Quote:
Originally Posted by
smial1966 
If you don't trust your own ears, how do you know what you're hearing?!?
The answer is in my post that you quoted: via proper ABX testing, which isolates what you're
actually hearing from any sighted bias. I am fairly certain, from experience, that what you perceive during your casual listening sessions with the Tera Player incorporates a huge part of expectation bias which doesn't involve your ears, and is a far cry from what you actually hear.
I don't claim that I don't suffer from it too: I'm human just like you. I suspect that I'm afflicted with just as much bias as you when I listen to, say, my O2/ODAC. I read about it prior to my purchase and bought into the hype just as much as you did with the Tera Player. The difference is, I only claim transparency, and I don't attribute some mysterious and magical properties to it. All the hype that surrounded it was based on objective measurements and double blind tests. Also, I only spent €250 on it, not €500, not €840. What I rave about, I can objectively measure and test for, in a repeatable fashion. There is no mystery, as far as I'm concerned. No magic, no voodoo, nothing science can't explain or measure, just straight up competence and maybe even talent, free of the all too common bullschiit that's so pervasive in audiophool circles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
smial1966
Surely even a rational objectivist could differentiate between a poorly rendered MP3 track and an uncompressed music file played on the same DAP?
Probably, but any MP3 I produce are very high quality (LAME) and transparent. Same goes for other formats that I've used (Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, LossyFLAC).
It is
precisely because I've successfully ABXed differences that were actually audible, and
failed when they were not, that I have some sense of what is real and what is likely just some sort of bias. I still stumble on some tracks that raise my suspicions, which subsequently disappear after I run an ABX test to make sure. I still get surprised sometimes!
Most of the time, people imagine differences where there are none, and are simply ignorant of what actual differences sound like, most notably with lossy codecs. And you might notice, that the most vocal audiophools know nothing about digital audio, perceptual encoding, and sampling theory. Again, I'm largely ignorant myself, but at least I know it, and instead of letting my imagination go wild, I try to understand the inner workings of what I'm listening to.
Edited by skamp - 1/9/13 at 2:51pm
