Objectivists - what might be wrong with this label/viewpoint!!

[jkeny]

Any time! ;-)



Why would I need to listen to it? Are you claiming that it provides audible benefits that can't be measured?

If you sent me one, I'd listen to it, but more to the point I'd measure it. But the comment about never hearing it seems reminiscent of the common anti-science subjectivist taunt that one gets if one gets too aggressive about finding out reliable truths.



Please indicate the reliable and bias-controllled means by which you support your claim that the new product "sounds better".

As things stand Mr. Keny you seem to just have admitted that like me, this Bruce Brown person (no widely known reliable authority that I have ever heard of) has never heard the product that you are touting here and now in the service of your own financial and possibly other personal interests.

So, if Mr. Brown is the authority that you seem to be claiming that he is, then he is no better prepared to comment on your current product than than I am, in accordance with your very own words!

Arny, in this as in all your posts that I've read, you show yourself to be simply argumentative - I refuse to engage with your closed-minded, circular logic

 

[dallasjustice]

High school mock trial judge's ruling . . .

I object to being able to do so as being a criteria for the validity of audio measurements on the grounds of logic and reason, not its actual impossibility.

Objection overruled. The witness can answer.

 

[microstrip]

Is there really a suggestion that one could not measure the difference between an orchestra with an oboe playing and the same orchestra with the oboe removed?

Do not mind, next time WBF will debate if we can measure the difference between Paniagua's La Folia recording with and without the bird chirps. In 2016 we will debate the same but removing the bumblebee tingles.

 

[arnyk]

Arny, in this as in all your posts that I've read, you show yourself to be simply argumentative - I refuse to engage with your closed-minded, circular logic

Talk about closed minds: It is clear Mr. Keny that you only want to argue with people that you can snow with double-talk. I am not the least apologetic for the fact that you have just confirmed that I failed to meet your needs in that regard. ;-)

 

[Atmasphere]

Surely, as our knowledge of this ear/brain interface grows it has an impact on what we measure & what importance we attach to the level of what we measure?

His answer is interesting - firstly "there might be something going on that doesn’t show up clearly on standard measurements". Why did he suspect that there was something going on? Did he hear it? He goes on "some minuscule squiggles" that would by & large "shrug them off as measurement errors" It requires both a belief in what is being heard & a tenacity in following it up & trying to get a measurement which correlates to what is heard. BTW, this DC sweep is an old technique, not a new one & you an also see this same test being applied in the ESS talk by Mallinson where his team also did the same thing when audiophiles told them that they could reliably identify differences during the development of the ESS DAC - a noise floor modulation occurring at a certain signal level (which btw, they haven't fully rectified in their DAC)

Again, I come back to my point - as we learn more about how our auditory perception works, is it not wise to evaluate & change our measurements to better focus on the aspects that are important to our auditory perception? So far this thread has suggested that we know the limits of this which are clearly delineated by existing measurements & I'm suggesting that in fact we don't know these limits.

I've been pushing this for years: the more we understand how the ear/brain system works, and then apply what we know about physics, the better we can get our systems to sound.

OK, we can measure any and everything in an audio signal now. When you or someone else figures out what kinds of sounds our ears like best, then that will be the job to come up with something better than stereo or for the mix and master engineers to do their job differently so that those sorts of signals are more highlighted or whatever they need to be to sound better, but that is about the recording side, as we can measure what we record now as well, so in either case, measurments of what we have now does not get us better as far as ear/brain interface, but some new breakthrough in how ears work will allow us to make a different signal that we will still be able to fully measure with what we have now as far as test equipment if we are still using audio signals. To SUM up, measurents are not going to advance what you seek to achieve, that is going to come from those doctors studying the why and how of how ears work and then integrating that knowledge into the signal we put into our audio gear. IF you still believe we cant measure audio signals then you did not read the link above very well. I know I said I bowed out but I thought this time we could come to terms here, just maybe. .

So it seems that Tom and jkeny have some common ground.

Anyway if your point is to prove that it there are aspects we can hear but can't measure, you need to come up with better examples..

I've got one. We can measure how an amplifier has very low distortion, and we can measure how another amp has higher distortion, or seems so. But when we listen to them, the amp with higher distortion appears to have better low level detail, does a better job of defining the instrumental timbres. We can measure that the distortion is different, but we actually get a negative correlation.

Maybe the problem is that we engineering types like to boil things down to a meter reading, when maybe we need a better readout. It my feeling that in the case of amplifiers, how they respond to a steady state waveform is different from how they respond if that waveform has one and only one iteration. To test this, we would need a signal that never repeats itself- that is how real world sounds are, like music- and see how the amp distorts the non-repetitive waveform. Because that is what is important. If you are thinking that "its all sine waves" then you missed my point.

 

[jkeny]

Yes, I believe we are all pissing in the wind currently with regard to audio measurements - they are ill-informed - designed based on engineering rather than psycho-acoustic principles.

For instance it is generally thought that we locate the source of signals primarily by inter aural timing (ITD) for low frequency sounds & inter aural level (ILD) for high frequencies. This was established in 1907 by Rayleigh using tuning forks as the signal source & became known as the "Duplex effect". However, if instead of pure tones, wide bandwidth signals are used this "Duplex effect" no longer holds & ITD becomes much more dominant at high frequencies. Just an example of how changing test signals has psychoacoustic implications as well as electrical engineering implications.

Another interesting example relates to the fact that, in nature we don't hear pure tones but rather a mix of harmonics & these amplitude modulate in unison. This modulation increases our ability to hear the tone at a much lower level than normal through the masking noise - called comodulation masking release - check out a demo of it here

I'm of the opinion that the standard JND testing should be revisted in the light of what is known about ASA now as it seems to me that auditory streaming may well bring a more realistic dimension to such tests

 

[microstrip]

I've been pushing this for years: the more we understand how the ear/brain system works, and then apply what we know about physics, the better we can get our systems to sound. (...)

I would be more extreme and I would also add: the more we understand how the ear/brain system works to transcend the technical limitations imposed by a two channel carrier using just two separate sound sources for replay.

 

[Atmasphere]

+1

 

[wakibaki]

No, no.

In order to understand what's going on here, you have to read between the lines. Not just between the lines, but deep between the lines. Deep, deep between the lines. Deep, deep, deep between the lines...

Sorry. Forgotten what I was going to say. Anyway, you can tell that John Lennon is sincere, and that Bryan Ferry is not. Although he could be pretending, Lounge Lizard image and all that. But they were just 4 ordinary boys, which makes a difference, when the cool-aid hits the fan.

Anyway all these measurements were made long, long ago, before time really began, probably the 1950s, before there was any argument about all this ****, so they're golden to all intents and purposes, just like the battleships at Scapa Flow have nonradioactive steel because it was smelted before the Atom Bomb.

These new painkillers are **** hot.

 

[jkeny]

I would be more extreme and I would also add: the more we understand how the ear/brain system works to transcend the technical limitations imposed by a two channel carrier using just two separate sound sources for replay.

Sure, but why not see what can be done within the limitations of stereo first, unless you think we have reached these limits already?

 

[jkeny]

...
So it seems that Tom and jkeny have some common ground.

Yes & I didn't celebrate this joyous occasion at the time so let me try to recompense

 

[wakibaki]

Sure, but why not see what can be done within the limitations of stereo first, unless you think we have reached these limits already?

A few people think just that, and that all this agonising over HD formats is just diverting energy from the exploitation of (16/44k1) multichannel.

 

[Don Hills]

... I've got one. We can measure how an amplifier has very low distortion, and we can measure how another amp has higher distortion, or seems so. But when we listen to them, the amp with higher distortion appears to have better low level detail, does a better job of defining the instrumental timbres. We can measure that the distortion is different, but we actually get a negative correlation ...

Have you considered that the distortion may be emphasising the characteristics of the sources that "define the instrumental timbres" and the "low level detail"? SE tube amplifiers as a class have higher distortion but are often preferred because they "reveal more of the music."

 

[FrantzM]

Have you considered that the distortion may be emphasising the characteristics of the sources that "define the instrumental timbres" and the "low level detail"? SE tube amplifiers as a class have higher distortion but are often preferred because they "reveal more of the music."

Distortion which by the way is measurable ...

 

[microstrip]

Sure, but why not see what can be done within the limitations of stereo first, unless you think we have reached these limits already?

No, this is the challenging aspect of stereo - every time I have though we have reached the limits I found that someone's new SOTA equipment could still push them.

 

[Don Hills]

... For instance it is generally thought that we locate the source of signals primarily by inter aural timing (ITD) for low frequency sounds & inter aural level (ILD) for high frequencies. This was established in 1907 by Rayleigh using tuning forks as the signal source & became known as the "Duplex effect". However, if instead of pure tones, wide bandwidth signals are used this "Duplex effect" no longer holds & ITD becomes much more dominant at high frequencies. Just an example of how changing test signals has psychoacoustic implications as well as electrical engineering implications. ...

Cite?

A wide bandwidth signal contains a wide range of frequencies. The auditory system processes each of these according to their frequency. Filter out the low frequencies from the wide bandwidth signal and you lose the ability to locate via ITD.

 

[jkeny]

Cite?

http://web.mit.edu/hst.723/www/ThemePapers/Binaural/MacphersonMiddlebrooks2002.pdf
"The Rayleigh Duplex Theory is quite satisfactory to explain
left/right localization of tonal stimuli. Nevertheless, in
the real world most sounds have bandwidths of several octaves,
and a listener rarely is exposed to a pure tone. Three
sets of observations led us to revisit the Duplex Theory in the
context of complex ~i.e., broadband! sounds.
First, lateralization studies have shown than listeners are
sensitive to ITDs in high-frequency complex sounds. Sensitivity
to ongoing time differences in simple sounds such as
pure tones is limited to low frequencies by the loss of phaselocking
in the auditory nerve at high frequencies and likely
also by a lower-frequency cutoff in the binaural system"

"As noted previously, complex, high-frequency stimuli
such as amplitude-modulated tones, tone complexes, and
bands of noise provide the auditory system with ongoing
envelope ITD information that is absent from high-frequency
pure-tone stimuli. ITD discrimination thresholds measured
for such sounds are typically found to be two to ten times
larger than those for low-frequency tones—as large as a few
hundred ms ~e.g., Bernstein and Trahiotis, 1994; Blauert,
1982; Henning, 1974; McFadden and Pasanen, 1976; Nuetzel
and Hafter, 1981!

A wide bandwidth signal contains a wide range of frequencies. The auditory system processes each of these according to their frequency. Filter out the low frequencies from the wide bandwidth signal and you lose the ability to locate via ITD.

"In some cases, the influence of ITDs persisted even when
stimulus spectra were limited to high frequencies, although
the effect of high-pass filtering varied widely among listeners."

 

[arnyk]

Yes, I believe we are all pissing in the wind currently with regard to audio measurements - they are ill-informed - designed based on engineering rather than psycho-acoustic principles.

I have friends who justify their beliefs in Creationism with similar flawed rhetoric.

I mean the statement above is ally itself self-contradictory as Engineering is a superset of the study of psychoacoustic principles. The study of Psychoacoustics is a subset of Engineering so there can never be a proper Either/Or relationship between them.

 

[amirm]

Since audio signals are two dimensional (time and amplitude) there is only a very short list (N=4) of things that can go wrong. They are: Linear Distortion (FR and phase), Nonlinear Distortion (IM, THD, jitter), random Noise (usually due to thermal effects) and Interfering Signals such as hum. The means for measuring all of these problems have been known for decades and in modern times are easy enough to actually measure for yourself with an investment that is by high end audio standards chump change. Most good modern audio gear reduces all of these potentially destructive influences to orders of magnitude below audibility. Worrying about these things is for chumps.

Compression artifacts in an MP3 encoder can be well above threshold of hearing yet you never see measurements of such Arny. Dynamic distortion that comes and goes based on what is played or what the equipment is doing at that moment is a glaring problem with our measurements today.

The other problem is how we measure them. THD for example is psychoacoustically blind yet we routinely use it to characterize non-linear distortion.

The real problem is the typical subjectivist audiophile's lack of scientific knowledge and corresponding distrust for science. Most of these people, even most leading audiophile subjectivist journalists lack the credentials and knowledge required to understand why the previous paragraph is true and what it means.

I wouldn't go there Arny. It will take all of one millisecond for any "objectivist" to distance themselves from measurements or audio science just the same.

Subjectivists generally loathe proper listening tests (they are taught to do so by self-serving sales hacks disguised as technicians).

"Objectivists" do the same if the outcome is positive. Witness the latest riots in the streets from Stuart et al.'s test of high resolution audio filtering and conversion to 16 bits.

 

[esldude]

Cite?

A wide bandwidth signal contains a wide range of frequencies. The auditory system processes each of these according to their frequency. Filter out the low frequencies from the wide bandwidth signal and you lose the ability to locate via ITD.

I have seen some other research on this beyond the citation of Jkeny. They have a bit of a different theory on what is happening. Related to pulse trains of higher frequency harmonically related tones. Paraphrasing from memory the related trains of pulses with a varying amplitude were treated somewhat as if the frequency of the amplitude changes were what is being timed. Like the Jkeny citation, they too found the threshold 10 or more times higher. So ITD can be used for localization less precisely on some types of signals.

I rather doubt this is common. I have tried various simple recordings in mono in various ways over headphones. Simplest is delay one channel versus another for solo violin or viola. Could never get anything, but a mono image in the middle. Do the same, but with a bit of frequency shaping and get some effect slightly to one side. It was very vague, and doing away with the delay and using only frequency shaping on one channel managed about half the effect. Put a level difference on one channel and it was a clear effect over to one side.

Whether this is important or not really isn't a big deal in this context. Regular old redbook standards will encode any of this happening way more than well enough. For that matter so did analog tape. Stereo is an effect, an illusion built upon certain characteristics of human hearing. With simple techniques it can be surprisingly accurate with imaging. Now if we did actual soundfield reconstruction we would have something.