Now about this statement "beauty/quality don't exist in sound waves"-- that is a red herring. The actual point is that a system which changes the sound waves changes the perception. And the ONLY ultimate evaluation of whether a system is adequately transparent is perception.
I also think you must be joking to claim measurements are relevant to anything divorced from the concept of perception.
So very wrong. Mike, you have the most distorted understanding of sound of anyone I've ever communicated with. I'm honestly not trying to be insulting, I'm just astonished at how you have arrived at such a misguided view of how sound and perception work. All sound is just sine waves travelling through air with only two components; frequency and amplitude, nothing else! Anything else you "hear", like beauty or emotion is just an interpretation created by your brain. Sorry to burst your bubble Mike but this is elementary and indisputable science.
You are missing the point. You claim that "we can measure everything" as though that were an obvious statement. You probably think that 24 bit/96 KHz equipment can measure more than 16 bit/44.1 KHz equipment.
No, no one is claiming that we can measure your perception of what you are hearing only the components of sound (frequency and amplitude). And yes, we can measure and record far more with 24/95 than we can with 16/44.1 whether you or anyone else can perceive that additional information is another question entirely.
Personally, I don't think we have measures for how well equipment reproduces musical feeling-- that real stuff that musicians study and work together to produce. But another point which even you should agree with is that it is ridiculous to say "we can measure everything" as though that were a trivial statement.
You cannot measure musical feeling or any other aspect of how you perceive sound and no equipment in the world can create or recreate musical feeling, all the equipment can do is record and recreate the sound waves. Your brain interprets certain combinations of sound waves as musical, beautiful, etc. A composer/musician/producer knows these rules of brain interpretation (aural illusions) and uses them to elicit a desired respond from you but it's all illusion! A recording or playback system doesn't know about these emotional aural illusions and doesn't need to know, all it has to do is recreate the frequency and amplitude of the sound waves as accurately as possible.
As soon as you say "the sound the engineer wanted you to hear", what you mean is the perception the engineer wanted you to perceive. If you think there is any reality to the idea of "sound he wanted you to hear," any reality to measurements of that divorced from the context of perception, you are really being silly.
You are mixing up terms here Mike. The sound which enters your ear is a small percentage of what you hear, the McGurk Effect should have proved that that to you. As a professional sound engineer of 20 years and a highly trained classical musician before that, I can assure you that it's all about the "idea of sound he wanted you to hear". I know that if I manipulate frequency and amplitude I can create an illusion. For example lets say I record two instruments, A & B. One of them (let's say B) I reduce it's amplitude by say 6dB and EQ filter 6dB/8ve above say 2kHz and add some echo (repeats of the sound waves at diminishing amplitudes). What I have done is modified the sound waves, they are still sound waves, they are still entirely (100%) describable in terms of only frequency and amplitude. However I know that your brain will interpret the processing I have done and will hear instrument B as being further away (more distant) than instrument A. I know this because I know a fair amount about the perceptual hearing processes of the human brain, it's my job. The reality is though, that's it's all just sound waves and instrument A and B were exactly the same distance away when recorded. All of music and sound production is creating illusions of width, depth, emotion, etc., but it is just illusions, none of that information is stored in the sound waves, just as the word "Far" was not stored in the sound waves you heard on the McGurk Effect clip.
What you are probably saying is that if we have two waveforms, A and B, and we all agree they have different feeling, and then we measure A and B, we will easily discover they are different waveforms. But that is not the same as measuring perceptual qualities of the waveform.
How many times Mike, there are no perceptual qualities of the waveforms to measure, the only qualities waveforms have is frequency and amplitude. Anything perceptual is created by your brain in response to an illusion we have created (like the word "Far"). For the last time Mike, what the McGurk Effect proves is that all humans are incapable of hearing reality (uninterpreted sound waves), instead your brain creates a manufactured model of reality and that's what you "hear ".
It's for this reason that your hearing is a completely inappropriate tool for judging transparency. Let's say you have a DAC which measures linearly except that it adds a big distortion at say 19kHz. I can measure this easily but you won't be able to hear it. You would conclude that your DAC is transparent, I would conclude (from the measurements) that the only explanation for your DAC to have so little transparency is that it's actually malfunctioning!
I hope you can gain something from this post Mike, if not then I think you'll have to go your merry way with your concept of the emotional waveforms.
G
