[Sam Spade]

@bigshot there is no need for any dunning kruger BS or "deciding what i hear" if i obviously hear the difference with my own ears, you guys are free to disregard my opinion tho just like i do with yours

its nice that objectivists have for everything a explanation but reality speaks another truth

knowing the theory is one thing, but if reality shows (some of us, with good ears i guess) that there is more to it then this is all we need, a good pair of ears

People with good ears still fall for placebo. Blind testing lets you show what good ears can really do.

 

[Sam Spade]

@bigshot there is no need for any dunning kruger BS or "deciding what i hear" if i obviously hear the difference with my own ears, you guys are free to disregard my opinion tho just like i do with yours

its nice that objectivists have for everything a explanation but reality speaks another truth

knowing the theory is one thing, but if reality shows (some of us, with good ears i guess) that there is more to it then this is all we need, a good pair of ears

Dunning kruger effect is real and has been empirically demonstrated.

 

[bigshot]

Dunning kruger effect is real and has been empirically demonstrated...

...by visitors to this discussion forum!

 

[gregorio]

Illusions or human perceptions ?

What’s the difference?

G

 

[The Jester]

What’s the difference?

G

Illusionists use slight of hand and other tricks to manipulate perceptions,
Accurate perceptual clues help recreate the original timbre of instruments etc combined with memorised experience,
Put your finger in a glass of water, is it an illusion that it’s wet or a combination of texture, temperature and memorised experience giving the perception of “wet”, since human skin has no hydro receptors

 

[castleofargh]

Option A: do a personal controlled test to demonstrate the audibility of something specific. I pass statistical significance.
It still does not mean someone else would hear it.
It doesn’t prove someone else with the same model of playback rig will notice(although it does suggest he would, a sample of 1 isn’t close to enough to conclude on that).
There is still a possibility of the test being flawed in the way it’s set up, or maybe because of a defective element in the testing rig.


Option B: sit down, play 2 settings or 2 devices while knowing what goes on at every moment, get a feeling that cannot be verified by that experience due to lack of controls, declare whatever it is I think about is causing the feeling. Make generalizations about it because the entire objective world revolves around me and my feelings from the non test.
Find someone else who sucks at testing, who might have felt whatever, not even necessarily what I felt, and conclude that it’s proof I was correct all along and that I never ever need to put in any more effort to know everything for a fact.
I enjoy that feeling of being special, so my brain will get an interest in feeding me more and more differences between anything and anything else. If others feel it, I’m right. If nobody else does, I’m simply that good and special.


Option C: do whatever I want, realize it doesn’t prove much of anything. Avoid making empty claims left and right. Go on with my life without the need to drag everybody else in my subjective reality.


Despite the forum being drowned by option B posts, I still like to hope and believe it’s merely representation and that most people are option C people. I’m mentioning this because I think it’s important to differentiate noisy few from potential silent majority. Online, that difference gets blurred real fast(even more so with bot farms and propaganda or marketing campaigns).
Follow the facts, and stick to calling facts only what is well demonstrated. Be careful not to judge something as true based on the number of times empty claims are made about it.
Just doing that is hard, it’s already going against several ”hardwired” brain mechanisms. Being less wrong is work.

 

[gregorio]

Illusionists use slight of hand and other tricks to manipulate perceptions,

Agreed.

Accurate perceptual clues help recreate the original timbre of instruments etc combined with memorised experience …

What “accurate perceptual clues”? Music recordings are not created from “accurate perceptual clues”, they’re created from no perceptual clues at all in the case of electronic music and then artificial “clues” added later or they’re created from numerous different individual takes which are then stitched together and processed with artificial “clues” or even in the case of classical and most other acoustic genres, recorded with multiple microphones in different locations and therefore the “perceptual clues” are literally all over the place and not at all accurate. The only potential exception would be true binaural recordings but of course there’s a relatively minuscule number of those.

When recording, mixing and mastering music recordings, engineers/producers use artificial reverbs, delays, EQ, compression and/or numerous other psychoacoustic tricks to manipulate perceptions. So again, what’s the difference?

Put your finger in a glass of water, is it an illusion that it’s wet or a combination of texture, temperature and memorised experience giving the perception of “wet”, since human skin has no hydro receptors

If there were a substance that wasn’t water but looked like water, had similar texture/temperature/other characteristics and you were told it was water, wouldn’t you perceive it to be water? Wouldn’t that be an illusion?

G

 

[The Jester]

Agreed.

What “accurate perceptual clues”? Music recordings are not created from “accurate perceptual clues”, they’re created from no perceptual clues at all in the case of electronic music and then artificial “clues” added later or they’re created from numerous different individual takes which are then stitched together and processed with artificial “clues” or even in the case of classical and most other acoustic genres, recorded with multiple microphones in different locations and therefore the “perceptual clues” are literally all over the place and not at all accurate. The only potential exception would be true binaural recordings but of course there’s a relatively minuscule number of those.

When recording, mixing and mastering music recordings, engineers/producers use artificial reverbs, delays, EQ, compression and/or numerous other psychoacoustic tricks to manipulate perceptions. So again, what’s the difference?

If there were a substance that wasn’t water but looked like water, had similar texture/temperature/other characteristics and you were told it was water, wouldn’t you perceive it to be water? Wouldn’t that be an illusion?

G

Texture would give a clue to viscosity, then memory experience if there’s anything familiar … temperature of different evaporation rates would be another clue once the finger is removed ..
With manipulations and or psychoacoustic tricks surely that depends on skill and the amount of time and money made available, “good enough” vs the best possible …
It could be said that everything outside the body is perception translated and interpreted by the senses and memory to create the world as we perceive it, recorded music is the illusion that tries to fool the senses into perceiving it as “real” … whatever “real” is …

 

[gregorio]

Texture would give a clue to viscosity, then memory experience if there’s anything familiar

Exactly, but in the case of water we rarely or never come across substances that look, smell and have other similar characteristics but with music recordings it’s the exact opposite, we rarely or never come across recordings that only contain “accurate perceptual clues”. Maybe I’ve misunderstood your analogy?

G

 

[sander99]

specially obvious are changes that stay consistent with each test but "i guess its all placebo"

Where did you get the idea that placebo is another word for randomization? It is not. If you are convinced - on a concious or on a sub-concious level - that a certain change will occur it can very well consistently happen. Even if you would do your utter best to suggest to yourself that something else will happen, your sub-concious conviction could still overrule that and make the same change happen as before (in case someone was wondering whether you can eliminate placebo by counter-thoughts).

 

[The Jester]

Sorry,
Did an edit during your reply …

 

[gregorio]

Sorry,
Did an edit during your reply …

No problem, it seems I may have misinterpreted your question and in practice you agree that illusion and perception are effectively the same thing?

With manipulations and or psychoacoustic tricks surely that depends on skill and the amount of time and money made available, “good enough” vs the best possible …

Sure, the final quality of a recording depends on the skill of those who create it and the resources available to them. However, “good enough vs best possible” is a very vague concept in this context because it assumes we’re trying to create the illusion of reality. Even in those relatively rare situations where creating the illusion of reality is a serious consideration, it’s still very rarely the primary goal. In many/most music recordings, pretty much the last thing we want is the actual reality of the performance/s and even an illusion of a reality is pretty far down the list of considerations or not a consideration at all.

G

 

[The Jester]

Indeed,
Probably the wrong thread for this discussion as 16 vs 24 is largely irrelevant,
More of a question than a statement but take for instance a single instrument, it’s unique sound is identified by the initial transient and harmonic overtones, so with the sometimes overuse of peak limiting and/or compression to increase overall loudness would that change the relative levels of the harmonics and natural decay compared to the initial transient level as it’s the one more likely to be changed more than lower level harmonics,
And if that’s the case would it then subtlety change the individual sound or timbre ?

 

[The Jester]

With illusion vs perception the difference is the experience memory, if the illusion can accurately replicate all the perceptual clues of say an acoustic guitar in an acoustic space that satisfies the experience memory then illusion = perception.
The big one in that is the “if” and how accurate is really needed…
As the old saying goes “fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time”..

 

[Sam Spade]

No problem, it seems I may have misinterpreted your question and in practice you agree that illusion and perception are effectively the same thing?

Sure, the final quality of a recording depends on the skill of those who create it and the resources available to them. However, “good enough vs best possible” is a very vague concept in this context because it assumes we’re trying to create the illusion of reality. Even in those relatively rare situations where creating the illusion of reality is a serious consideration, it’s still very rarely the primary goal. In many/most music recordings, pretty much the last thing we want is the actual reality of the performance/s and even an illusion of a reality is pretty far down the list of considerations or not a consideration at all.

G

Illusion and perception are two different things. An illusion is something that misleads what you perceive.