DanWiggins
Member of the Trade: periodic audio
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2017
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Expectation bias is of course real, and I think why many of the purely "objectivists" in the audio world simply don't get it. At the end of the day, all we sell is illusion; audio is but fantasy of an event we never witnessed, nor can be captured as it originally happened. How much pepper and salt belongs on a steak? That is for the eater, not the chef, to decide what is correct.of course it's hard to test for more than one specific situation at a time when so many variables can all have some impact, and that impact from one variable can also be altered by changes in the other variables. it's kind of a mess.
my concern with CSD is that it might convey an idea of long lasting decay over all sounds just because it shows that. but real music obviously isn't only made of full scale tone that cuts off instantly. with music the driver keeps being constrained by electrical forces for the signal, so the actual result might be more like extra distortion than actual long lasting decay(I saying the same thing but it's the way to imagine it that changes). and specifically in the low end, it's not like bass drums or guitar bass have impulse like behaviors anyway. so while CSD or impulse response can be super informative objectively, I fear how they might bias me into false ideas about what I'm supposed to hear.
IF you are interested in accuracy, then a clean CSD is of course important. The Toole/Olive paper about timbre and resonances is quite instructive on that! However, if your enjoyment is enhanced by some additional ringing, or a too-lean bass, or dropped-down top end, then is that wrong? The objectivist would say yes - and measurably so! I say "if the music moves you, you want to listen to more music" because of the colorations there - then they really aren't colorations but simply requirements for you.
Perception has general trends, but in the end it is all individual. And that includes expectation bias. If you expect to hear something - or the absence of it - you may not perceive it. And if you do, you may downplay (or highlight) because of the bias going in. The actual act of perceiving (which I say is different than the act of hearing, hearing being a purely mechanical/biological process before it's perceived through the filter of our wetware in our skulls) is what matters, and if it sounds better to you - then it is. Unquestionably so.