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Originally Posted by jonnywolfet /img/forum/go_quote.gif
hmmm, i have had nothing but joy from my ps1, i would say that it sounds better than average by a long shot.
to what would you attribute all the positive comments about the scph-100x?
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First of all, how something sounds to you, and how something measures are two different things. Assuming that because something measures better than it should sound better makes an assumption that there is a linear relationship between audio measurements and audio enjoyment, and while I am unaware of any data that will back up this assertion - it is almost certainly completely untrue. The fact that some people enjoy tubes which produce very high levels of distortion would seem to be proof of that. All else being equal, i would expect that people will usually prefer a system that has less distortion than more (e.g. I would imagine that someone who likes the sound of their tube amp with X measured amount of distortion, would like it less if suddenly the level of distortion increased by some factor Y to X*Y, but I could be wrong). The problem is all else isn't equal.
You and I will hear the same song, reproduced by the exact same system in the same room, differently, and this is due to differences in our brains and our ears.
First of all, lets get it clear - many, many, many products get good reviews from people, despite the fact that they are crap. Skull Candy headphones would seem to be an appropriate example here. If you walked into a high school and asked kids what they thought of Skull Candy headphones, and if they thought they were good - I'm sure you would get lots of positive reviews. I doubt many people here would agree.
Why does the Sony Playstation SCPH-100x get so many positive reviews? There are lots of plausible reasons including placebo effect (they heard it was really good, and have convinced themselves that it is), that they want it to sound as good as more expensive systems - essentially cognitive dissidence. But because we hear things differently, and thus have different abilities to resolve differences between systems. This brings up another, probably more parsimonious explanation which is that it may be that the people who are recommending the sony playstation simply do not have good enough experience and/or ears/brains to hear the difference between the truly high end systems and what is merely okay. A good analogy to this is the perception of color. My dad works in the printing industry and has a very good eye for colour. He is able to resolve much more subtle differences in shades of colour than I am. I often have a hard time seeing the difference between dark blue, black - and sometimes even dark, dark brown- but I have no difference seeing the difference between red, and say green. My brother on the other hand who is colour blind can't at all resolve the difference between red and green. This is a example where it is easy to understand how someone's underlying biology affects their ability to perceive the world visually. I can pick up an object and say it's green, or red - and most people (who are not colour blind) can see it too. Furthermore, we can analyze the objects electronicaly to see what wavelengths of light they reflect and show quantitatively that they are different colours. Some peoples eyes are better at doing this than others. But when it comes to audio doing this is much more difficult. I can't hold up a tone and ask "how does this sound to you?", the way I can pick up a red ball and say "what colour is this to you?". I think this is the basis for a lot of confusion - by our biology, it is very difficult for us to discuss in a quantitative way how a tone sounds- but we have no similar difficulty with color. If you took a fully colour blind person and asked them to review a TV - one black and white, one in colour - you wouldn't be surprised that they can't tell them apart- but that's because we can easily identify that person as colour blind. But we cannot nearly as simply identify people who have varying degrees of tone deafness. It would require a lot of complicated testing in order to determine different individuals abilities to resolve different tones - and this difference would almost certainly vary with frequency. My guess is that if we did this, we would find that people who have difficulty resolving audio detail at a high level of resolution are probably also the people who think that a Sony playstation sounds as good as a Meridian 808.
This is why I think that lots of people recommend the sony playstation as a good source - simply because they can't hear the difference between it and higher end sources, so they assume that the difference must not exist. And it's true to a point - for them, a difference does not exist. In audio, as in the rest of life, one of humanities great failings is demonstrated here: People are unwilling or incapable of imagining experiences that exist outside their own perceived reality. In essence, people never think to walk a mile in someone elses shoes.
PSX Multi-out: 
PSX RCA-out: 
PSX Multi-out: 
PSX RCA-out: 
