect I'm not alone here
Normally I don’t care if a thread I start drifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but in this case I want to refocus a bit. It’s one thing to make the argument that anything we can hear can be measured, but it’s time to admit we don’t measure everything we can hear. We can come up with a zillion excuses for why that is so, but it doesn’t change the fact that we simply aren’t doing that. When you lay down your money to buy a piece of gear, there is a lot of faith involved. Whether you care to admit that is another issue.
Manufactures typically don’t provide any measurements with the gear you buy, they provide specifications. The only way that any of us can review actual measurements of the gear we buy is via reviews by magazines that actually do measure gear. The measurements provided by magazines can alert you to design problems or aberrations that may keep you from making a purchase, but most well designed and manufactured gear has exemplary measurements which leaves you clueless how one great measuring piece of gear is going to sound compared to another great measuring piece of gear.
When ARC released the REF-5, did they provide any measurements which they portended would show why the REF-5 sounded better than the REF-3? No, they didn’t. The marketing people reached into the book of audio marketing adjectives and described why the REF-5 would sound better than the REF-3. Ditto for the Anniversary preamp. And again, I’m not picking on ARC as you can substitute your favorite OEM in place of ARC as it’s the same story.
Some manufacturers do provide you a laundry list of circuit and parts changes they have made to upgrade their new gear and offer that as an explanation of why it sounds better than the current piece of gear you own, but there is no measurements proffered to show why this is true. It all comes back to faith.
And this brings me full circle to my point: There is no current correlation to what we hear and whatever measurements are available from magazines that perform reviews. And if you bought a piece of gear that had never been reviewed by a magazine that performs measurements, you made your decision based on unverified specifications. Current measurements can’t tell us how good something will sound nor can they lead us to make meaningful sound quality comparisons against other gear.
So when I hear objectivists tell subjectivists to prove with measurements what they claim to hear, the objectivists don’t have measurements to verify what they hear either. All we have is a basic set of cookie cutter measurements that can point out obvious design issues. So when you make the decision to buy a manufacturers new and improved component, you are really back to buying on faith. And when audiophiles ask other audiophiles to prove what they claim to hear with measurements, nobody has them including the manufacturers that made the gear so it’s really disingenuous to ask for “proof.” Science leads to the designs of the gear we buy, but faith and our hearing tells us whether the gear sounds great. Measurements damn sure don’t.
Manufactures typically don’t provide any measurements with the gear you buy, they provide specifications. The only way that any of us can review actual measurements of the gear we buy is via reviews by magazines that actually do measure gear. The measurements provided by magazines can alert you to design problems or aberrations that may keep you from making a purchase, but most well designed and manufactured gear has exemplary measurements which leaves you clueless how one great measuring piece of gear is going to sound compared to another great measuring piece of gear.
When ARC released the REF-5, did they provide any measurements which they portended would show why the REF-5 sounded better than the REF-3? No, they didn’t. The marketing people reached into the book of audio marketing adjectives and described why the REF-5 would sound better than the REF-3. Ditto for the Anniversary preamp. And again, I’m not picking on ARC as you can substitute your favorite OEM in place of ARC as it’s the same story.
Some manufacturers do provide you a laundry list of circuit and parts changes they have made to upgrade their new gear and offer that as an explanation of why it sounds better than the current piece of gear you own, but there is no measurements proffered to show why this is true. It all comes back to faith.
And this brings me full circle to my point: There is no current correlation to what we hear and whatever measurements are available from magazines that perform reviews. And if you bought a piece of gear that had never been reviewed by a magazine that performs measurements, you made your decision based on unverified specifications. Current measurements can’t tell us how good something will sound nor can they lead us to make meaningful sound quality comparisons against other gear.
So when I hear objectivists tell subjectivists to prove with measurements what they claim to hear, the objectivists don’t have measurements to verify what they hear either. All we have is a basic set of cookie cutter measurements that can point out obvious design issues. So when you make the decision to buy a manufacturers new and improved component, you are really back to buying on faith. And when audiophiles ask other audiophiles to prove what they claim to hear with measurements, nobody has them including the manufacturers that made the gear so it’s really disingenuous to ask for “proof.” Science leads to the designs of the gear we buy, but faith and our hearing tells us whether the gear sounds great. Measurements damn sure don’t.
If measurements could completely capture the essence of what we are hearing, then by simply providing those measurements we should be able to reliably predict what a product should sound like. (The Bob Carver challenge in reverse.) If not, then we haven't found all of the relevant data or we are measuring the wrong thing.
Of course, what we can currently measure stops at the brainstem and we can't begin to come up with a model to deal with the complexity of the neurophysiologic experience of music and sound. Add the complications of additional sensory information and the quest is seemingly quixotic.
I certainly don't dismiss utilizing measurements where they can reliably direct our actions. For audio manufacturers, measurements are absolutely necessary for product development and manufacturer quality control. However, I think that there is a 'tyranny of numbers'; meaning that we draw false assurance by having something to measure.
Of course, what we can currently measure stops at the brainstem and we can't begin to come up with a model to deal with the complexity of the neurophysiologic experience of music and sound. Add the complications of additional sensory information and the quest is seemingly quixotic.
I certainly don't dismiss utilizing measurements where they can reliably direct our actions. For audio manufacturers, measurements are absolutely necessary for product development and manufacturer quality control. However, I think that there is a 'tyranny of numbers'; meaning that we draw false assurance by having something to measure.
And the rest of us are a bit staggered, or perhaps the word is tickled, by the stuff you repeat here on a weekly basis, Frank. Floyd Toole...Frank....non-linear distortion is pretty much a non-issue in modern quality audio...or I can stick a tweeter in my ear and hear perfect imaging because I welded my belt buckle to chassis of my home theater in a box...It's a tough choice, I must say.
Tim
I'm inclined to agree. Let's say measurement's did exist that could tell us exactly how something would sound without hearing it. How many pages would you guys reckon it would take? Now how long would it take us to really understand these pages? A lifetime? Two?
I was involved in the design and construction of my house. Every blueprint and every sample passed through my hands. Did it tell me what the house would be like to live in? Nope.
I cook reasonably well I've been told. Can I know how a dish will taste by looking at a recipe? Nope.
I don't think we humans have the communication skills to actually pass on a full experience. Quixotic indeed.
I was involved in the design and construction of my house. Every blueprint and every sample passed through my hands. Did it tell me what the house would be like to live in? Nope.
I cook reasonably well I've been told. Can I know how a dish will taste by looking at a recipe? Nope.
I don't think we humans have the communication skills to actually pass on a full experience. Quixotic indeed.
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