[castleofargh]

The real work begins after a test is completed. The results need to be analyzed and the test probably would need to be updated and eventually repeated by others.

don't spoil, I haven't watched all the episodes of the scientific method yet. but I do have this very official document:

 

[Zapp_Fan]

AUDIBLY perfect. I think if you took a solo violin and recorded it and played it back on the stage of Carnegie Hall on a very good speaker that has been carefully calibrated, you could put a violinist right next to it playing the same thing and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. You would have two violin sounds with the same space wrapped around them. I think that would be identical.

It has to be single source single channel single location though. Once you add space to the recording, it becomes much more difficult.

This is pretty plausible, but the dispersion pattern of a speaker and a violin look quite different. For example some sound comes out the back and sides of the violin. I think "no audible difference" is a plausible outcome, but I also wouldn't bet too much money on that. A spherical speaker array might be a better approximation and that might be enough. But a violin is still not really omnidirectional. Even after getting to Carnegie Hall things would not be simple

The rigs they use to create (good) impulse response recordings are spheroid, with many drivers pointing in many directions, basically for this reason.

I guess I bring this up just to illustrate the difficulty of reproducing real spatial information and directionality. It's an example of of why aiming for 100% fidelity to live sound is not just difficult, but arguably a bad idea.

 

[ev13wt]

This is pretty plausible, but the dispersion pattern of a speaker and a violin look quite different. For example some sound comes out the back and sides of the violin. I think "no audible difference" is a plausible outcome, but I also wouldn't bet too much money on that. A spherical speaker array might be a better approximation and that might be enough. But a violin is still not really omnidirectional. Even after getting to Carnegie Hall things would not be simple

The rigs they use to create (good) impulse response recordings are spheroid, with many drivers pointing in many directions, basically for this reason.

I guess I bring this up just to illustrate the difficulty of reproducing real spatial information and directionality. It's an example of of why aiming for 100% fidelity to live sound is not just difficult, but arguably a bad idea.

You would need a sound source, omni. No walls (think speakers all over the walls) a couple of really fast computers. Then you might get close. Depending on the recording.

But I can figure out, over a very very bad low fi phone connection, with dropouts, that its my moms voice. We humans are really great at "filling the blanks". Its fun! Buy a CD, listen, go to an actual performance in the hall where it was created. Next day, listen to the CD again. It will literally "blow your mind".

 

[bigshot]

This is pretty plausible, but the dispersion pattern of a speaker and a violin look quite different.

Obviously directionality of the sound would be different. But that falls into the category of space again. We can reproduce sound audibly perfect, but reproducing space is the hard part. However, I'd bet that the distance from the stage to the first few rows of the audience would be enough space to obliterate the dispersement difference and the sound itself would be audibly identical.

The thing that makes the idea of a violin and recording sounding the same plausible is the fact that you're wrapping the ambience of Carnegie Hall around both of them equally. That would eliminate the problem of space and make the comparison focused just on the sound itself.

 

[gregorio]

This is pretty plausible, but the dispersion pattern of a speaker and a violin look quite different. For example some sound comes out the back and sides of the violin.

It doesn't really matter what the dispersion pattern of a speaker or a violin look like or that they're quite different, neither does it matter where the sound comes out of a violin. In a typical live performance situation you can't hear where the sound is coming out of a violin, that information is obliterated by the distance, absorption and reflections of the concert venue. This is particularly obvious in case of a french horn; the sound obviously comes out of the bell of a french horn but in a performance situation no one in the audience hears even the slightest bit of that sound, 100% of what the audience hears of a french horn is reflections. With a violin, it's probably not 100% but it would be surprising close and more than enough to obliterate where exactly the sound is coming out of a violin and the same would be true of a speaker, assuming the audience is a reasonable distance from the speaker.

G

 

[Ramblinman]

Skype, gotomeeting, Zoom - whatever you like. Here is the thing. I am not claiming that I am right, or you are right. My issue is not with what you are saying, but I do have an unsettling issue with science vs pseudo science - and this is very dangerous. In this age of social media, and online connectivity everyone claims to be an expert because of personal experiences, so people don't provide evidence, but they provide personal anecdotes. You claimed above that "measurement techniques are imperfect" what studies do you have that back up that claim? are they imperfect, or is it your lack of knowledge how measurements are done, or the limitation of your tools? The inaccuracies exist because of Gravitation, Weak, Electromagnetic, and Strong forces, this is the nature of the universe. We can observe things that human eyes cannot even see (e.g michael morley expirement, special, and general relativity) and people claim without evidence that "our measurements still suck" - OK makes sense, but please provide a paper, a study, anything that will back your claim up. I provided you three things about measurement, that are time tested, and anyone can google them, read about them, and make their own conclusion or try to provide counter evidence.

So.... you understand that internet studies cannot be trusted, but you want me to send you one backing up my point?

 

[Haris Javed]

So.... you understand that internet studies cannot be trusted, but you want me to send you one backing up my point?

No one is talking about internet studies, white papers are actual results, many companies / universities will publish those. E.g Texas Instruments will publish details for their OP AMPS, and its characteristics, and evidence / data that backup's their claims. Ncbi will publish papers / data from the medical field, The Physics Review does the same for the field of Physics.

 

[jagwap]

No one is talking about internet studies, white papers are actual results, many companies / universities will publish those. E.g Texas Instruments will publish details for their OP AMPS, and its characteristics, and evidence / data that backup's their claims. Ncbi will publish papers / data from the medical field, The Physics Review does the same for the field of Physics.

I am forced to use Texas Instruments datasheets and papers, but there are enough errors that I am carefull about trusting them. Also there is never anything about their sound in there. Just the performance, and you have to use you experience to know whether they will influence the sound.

The AES (Audio Engineering Society) is a great place to read peer reviewd papers on audio. However it will never satify the hardcore bunch here because they don't have a perfect record of being right.

 

[jagwap]

don't spoil, I haven't watched all the episodes of the scientific method yet. but I do have this very official document:

I like your infogram. It seems some here think observation no long exists though.

Edit for the pedants: proovable observation.
Many don't seem to believe the next three stages either.

 

[bigshot]

The AES (Audio Engineering Society) is a great place to read peer reviewd papers on audio. However it will never satify the hardcore bunch here because they don't have a perfect record of being right.

Who here doesn't respect the AES? Not all of their papers are good, but they're a great source overall.

 

[colonelkernel8]

I am forced to use Texas Instruments datasheets and papers, but there are enough errors that I am carefull about trusting them. Also there is never anything about their sound in there. Just the performance, and you have to use you experience to know whether they will influence the sound.

The AES (Audio Engineering Society) is a great place to read peer reviewd papers on audio. However it will never satify the hardcore bunch here because they don't have a perfect record of being right.

This is why you can order samples and an evaluation board from TI so you can test it. The specs (when correct mind you) really do tell the whole story as far as the performance of an electronic component is concerned, including its “sound”. The problem is the implementation is arguably the bigger part of the story...depending on the part of course.

 

[colonelkernel8]

Back to the topic at hand: “burn-in”.

@amirm, you have Audio Precision’s headphone test fixture correct? Would you be interested in conducting an experiment in conjunction with your website? We can control for headphone placement and any other concerns that were raised from Tyll’s adhoc experiment. Multiple examples of an individual model of headphone and multiple models.

Who knows, maybe we’ll (just amirm really) end up with something publishable.

Alternatively, since that would be expensive, we can attempt a less conclusive experiment with a single pair of headphones, while controlling for some of the potential issues spotted with Tyll’s example.

That should move our conversation away from pure conjecture and subjective listening experiences, and if we somehow falsify the notion of burn-in with headphones, we can start work on psychoacoustic “burn-in” or how our mind might adapt to a different sound signature.

 

[Ramblinman]

No one is talking about internet studies, white papers are actual results, many companies / universities will publish those. E.g Texas Instruments will publish details for their OP AMPS, and its characteristics, and evidence / data that backup's their claims. Ncbi will publish papers / data from the medical field, The Physics Review does the same for the field of Physics.

So how would any white paper back up audible perceptions?

 

[SilverEars]

I like your infogram. It seems some here think observation no long exists though.

Edit for the pedants: proovable observation.
Many don't seem to believe the next three stages either.

People always observe or notice things, but the problem is, they either stop there or go for the theory that is not tested. Scientific method is testing out the hypothesis with experimentations that is deducing all the possibilities to find the infallible theory. It's respectable since it's a rigorous process of getting a consistent truth from what you observe instead of making shallow assumptions.

The problems I find with much of audiophiles with tech babble is that they reiterate what the designer of the equipment state it, and passes it on akin to moral statements in a religion. If one doesn't understand the what is being fed to them, a reasonable person will not pass on information that they do not understand or bring it up. It's basically passing on something that people are seeing on a shallow level(they make significance of, but how is this reasonable if they don't understand it?), but do not fully understand to make the right determination to find it as a truth or not.

It falls under the definition of gullible.

 

[Haris Javed]

I am forced to use Texas Instruments datasheets and papers, but there are enough errors that I am carefull about trusting them. Also there is never anything about their sound in there. Just the performance, and you have to use you experience to know whether they will influence the sound.

The AES (Audio Engineering Society) is a great place to read peer reviewd papers on audio. However it will never satify the hardcore bunch here because they don't have a perfect record of being right.

That is Ok - again due to the nature of universe these things cannot be 100% on spot. For this exact reason statistics exists. If you sample a million OP AMPS you will notice that 68% of OP AMPS will be in +- 1sd of the mean, and 96% will be in +- 2sd of the mean. Out of millions of OP AMPS some will just right out fail, and if you are testing with a p - value of .05 then you should be OK with 50,000 of them failing