There is really no excuse for this now with all the advances in component pieces ie caps and resistors. I have solid state gear that is very quiet and very natural in sound.
Preference vs. audibility - please keep them separate.
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There is really no excuse for this now with all the advances in component pieces ie caps and resistors. I have solid state gear that is very quiet and very natural in sound.
Not an original point, I expect, but there is also a vibrant market in clockwork watches - I have a few myself. As with analogue audio, the measurements appear to be unequivocal, yet enthusiasts queue up to pay very high prices for timepieces that, by any measure, do not perform as well in their ostensible primary function of measuring time as cheap 'n' cheerful quartz versions. Presumably it is the test gear at fault, and in fact clockwork watches do measure time as accurately as quartz versions? Or is it simply that people like the thought of a clockwork mechanism? It's the latter case for me. I know it's a worse time keeper than the quartz version and I can't even see the mechanism inside, but I like the ritual of winding it (if it's not an automatic) and to hear it ticking. It's a link with the past, I can see how it works more-or-less, and inwardly I can feel like a member of a slightly exclusive club. Yes, I admit it: I hope people notice my vintage watches when I'm wearing them!
I think this is a matter of semantics. There is a strong probability that the 20 dollar bill in our pocket has trace amounts of cocaine. That amount would never have a physical effect on humans.OTOH it is difficult for a machine to say what amount of cocaine will have physical effect on humans. An actual human would do that very easily.
I've even moved past that. The battery in my watch died a couple of years ago. I always have a phone in my pocket that updates itself daily. How could anything be more accurate. As a side benefit, it also makes calls, sends emails and test messages, got a calendar....
Tim
This may not be a good analogy. I was not saying that the test gear was at fault so much as its just not as sensitive in this one particular area. What I was suggesting is that engineers might be at fault, if they presume to ignore how the human ear/brain system works, and just go for numbers on paper. The latter is where I have trouble with the 'quaint watch' analogy.
To further the point, the ear/brain system allows us to perceive sound according to a set of rules. These rules were poorly understood 45 years ago when most of our testing regime was conceived. In the meantime, science has learned things about our physiology that fly in the face of how the audio industry has set up its testing regime, yet the industry doggedly hangs on to the old ways. I am firmly convinced that if we as an industry could drop the dogma, we could also design meaningful tests where a glance at the spec sheet would tell us a lot about how the product sounds and whether it would work in our system. Right now that's a crap shoot, so we have to audition everything and can't rely on a review or even a close friend's own testimony.
Groucho,
The luxury or old fashioned clock argument comes periodically to add noise to this debates. We all now know that you have a vintage clock, bravo, what was the purpose of introducing analog audio in this beautiful story? Do you want to scientifically compare the objectives of sound reproduction with those of wearing a watch ?
BTW, I have a digital pocket watch that is older than me. Perhaps we can start a thread to show our favorite watches.
Do you want to scientifically compare the objectives of sound reproduction with those of wearing a watch ?
No. Well, just a bit. I'm really suggesting that a vibrant market in some 'retro' product does not equate to proof that said product has hidden qualities that modern science has failed to reveal.
Just to return to the thread topic - can someone tell me what classification the perception of the phantom/missing fundamental fits into?
This fundamental frequency is not in the audio waveform & it is not perceived by all - so does it fall into audibility?
Should there be another classification in addition to the two given in the o/p?
This fundamental frequency is not in the audio waveform & it is not perceived by all - so does it fall into audibility?
Should there be another classification in addition to the two given in the o/p?
Hi Atmasphere. My reaction is the one that says that we don't need to understand how human hearing works if we can simply (re)produce the sound accurately and cleanly. To this end, I see the system comprising source, overworked stereo amp covering the full range, driving two passive speakers as being where the deficiencies lie. New ways to specify and measure this ancient configuration won't help us very much (IMO, YMMV etc.)
Does it say all that in the original post? Am I looking at the same one as you?
Edit: Ah, I see what you mean. Is this not simply another case where the person's perception is unimportant as long as he perceives the same sound from the audio system as he hears normally? Limited bass response from the speakers is an example where there will certainly be a mismatch, and the listener has to fill in the missing fundamental if he can.
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There are some people that will hear the fundamental & some that will mainly hear the overtones instead.
This means that one group's audibility can be different from another group & I'm not talking about hearing diseases or problems.
So which group's results do we use to define audibility?
Or do we have to check scientific audio tests against real world ? How would that be done?
This is the position held by many. But it is insufficient. Understanding how the ear/brain system works is paramount. For example, did you know that if there is information coming from the rear of the speaker, that when it bounces around in the room it can help with image location? This is due to human perceptual rules. That is why many loudspeakers have rear-firing information- they can take advantage of this to produce a more precise 3D soundstage, one closer to the original.
Put another way, how do you know when you are reproducing a sound cleanly?? Because test instruments, proven in certain situations to be insufficient to the cause, tell you so?
I mentioned earlier that Chaos Theory has something to say about audio amplification. One thing that it addresses is the fact that an audio circuit can behave predictably with a particular waveform, but not so predictably when the waveform is constantly changing. We do very little in the way of measurement with waveforms that never repeat themselves, but that is what we usually listen to. Yet I don't know of any audiophiles that really enjoy listening to sine or square waves. So we really don't know how much distortion our electronics are really making. The technology certainly exists to put some numbers to this but the will does not. IME this has a lot to do with the fact that many designers think we already have everything all figured out. Obviously that is not the case- its a made-up story, but it is one that is really common and commonly accepted.
Without the ear I couldn't appreciate my psychoacoustic circuit and without that I couldn't make any real progress in voicing my system. The ear is the best measurement device period. There is so much information in a recording, I use to get glimpses and now I get hit with a hammer. A measurement will point you in the right direction but the ear will get you farther in the audiophile journey.
Ralph-I hate to play the devil's advocate, but I'm going to. I have noticed over the years that many of your upgrades to your product line tout vanishingly lower distortion levels than the version that preceded your newest incarnation of the product. So are you saying there other distortions present in addition to the ones you know about and measure and find ways to lower that you don't know how to measure?
I said before and I hope I'm right. The ear does not measure. Machines cannot perceive. Of curse we can test to to see at what levels we perceive. Like I saidy ou can't prefer it if you can't hear it.. Once we hear it then we can measure it. it.
The audio community has it ass backwards...improve the delivery of information (psychoacoustics) and then listen and then measure. Now we measure,listen and no progress on delivery,expept for silk tweeters and Class D powererd subs....big deal.
I'm very sceptical of such ideas. Yes, it may sometimes help with (an illusion of?) ambience with some recordings, but may completely mess up others. If there is something to the idea, why not 'formalise' it and do it with DSP, multichannel audio, supplementary surround speakers etc.? The High End way of experimenting with rear firing drivers or whatever looks like trying to solve a many-dimensioned problem by chance using the approved analogue methods, then dressing it up retrospectively as scientific.
Well, I think we can imagine what you mean by accurately, but what means cleanly?
There is one aspect that most people fail to consider - SOTA systems reproduce the encoded information in the recording, they do not add it. Other systems just kill it. You should forget the SME room, that according to your view suffers from the problem you refer.
If you are interested in rear firing systems you should look at the Siegfried Linkwitz pages about dipoles.
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