Preference vs. audibility - please keep them separate.
- Thread starter j_j
- Start date
- Status
John, for example, I started a thread quite a while back on receivers that come in all flavors and at all prices; who's posting there?
But I don't mind anymore now because I know that the underground community find it inspiring enough to read some. :b
Amir is absolutely right in what he just said: It's up to you and you only to take charge and not worry. ...Don't ever expect or assume from others, but only from yourself. :b
John, for example, I started a thread quite a while back on receivers that come in all flavors and at all prices; who's posting there?
But I don't mind anymore now because I know that the underground community find it inspiring enough to read some. :b
Amir is absolutely right in what he just said: It's up to you and you only to take charge and not worry. ...Don't ever expect or assume from others, but only from yourself. :b
I'm not discounting what Amir said, and I'm not "worried" about it, but it is frustrating when you are trying to create dialogue and no one cares or has even one iota of interest. This is not unlike your AVR thread and the PICTURE thread (which I love by the way and look at all the time).
Sorry but it is not end of discussion - it is just a start. You are addressing individual preference and completely forgetting about collective preference - obtained analyzing statistically the individual preferences. Then preference can be studied scientifically, and is no more only an individual characteristic. IMHO, it is this type of preference we many times implicitly address in this forum - we do not spend our time just debating a random individually owned entity. We express our individual preferences and compare them with other groups preference, surely most of the time using methods that are not scientific.
Concerning the second part of your post, it would be very nice to have someone who could address the "self-training, or whatever". Audiophile culture on audibility is usually limited to a few audio challenges that have been reported in old audio magazines - journals of Psychoacoustics and AES publications are not of free access.
That is a good point Micro,
because a lot of the scientific research out of Harman group can start from this and group tests, with their statistical analysis of preference vs performance and cognition (blind and sighted).
The whole process could be deemed critical as part of a R&D/development cycle (which is part of the narrative reasonably often from Harman).
Cheers
Orb
Last edited:
I believe that people do care. WBF is a unique site, you know that, and it's up to me (you, him, her) to create, sustain, invigorate people's interest.
I think its fair - thanks Myles and Amir. Will you also create a "No against DBT talk" label?
No, I'm not forgetting that. They still end at the nose of the group, as it were. Like what you like.
PLEASE talk about music. I'm all for it. I don't care what the media is, either.
If you want to reject science, start a "no science" forum, why not? I'm sure Amir can add it.
You made the claim, now support it.
Do we need to inform the ethics committees of the IEEE and AES of your complaints? If not, I think we can assume they are groundless, and merely constitute disparagement for the sake of being annoying.
Your choice, I guess.
Music is an interesting one in the context of preference vs audibility/quality.
Science shows how there can be a preference for a more "notable"/louder music (really oversimplifying as everyone knows) and this lead to the loudness wars/dynamically compressed music that may seem livelier for listeners.
And yet I would say nearly everyone of us here hate dynamically compressed music due to the effect it has on instruments and the voice, yet statistically majority of general listeners do not really care or notice the difference (unless talking about extremes).
The other aspect I guess historically was when they added the security to music that was meant to have no audibility and did pass large early trials, however later on was proved to have a negative effect (would be interesting in those early trials to know statistics of preference for with/without the security encoding).
Cheers
Orb
The problem, of course, is that subjective results are not transitive. This means that if you make something .3dB more intense, most people are going to think it sounds better. And, comparing .3 and .6dB more intense, they will vote for the .6dB. HOWEVER, if you compare the .6 (or .9 or 1.2 or something farther along, depends on source and person) with the original, they will dislike the higher level.
In other words if A>B is true, B>C is true, and C>D is true, that does not mean that A>C or A>D is true.
As to the A-flat remover, it wasn't a particularly good idea in the first place. When we heard about it at Bell Labs in the Acoustics Research Department, the reaction was a mix of amusement and exasperation. The argument that it would take a contrived signal to detect it was at least moderately wrong, and the idea that it would work at all was also pretty strange, given noise modulation in cassettes, distortions in LP's, FM noise, and so on. It was before any perceptual coder (it was an analog system), and perceptual coding would have driven it completely bonkers, too.
j_j said:
Fully agree.
BUT
High-end audio is built on one single pillar: sighted testing. Remove that pillar and the whole building is bound to collapse.
Talking ABX: attached is the pdf of the 9th ASA meeting where Munson & Gardner presented their paper (C9 on page 675)
Klaus
It can be an interesting debate - how does high-end achieve consistently a fantastic sounding quality using mainly sighted testing as a development tool?
jj talked about audibility, which translates into audibility of differences between components, and there high-end only can survive as long as comparison tests are not done blind. Before this turns into a heated DBT debate, I stop. I for one turned my back on audio high-end for the above reason.
Klaus
Because it's mainly about design. The testing that everyone seems to think is the key to steering development is really just confirmation.
Or... putting it another way, given the sources, devices, components that have all been developed by objective design methods, it's hard even for a boutique wannabe 'high end' company to get it spectacularly wrong when following the data sheets and bolting them together. A 300kg solid gold chassis won't actually do any harm, even if it does no good either.
- Status
Similar threads
