Of course. No denying that, but we are discussing what skills does one use to judge how your acoustics and power supplies improved the sound
Negative show report posts... enough is enough.
- Thread starter Peter Breuninger
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Of course. No denying that, but we are discussing what skills does one use to judge how your acoustics and power supplies improved the sound
Training your ears on live concerts of orchestral/ensemble music. That's the only thing that can tell you what to listen for. Forget 'golden ear' or similar tests.
Soundstage relies on faint echoes and decay in the recording which take a system with good resolution to reproduce, a proper acoustic space for them not to get muddled up, and good electronics and cables to convey/preserve these details. An immersive, 3D soundstage where the speakers AND room boundaries disappear, pinpoint imaging with micro detail fully intact is the sign of a good system and setup. This is actually one area where everything is critical, especially cables.
Experience helps. For example, RFI/EMI riding on the AC power has a noticeable signature, which is instantly recognizable when you have experienced it. Clean power leads to a more relaxed, clearer and more detailed sound.
How do you demonstrate that to be true? For my part, I provided research that backed what I said. Do you have some equiv. research that shows the effect, before and after said training with live concerts?
And why would such a training help? I record my brother playing violin. I play it on two systems and ask you which one sounds more correct. How would your training in listening to live music help?
I can tell you that when it comes to non-linear distortions, musicians have no advantage whatsoever over general public. I have tested them many times. They simply have no acuity in this regard. Amplifier distortions if audible, are non-linear in nature. So based on my parallel testing, musicians who by definition would have been trained as you say, are not able to deliver on that skill in audio reproduction. Nor do I know of any formal research that says otherwise.
So as much as what you say makes sense in one's belly, the research and experience shows it to not be the case.
In contrast, I can show you with certainty that ability to hear colorations is supremely helpful in detecting equipment fidelity. I provided one such research in my last post where specific colorations were added to music, and only the trained listeners with high certainty could detect them. Surely you agree that audio reviewers would have some or all of the training you mention. But they did not manage to find such obviously audible colorations. What explains that if your theory is correct?
That is a theory. Any such theory needs objective evidence to convince someone. Where is that evidence? A bunch of people believing it to be the case based on intuition? That is sum total of it, right?
Would you give any odds to the theory being wrong?
Everything can't be critical. We think they are. We have convinced ourselves they are. Yet, there is one class of them that we can easily and objectively analyze to be true: room and loudspeakers. Yet the exact same methodology, fails to find merit in cables. Surely then, the criticalness can't be equal when one set of differences are so obvious, so clear, so up front that they show up readily in double blind tests, and the other does not. Whether you believe or don't believe in blind test, hopefully you believe in the logic of what I just said
.If that is true and I came to your house and either swap said power cable with garden variety IEC cable, or left your premium cable in place, and you sat down to play your music, you would be able to 100% tell if I had made that change or not if no clues are visible?
. . . .Everything can't be critical. We think they are. We have convinced ourselves they are. Yet, there is one class of them that we can easily and objectively analyze to be true: room and loudspeakers. Yet the exact same methodology, fails to find merit in cables. Surely then, the criticalness can't be equal when one set of differences are so obvious, so clear, so up front that they show up readily in double blind tests, and the other does not. Whether you believe or don't believe in blind test, hopefully you believe in the logic of what I just said
So VERY very true.
That is a theory. Any such theory needs objective evidence to convince someone. Where is that evidence? A bunch of people believing it to be the case based on intuition? That is sum total of it, right?
Would you give any odds to the theory being wrong?
Everything can't be critical. We think they are. We have convinced ourselves they are. Yet, there is one class of them that we can easily and objectively analyze to be true: room and loudspeakers. Yet the exact same methodology, fails to find merit in cables. Surely then, the criticalness can't be equal when one set of differences are so obvious, so clear, so up front that they show up readily in double blind tests, and the other does not. Whether you believe or don't believe in blind test, hopefully you believe in the logic of what I just said
We can't correlate everything we hear to a particular measurement. If you believe this then it follows that there isn't evidence for everything.
I have plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence to back up my claims but this kind of experience is usually not accepted by hard core objectivists anyway.
I really disagree with the statement that everything is not critical. The music is being produced by a system and to eek out the last degree of performance everything in the system is critical imo. We are talking about one of the finer points of audio reproduction (soundstage), so in the context of the discussion about soundstage cables do play a critical role. For example, if you use nice, smooth sounding, warm copper interconnect cables you will smooth out much of the micro detail present in the music which has a massive negative effect on the soundstage of many recordings. I have witnessed this personally countless times and my customers notice it as well.
If the discussion was about what matters for audio reproduction just in general than I would completely agree with you, but for this discussion we must assume the speakers and room are set up with a high degree of competency for anything else to matter at all. But, at the same time poor electronics can also kill the soundstage so they are critical and cables can smooth out micro-detail so they are also critical, as is having clean AC power. If you take away any of these things your soundstage will suffer, so in my view it's all critical, every part of the system is critical. You want decent mid-fi results then lots of things become non critical, if your goal is HiFi then everything matters.
It is just harder than you imagine I think. A recent example with a violin. I recorded one that I have recorded a few times in the same room each time using the same mic and the rest. The violinist changed strings. The week after the string change the timbre was very different. It was catching the bow differently according to the musician, who used more rosin until they settled in which changed things a bit as well. I was right there to hear it up close live, and in the recording. It came through either way. Was a fairly obvious difference.
Now which one was right? The blindingly obvious answer is both were. Yet I have seen people condemn one DAC vs another for smaller differences in tone and timbre. You don't know what the original was. However, if Harman research is to be believed, and extrapolating from it, I might use either of those recordings with either set of strings and a group of 100 people might rank 4 loudspeakers in the same order. Some of them may have never heard a live violin.
I think another interesting thing about the Harman research is they found results were better comparing 4 loudspeakers than when you only compare 2. Pure conjecture on my part, but with 4 choices it becomes apparent you can't easily split them so neatly. Maybe it dampens false confidence or allows you to hear more clearly without prejudice when dealing with 4 choices. If 4 worked better than 2 what do you think the chances are of being accurately and consistently discriminating with one, and your memory.
And please don't take this as me coming off critical against you. I am not. Just doing a hypothetical, nothing against you personally of course. I have done the exact thing you are describing most of my life.
I'm not sure about being able to consistently A/B/X a single power cable but I am sure if power cables for the entire system were changed out it would be very obvious.
If we were at a location with significant EMI/RFI interference and I inserted one of my modified SurgeX power conditioners then there would be a night and day difference. For example at RMAF 2014 I heard a system Friday after hours I thought was great but we all noticed some harshness. I recognized it as AC power and suggested we try my SurgeX (replacing a $3500 Equitech BPT), which solved the problem. It was noticeable to at least 6 people in the room and the difference was not subtle, it was a massive improvement that was noticed by many show-goers. This, I could A/B and get it right every time... of course home conditions aren't as bad as a show and the difference is more subtle, but the SurgeX consistently makes a noticeable improvement in every system it has been tried in, mostly due to it's superior EMI/RFI filter. The group using my SurgeX got best sound in show, cost no object, by TAS btw...
So, yes.. power quality is also critical
It can't all matter equally just by logic. Something with multiple components that vary from setup to setup and they all matter equally? It just doesn't make sense. I understand the logic of that. It is the idea we start with the purest cleanest source and every step degrades it somewhat. So it is like a bank account of sound quality and every piece removes something from the account. I don't find this to be fully accurate common though it is in people's minds.
Some things do more damage than others. Some parts of the system have to be a bottleneck. Some bottlenecks may obscure several other parts of the system. You can imagine you have fine tuned everything to the point nothing is a significant bottleneck, but you will need to do some convincing before I would buy that. The biggest, number one, obviously most troublesome bottleneck in the whole affair is speakers or speakers with rooms. Nothing else comes close. Well sometimes processing at the mixing/mastering stage can be worse, but we'll assume using quality recordings.
With only a little experience recording right off the top of my head, I would say speakers do 90% of the damage, microphones 9% and everything in between (if processing is minimized) only about 1%.
In terms of overall system performance I agree. When considering the preservation of micro-detail and achieving soundstage perfection then everything becomes critical because you cannot achieve this goal if any elements of the system don't perform at a high level. i.e. you can't have any significant bottlenecks at all.
I didn't ask for measurements as proof point. The proof can be anything. In the case of loudspeakers and Harman, they used listening tests and compared one group of people with another, while intentionally changing the response of the system. No measurement was used.
I am not a hard core objectivist. I am however a person who likes to see every step of reasoning backed by something independent than one's belief and opinion.
Why do they make a difference?
I can also line up hundreds or thousands of people who can't hear the difference. What then? How do we adjudicate here?
Again, these are all the things that we *think* are true. But try as we might, collectively, we have all failed to produce any back up to demonstrate them. The result is a thread like this: one person hears a system, declares it as lacking warmth, and another person goes nuclear claiming he doesn't know what he is talking about. If subjective opinions, earned through countless listening sessions produces valid data, why the current situation? Why can't we all agree the same amplifier is the best? The same DAC? The same cables? Isn't it the case that we are using a faulty litmus test and therefore the conclusions are improper and beg disagreement?
The "15 second man (that's what my wife calls me... geez I hate it
)" said that every time he heard them, the speakers in question had a particular sound that he doesn't like.I would have though that an expert would easily be able to tell after 15 seconds, whether or not a speaker that he is already familiar with sounds like it usually does
I feel that the final sound of a stereo is a subjective experience. On the other hand, I also feel everything matters, and cables do have an impact on the sonic signature. Since the sound is subjective, I suspect that it affects everyone slightly different. Whether the cable change is measurable or not, that is not the defining point in my opinion. We are just starting to understand what happens at the atomic level, and if we do not yet know how to measure these changes that will not keep me from enjoying the end result.
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A test that levels the playing field is not necessarily a right test. I get that you are testing for coloration. I guess that is not the way I look at things, but like I mentioned, tone, timbre, separation, speed, slam, soundstage, are some of the attributes I look for that are not covered in the test.
Also do designers of Martin Logan and other panels, or of horns and some other boxes, take this test? Does that mean they cannot test for fidelity?
Regarding your violin example, in both cases the violin was correct. However, you will be able to hear the piano wrong pretty easily, like it never can be played.
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Hi don't worry, there is nothing in your message to be taken personally.
We all realize there are multiple tonalities. I find your violin analogy similar to Amir's, but that analogy is not correct. Because both those violin tonalities are right. Yet you will hear a piano in a speaker that can never exist, because of the way it breaks in the crossovers. That is what Harman doesn't train you for. Many speakers will never give the weight to brass. And some electronics will just not separate as effectively as others, and you will see in the slam, for example, in Gnomus like I mentioned, that some are slow and don't slam.
I understand decay will differ venue to venue and where you are sitting, yet in my room I will want the best I can get. My question was only if Harman addresses these attributes.
I guess Amir is saying Harman tests for a certain thing, where playing fields are leveled. I am saying what it tests for are attributes less important to me, or rather I can't see how they address the attributes important to me. To which Amir contends there is no data to prove that my attributes make one a better listener. And my contention is burden of proof is on Harman. Can Harman enhance a foundation based in training on live classical concerts? Possibly
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