Why do you bother to hang out in sound science? You make proclamations that are so out of tune with this forum, it’s pitiful. Are you just looking for attention? Do you not have people who will listen to you offline? I really don’t have a lot of interest in your performances, I’m afraid. Maybe someone else will play your game.
I believe my points are pertinent to the topic. Yes, I have so much..........a big house and a fifty foot pool, places to go and things to do. But your being careful not to see things totally, you only view the world one way, thus I am here to bring color into the thread!
Prat is a real thing but it has far more to do with the creation of music than the reproduction of it. If you are playing an instrument the call outs for the time and tempo will be on the sheet music and the conductor will give you cues and control the pace as it goes. And if you are working with digital music you can control it in the software, like the tempo of your drum track or something and if it matches the rest of the instruments. During playback none of this should be an issue unless you are controlling the speed of the playback or you have some serious issues with your equipment. There is no way your cables, dac, amp or speakers are going to effect the pace, timing or speed of the music or specific instruments. Especially not on headphone that are right on your ears with very tiny fast reacting drivers.
Now I will agree some headphones have trouble with complex music and get muddy or confused and not separate the instruments well but I wouldn't call that prat.
I could see maybe were you might hear something similar to what pacing or timing might be if you were listening to a tape deck or turntable and it was having trouble keeping the speed constant. However for digital music it just shouldn't be a thing. It should be a term used to describe music, not equipment.
But a giant portion of the audio community seems to think that it’s an actual thing that not only speakers and headphones do, but amps and sources do too. I seem to think it can be influenced by the FR. Meaning some frequencies will influence it more than others. But more than that there is a style of bass reverb that is both clear and not so clear. The result is a sound like the way a room will generate the response of sound waves bouncing inside the speaker then going out and reflecting back from the side walls and rear walls of the listening room. This has been tested and confirmed to be a real phenomenon and not a guess. What it ends up doing is adding a small lower midrange boost to the frequency response.
This has been used as an additional add to the response of headphones to emulate the feeling of being in an actual room listening to speakers. You could look at it like a smearing of some frequencies which in turn would also happen if listening to speakers in a room. While at first it may seem not advantageous to include such distortion, but for many they enjoy such effects, finding it a new addition to crossing the difference between speakers in a room and headphones.
Prat is a real thing but it has far more to do with the creation of music than the reproduction of it. If you are playing an instrument the call outs for the time and tempo will be on the sheet music and the conductor will give you cues and control the pace as it goes. And if you are working with digital music you can control it in the software, like the tempo of your drum track or something and if it matches the rest of the instruments. During playback none of this should be an issue unless you are controlling the speed of the playback or you have some serious issues with your equipment. There is no way your cables, dac, amp or speakers are going to effect the pace, timing or speed of the music or specific instruments. Especially not on headphone that are right on your ears with very tiny fast reacting drivers.
Now I will agree some headphones have trouble with complex music and get muddy or confused and not separate the instruments well but I wouldn't call that prat.
I could see maybe were you might hear something similar to what pacing or timing might be if you were listening to a tape deck or turntable and it was having trouble keeping the speed constant. However for digital music it just shouldn't be a thing. It should be a term used to describe music, not equipment.
“First, most speakers are designed to measure flat in an anechoic chamber. When a speaker is put into a room it gets a bass boost from the proximity of the walls—this boost typically happens at about 200Hz and below. It also naturally gains a warm tilt due to the ever reducing sound power being put into the room as the frequency gets higher and the speakers directivity becomes more narrow.”
Everything can’t be measured. Take a sunset, every sunset is slightly different. There is an element of subjectivity there. Maybe one sunset has more clouds and another has less, who to say one in better? It’s entirely subjective. There is absolutely a place in science for subjective observations? The perceived bounce of a reproduction can be noted, less or more....to the point of smearing detail or bringing detail into absolute clear focus.
You’re literally making up this as you go. If you have any evidence to produce instead of meaningless flowery prose, now would be a good time to post it.
Unless you can somehow learn the difference between subjective preference and defined point of reference, nothing can be made of your postings in Sound Science.
But a giant portion of the audio community seems to think that it’s an actual thing that not only speakers and headphones do, but amps and sources do too. I seem to think it can be influenced by the FR. Meaning some frequencies will influence it more than others. But more than that there is a style of bass reverb that is both clear and not so clear. The result is a sound like the way a room will generate the response of sound waves bouncing inside the speaker then going out and reflecting back from the side walls and rear walls of the listening room. This has been tested and confirmed to be a real phenomenon and not a guess. What it ends up doing is adding a small lower midrange boost to the frequency response.
This has been used as an additional add to the response of headphones to emulate the feeling of being in an actual room listening to speakers. You could look at it like a smearing of some frequencies which in turn would also happen if listening to speakers in a room. While at first it may seem not advantageous to include such distortion, but for many they enjoy such effects, finding it a new addition to crossing the difference between speakers in a room and headphones.
“First, most speakers are designed to measure flat in an anechoic chamber. When a speaker is put into a room it gets a bass boost from the proximity of the walls—this boost typically happens at about 200Hz and below. It also naturally gains a warm tilt due to the ever reducing sound power being put into the room as the frequency gets higher and the speakers directivity becomes more narrow.”
Would that be the same “giant portion of the audio community” that believes green markers make CDs sound better, digital cables sound different, Ethernet switches alter sound, and putting a certain sticker on a chip helps with quantum noise?
Would that be the same “giant portion of the audio community” that can’t prove any of those things are true?
At what point will something be too absurd for audiophiles to believe in with zero evidence?
Would that be the same “giant portion of the audio community” that believes green markers make CDs sound better, digital cables sound different, Ethernet switches alter sound, and putting a certain sticker on a chip helps with quantum noise?
Would that be the same “giant portion of the audio community” that can’t prove any of those things are true?
At what point will something be too absurd for audiophiles to believe in with zero evidence?
Obviously the green CD markers haven’t really been talked about since the late 1990s, when they came out. Only very few audiophiles from that time remember the advertising. PRaT on the other hand is a way to describe a form of musicality.
And I’m not sure a giant portion of the audiophile community purchased the green pens?
The facts are, if you are at all interested in facts, show that actually many headphone characteristics can’t be fully tested. You obviously know this but somehow fail to admit the fact?
Can’t be fully tested:
1) soundstage
2) timbre
3) imaging
4) PRaT
These can’t be tested so I guess none of them even exist?
Definition of musicality
1 : sensitivity to, knowledge of, or talent for music
2 : the quality or state of being musical : MELODIOUSNESS
Examples of musicality in a Sentence
The judges will employ the following criteria: musicality (40%), star quality (20%), charisma (20%), and technical skill (20%)..
— Billboard Staff, Billboard, 22 Sep. 2021
But Markie had a playfulness and an off-key, enthusiastic musicality that turned out to have pop potential.
— Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2021
If someone else is interested in the ways to measure the aspects of sound fidelity related to soundstage, timbre and imaging, I'm happy to discuss it. But I'm not interested in going in circles with your poetic blather. You've proven that you don't listen and you don't have anything on topic to say.
There are actually many things in audio that can be tested and measured, including all the things you listed. Pretty much if you can accurately describe what you hear it can be measured with the right equipment, knowledge and effort. Just no one really bothers doing it. At least not reviewers at any rate. I am sure there are labs where this is done. I would bet you Harmon and Bose have equipment that can do it. You can for sure measure and compare timbre, its frequency. And you can measure imaging and sound stage with the correct equipment and graph it. It would be more difficult with headphones but it could be done. And measuring pace and timing would not be that hard either. I would propose you can measure things most humans cannot even perceive.
What you can't measure is what something sounds like to a particular person or what someone might prefer. This would take a fairly large study and would be an average. Again look at the work Harmon did with the Harmon Curve. And what you can't do is predict how something will interact or sound in a particular room. That is what room correction and dsp is for. Well actually it can be modeled in software if you have all the data. This is what room correction does, it measures many of these things and corrects it. Some room correction goes far beyond eqing frequency response and correcting it.
If you can't accurately describe what you are hearing or it can't be measured and compared then it is probably in your head. If someone says this product is more "musical" than another one that is fine and dandy but WHY was it more musical. Tell me what you heard different. And I am willing to bet if you measured everything you could compare it and find differences in the data. Just because people don't do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
I will agree with you that most of the things you listed there really isn't any data for, at least not publicly. Most of it is done by simple listening tests. However if someone wanted to take the time to do it I am quite sure it could be done.
Definition of musicality
1 : sensitivity to, knowledge of, or talent for music
2 : the quality or state of being musical : MELODIOUSNESS
Examples of musicality in a Sentence
The judges will employ the following criteria: musicality (40%), star quality (20%), charisma (20%), and technical skill (20%)..
— Billboard Staff, Billboard, 22 Sep. 2021
But Markie had a playfulness and an off-key, enthusiastic musicality that turned out to have pop potential.
— Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2021
If someone else is interested in the ways to measure the aspects of sound fidelity related to soundstage, timbre and imaging, I'm happy to discuss it. But I'm not interested in going in circles with your poetic blather. You've proven that you don't listen and you don't have anything on topic to say.
Typical audiophile tactics - fabricate a hardware based metric then state you‘re failing to prove anything because you can’t measure said imaginary metric.
If someone else is interested in the ways to measure the aspects of sound fidelity related to soundstage, timbre and imaging, I'm happy to discuss it. But I'm not interested in going in circles with your poetic blather. You've proven that you don't listen and you don't have anything on topic to say.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, or point me to some studies or something that explains it. This kind of stuff fascinates me. When people say a certain thing can't be measured, like how a cable sounds or whatever I am always like "Oh I am quite sure it can be measured with the correct equipment. Just no one has bothered doing it because it isn't worth their time.".
As we've discussed before, headphones aren't capable of true soundstage. You need speakers for that. It's a combination of channel separation and the acoustics of the room. Channel separation is the primary issue, and it's generally down at an inaudible level with modern home audio components. It just isn't something to worry about. The acoustics of the room involve delay and response deviation created by the physical shape and construction materials of the room. Obviously, houses don't come with acoustic spec sheets, so you measure using a calibration system and microphone. It measures the sound of the room from the listening position and corrects the time and response to optimize the playback. Using the term the way headphone incorrectly people use it, soundstage is the degree of openness or closedness of the cans. In general, tightly sealed headphones sound more like they're inside your head, more open ones may sound more open. The materials of the surrounds and the distance from your ear can affect it too. But it also involves a lot of factors, some of which are specific to the individual listener's head and ear shape. Even if it was measured, my measurements wouldn't be the same as yours, so there's no baseline for the calibration. If we all were equipped with identical noggins, there might be more of a motivation to quantify that.
Timbre is directly related to frequency response. If you take a piano and severely band limit it to the mids and upper mids, it would sound a lot like a xylophone. A violin sounds like a violin because of harmonics. A balanced frequency response presents the fundamental tones in perfect relation to the upper harmonics, and as long as it is balanced throughout the entire range of human hearing, it will present as a very natural sounding violin.
Imaging has to do with distortion and frequency response. Obviously distortion blurs detail. But frequency response can too because of auditory masking. If there is a spike in one frequency, it can cancel out an octave above. This can create opaque sound because you are hearing accentuated sound in one range and a missing section in the next. (This also interferes with upper harmonics, and is part of what causes artificial timbres by the way.) If distortion is below the audible thresholds, and the response is balanced, the sound becomes crystal clear and you can hear every detail in the sound. Noise is also an issue here. A high noise floor obviously creates an opaque sound too.
So, aside from the physical aspects of the room and the construction of the headphones themselves, which are widely variable, every aspect of sound fidelity can be broken down to response, distortion, noise, dynamics (i.e. amplitude) and timing. Thankfully, when it comes to modern electronic components like DACs, DAPs, players and amps, all of the problems in these areas are usually below the threshold of audibility at normal listening volumes. The wild card is the transducers and the physical aspects of sound, not the signal processing.
All of these things are based on scientific principles. It isn't based on loosey goosey mysticism or guesses based on ignorance or sympathetic magic.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, or point me to some studies or something that explains it. This kind of stuff fascinates me. When people say a certain thing can't be measured, like how a cable sounds or whatever I am always like "Oh I am quite sure it can be measured with the correct equipment. Just no one has bothered doing it because it isn't worth their time.".
A difficulty arises in the correlation of a perception ie the reason I prefer one cable over another with an observed measurement ie capacitance , resistance
Fidelity is separate from perception. The problem is that people get them mixed up and use the individuality of perception to attempt to claim that fidelity doesn’t exist.
Sound consists of frequency and amplitude spread out over time. If you reproduce those three things beyond the ability of human ears to hear, you’ve achieved audible transparency. Increasing the fidelity beyond that point won’t make it sound any better.
Perception is totally individual. Each person has to satisfy themselves on that. The baseline is the threshold of human hearing- high fidelity sound.
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