you cannot trust your eyes, so why trust your ears? - Page 7

If this post was targeted at me, I wasn't calling anyone an idiot. The point I was trying to make is that measurements don't give interpretation, and that misinterpreting the use of measurements leads to errors. It could be that you really are an idiot and didn't understand ph0rk's post. It could be that you're smarter than all of us and were distracted. You could've been tired, multitasking... any number of things could have explained why ph0rk's post was incomprehensible to you and not to me. But measurements don't go that far. They don't give you the interpretive leap, and they also won't explain things for you (such as explaining what the post actually meant). I wasn't trying to insult anyone, I was just merely pointing out that any measurement/data collection/etc only has usefulness inside of a specific purpose. In audio's case, the measurements are not there to tell you what a device sounds like, but that by itself does not make them useless, it just means that they're helpful in some ways (such as finding differences, audible limits, etc) and not in other ways (telling someone "how something sounds," in which case it's just as inaccurate as calling something "laid back, thick, chocolaty, easy going and easy to listen to")

Thanks for your response royalcrown. Sorry I’ve been unable to respond for a day and this thread has moved on, so I’ll keep my response brief:

Your answers are the constructive type that I welcome irrespective of whether or not I agree with them. My little rant was specifically about the repetitive nature of the more negative responses. You say that you don’t consider DBT infallible, which is good, but that is not the way some of the closed minded responses come across.

Anyway, to try to keep to the intentions of this tread, here is my opinion on when I should trust my ears:

I have no choice but to trust my ears all the time because they are the only ones I’ve got.

Of course, I also put in a lot of effort to counter the pitfalls, but on balance I trust my ears more than other peoples tests or measurements - however more controlled and scientific those may be. This also implies that my views are of limited use to anyone else. I can't help that, but a variety of views can help a prospective buyer to open their horizons and form a short list.

And well you should - unless you were there you don't know if they were performed correctly.

Chances are going by the impressions of others could work similarly well for many things, as long as you have enough impressions from enough different people to run an impromptu consensus analysis - one or two isn't enough!

Thanks I feel better now. And I don't interpret you including this possibility among others (in light of the discussions we have had on this thread and others), as being insulting at all.

Please, PhilS, can you litigate this forum into nonexistence? I'll completely mod my well-loved H120 (80gb hdd, clock etc) and give it to you if you can erase this sad forum from the face of the internet.

you clipped off the very next sentence where I included the possibility of you being smarter than all of us. Heck, you could be Chris Langan and this could be your online handle for all I know - the point I was trying to make was that it could be any mixture of the causes I mentioned and more, and we have no way of determining which one is the right one. I guess this is all I can do - if you still want to make it seem like I'm attacking you, there's not much else I can do.

Yeah, you can run to your bed, start crying saying "why are this believers so bad with me?", like Chris Croker style (or whatever his surname is)

Edit: I didn't see any insult in what you wrote. I just saw some irony and facts expressed in a relaxed way. By the way, I am really tired and have slept very little lately, so don't get me wrong

I'm currently in the market for a speaker upgrade in my, well, speaker rig.

I have homed in on the Harbeth speakers since they seem to be the answer to everything I seek in a speaker. During my studies I have been reading their user group forum in which the designer, Alan Shaw, is active.

It was extremely refreshing to read what he has to say. This is in answer to a customer who claims he can hear the difference between cables.

Alan Shaw on trusting your senses.

Alan Shaw on cables:

"One thing to add - never, during the entire fifty year history of the BBC's involvement with speaker design employing the world's best audio engineers was the subject of speaker cable ever mentioned, discussed, analysed or given any elevated status. Providing that the cables were adequately thick (for the current and length) that was the end of the matter. Don't you think that if this was a really significant matter that one - just one - of those pragmatic boffins at some point over the fifty years would have taken a look at it? We cannot accuse them of being blinkered or narrow minded when that very group of researchers posed and solved the revolutionary question 'do you think that we could improve fidelity if we replaced paper speaker cones with one made from plastic? Imagine my surprise (as a then audiophile) when upon taking over at Harbeth I discovered that our founder used telephone cable inside his MK1,2,3,4 speakers. But it met his criteria of low resistance (for a short length) and colour coding."

This is from a man who actually knows what he's talking about. Oh, and his designs are highly praised and routinely makes it to Stereophiles Recommended Components.

This is really a man I'd like to do busyness with; I'll probably have a home audition next weekend.

He makes a few good points, although there is quite a bit of hyperbole and overbreadth in what he says, and I think the few good points he makes are obscured by the hyperbole/overbreadth, or are not really relevant to the issue at hand. In addition, some of things he says, IMO, are just plain incorrect, or at the least, are very misleading (e.g., point #6.) Anyway, his comments certainly would not motivate me to buy a speaker from him; on the other hand, if they sounded great to me, that's another matter.

My understanding (from perception, taken a long time ago) is that specific audio memory was very short, while emotional memory was long. A cursory googling doesn't reveal anything definitive, though.

Yes, this notion is repeated often on this forum, i.e., that "auditory memory" is very short. My understanding is that the tests involve the ability to recall a precise test tone that is heard for a very short duration. Nobody has yet pointed me (despite numerous requests) to a test that would be similar to listening to a music passage with which one is intimately familiar, and attempting to determine if the passage sounds different when something is changed.

P.S. I'm not sure what you mean by "emotional memory."

Of course, as I said, I homed in on these speakers because they seem to offer what I seek - then I began reading more. It is only reassuring to learn that they are designed by a man who use proper methods and understanding of the way humans perceive audio. I'll soon see if they sound good to me in my home.

I think PhilS's point was that if you can't rule out "PhilS is an idiot" based on his other posts on this thread, then you are being insulting. I don't think anyone says you are "attacking" him, but you and Ph0rk are definitely not as polite as PhilS. (Neither am I.) I do think that Ph0rk's paragraph can be demonstrated fairly convincingly to be far harder than a 5th grade level, and generally "hard to read" to a non-technical specialist.

I was able to guess what Ph0rk meant... but my job actually involves decoding poorly written computer software and documentation. I practice this skill regularly. In fact, of all the people in my group, I'm the best at it---partly because I have developed certain reading techniques and see it as a challenge.

In other words, I'm no fifth grader.

Hey Bullseye, you've said that you want to do good in the world by preventing people from wasting their money on exotic cables. I think you will have more success if you learn good communication skills. We've said it before, and I'll say it again---putting an emoticon after an insult does not make "not an insult." And if these insults are coming out of you because English is not your first language, you might want to learn a few things about English.

Hey, I used to write poorly documented code!

To be honest though, I think before writing and speaking so much at my day gig that I tend to treat web forums as more of a conversation than written discourse, which is why I rarely point out the typos and grammar of others.

I guess when you spend half a day converting a paragraph-long sentence into two half-paragraph long sentences (three on a good day), your standards for "hard to understand" vary.