[mike1127]

Quote:

Cool, let's call that your hypothesis. How would you go about testing it? What background info might be useful from prior studies?

Well that question, how would I test it, brings up several issues. There are some more fundamental issues that need to be tested first.
 
Here are my observations from experience. All of this would be interesting to formulate more precisely and test.
 
Professional musicians develop their perception of sound and arrive at the ability to perceive what could be called "abstractions."
 
Consider the realm of vision: consider that the human brain is good at identifying a face under many lighting conditions, angles of view, emotional expressions on the face, etc. We could call this a perception of an abstraction. The concept of "Bob's face" is an abstraction which can be recognized in different concrete instances.
 
Musicians perceive the same kinds of abstracted concepts except in the domain of hearing. A simple example is the ability to recognize a particular player's sound, in different acoustic environments, different musical compositions, different distances and volume levels, etc.
 
Scientists who study vision have an interested in things like facial recognition. They not only acknowledge the brain can do it, but have developed algorithms to imitate it.
 
But in the domain of audio, in a paradigm such as Ethan Winer's, there seems to be a total lack of interest in (or acknowledgement of) abstracted concepts.It's rather a primitive science by comparison.
 
Okay, finally arriving at my original point: it is the direct experience of musicians that a perception such as the sound of a particular player is sometimes a perception that takes in details over time, such as an entire musical phrase.
 
So first there needs to be some work on how abstracted perceptions work, and from that point we can proceed to a study of what features of them play out over time.

 

[Clarkmc2]

Quote:

But in the domain of audio, in a paradigm such as Ethan Winer's, there seems to be a total lack of interest in (or acknowledgement of) abstracted concepts.It's rather a primitive science by comparison.

Not necessarily. When you crystalize your statements about the hypothesis, why don't you ask him about it? By the way, I was not speaking about you when I mentioned a couple of posters. You ask interesting questions, some of which may end up falling outside sound science, but interesting. It is some of the unending responses that were prating on about nothing.

 

[anetode]

So first there needs to be some work on how abstracted perceptions work, and from that point we can proceed to a study of what features of them play out over time.

There is a large body of work in cognitive science devoted to some of the things you've mentioned.

First, it is important to recognize the quantifiable role of consumer satisfaction. Given two comparably performing products, a consumer's long term impression will be heavily influenced by factors like ergonomics and appearance. Seemingly superficial factors like comfort, ease of use and the flavor of visual design will be along for the ride in the cognitive feedback loop which will help establish how a consumer thinks their headphones sound.

Then there's the consumer themself. Even without any significant hearing defect people will hear differently. Some have a propensity for liking certain types of linear and/or non-linear distortion. Say that you play a wood instrument. You are used to a specific arrangement of harmonics, resonances, so even when a component fails and colors the sound, you may still see the result as preferable to a neutral rendition of the recording. Or you may have weird dumbo-ears that fly in the face of the common HRTF. Furthermore, you can't ignore outright bias that only grows stronger with compounded listening (e.g. I have what's supposed to be the best headphone in the world --> I have the best headphone in the world!).

It's the cumulative effect of cognitive processes which, imho, actually serves to undermine long-term listening. The more you listen to a component the more your brain will adjust to it, not even at a metaphorical level but as manifested in synaptic growth. This type of learning is essential to a human brain and it is why it is likely that you will remember and cherish your mother's voice for your entire life.

The flaws in long-term listening are particularly obvious in journalistic testing. Here we have the perfect storm: a journalist will receive a product on extended loan, marketing literature to go along with the product and the monetary incentive to think about that product for the term of the loan due to the obligation of having to write about it.

There may well be benefits to long-term testing but you will have to sort them out from the pitfalls.

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Not necessarily. When you crystalize your statements about the hypothesis, why don't you ask him about it? By the way, I was not speaking about you when I mentioned a couple of posters. You ask interesting questions, some of which may end up falling outside sound science, but interesting. It is some of the unending responses that were prating on about nothing.

I did mention it to Ethan, and his reply was that my statements and questions indicated I knew nothing about audio. I think I am justified in saying he lacks interest, even completely and totally lacks interest and even seems to lack comprehension, seeing as a few sentences on my part led him to judge me as ignorant.

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

There is a large body of work in cognitive science devoted to some of the things you've mentioned.
First, it is important to recognize the quantifiable role of consumer satisfaction. Given two comparably performing products, a consumer's long term impression will be heavily influenced by factors like ergonomics and appearance. Seemingly superficial factors like comfort, ease of use and the flavor of visual design will be along for the ride in the cognitive feedback loop which will help establish how a consumer thinks their headphones sound.
Then there's the consumer themself. Even without any significant hearing defect people will hear differently. Some have a propensity for liking certain types of linear and/or non-linear distortion. Say that you play a wood instrument. You are used to a specific arrangement of harmonics, resonances, so even when a component fails and colors the sound, you may still see the result as preferable to a neutral rendition of the recording. Or you may have weird dumbo-ears that fly in the face of the common HRTF. Furthermore, you can't ignore outright bias that only grows stronger with compounded listening (e.g. I have what's supposed to be the best headphone in the world --> I have the best headphone in the world!).
It's the cumulative effect of cognitive processes which, imho, actually serves to undermine long-term listening. The more you listen to a component the more your brain will adjust to it, not even at a metaphorical level but as manifested in synaptic growth. This type of learning is essential to a human brain and it is why it is likely that you will remember and cherish your mother's voice for your entire life.
The flaws in long-term listening are particularly obvious in journalistic testing. Here we have the perfect storm: a journalist will receive a product on extended loan, marketing literature to go along with the product and the monetary incentive to think about that product for the term of the loan due to the obligation of having to write about it.
There may well be benefits to long-term testing but you will have to sort them out from the pitfalls.

You mention consumer satisfaction. The general consumer has very little development of musical perception compared to an average professional musician. The "body of work" you speak of -- well if we made an analogy to the visual domain and facial recognition, it would be like the scientists developed a "facial recognition" algorithm that imitates people who've had strokes and can no longer see faces, only pretty colors and grayscales. You mention nothing that has to do with the really interesting stuff to a musician. This is why, from the point of view of a musician, the state of audio science just looks primitive and irrelevant. You are interpreting my statement about "factors that play out over time" in a specific way, but not the way I intended and not the way that is interesting to a musician. I'm speaking of the way a phrase is shaped over time. You can't hear one second of Mozart and judge the rhythmic quality of the players. You have to hear at least one phrase.
 
I think the problem is this. In the visual domain, nearly everyone is born able to recognize faces and so everyone agrees it's a valid field of study. However, in music, only a few people train to the level that they can recognize things like
 

1. the particular rhythmic feel and quality of a certain player
2. the timbres that are particular to certain makes of instruments
3. the factors that contribute to the sense of pacing and tempo, including articulation, and very important-- hall reverberation.

 
So when I mention to Ethan that the signature sound of something like a microphone or speaker affects the rhythmic quality (which I called Pace, Rhythm, and Timing), I was told that I was spouting nonsense. Wow. That leads me to wonder if Ethan can even perceive rhythmic qualities and how they can be reproduced faithfully and/or corrupted.
 
All I can say is Wow! What a total lack of interest in the most important abstract concepts.

 

[anetode]

You mention consumer satisfaction. The general consumer has very little development of musical perception compared to an average professional musician. The "body of work" you speak of -- well if we made an analogy to the visual domain and facial recognition, it would be like the scientists developed a "facial recognition" algorithm that imitates people who've had strokes and can no longer see faces, only pretty colors and grayscales. You mention nothing that has to do with the really interesting stuff to a musician. This is why, from the point of view of a musician, the state of audio science just looks primitive and irrelevant. You are interpreting my statement about "factors that play out over time" in a specific way, but not the way I intended and not the way that is interesting to a musician. I'm speaking of the way a phrase is shaped over time. You can't hear one second of Mozart and judge the rhythmic quality of the players. You have to hear at least one phrase.

I think the problem is this. In the visual domain, nearly everyone is born able to recognize faces and so everyone agrees it's a valid field of study. However, in music, only a few people train to the level that they can recognize things like

• the particular rhythmic feel and quality of a certain player
• the timbres that are particular to certain makes of instruments
• the factors that contribute to the sense of pacing and tempo, including articulation, and very important-- hall reverberation.

So when I mention to Ethan that the signature sound of something like a microphone or speaker affects the rhythmic quality (which I called Pace, Rhythm, and Timing), I was told that I was spouting nonsense. Wow. That leads me to wonder if Ethan can even perceive rhythmic qualities and how they can be reproduced faithfully and/or corrupted.

All I can say is Wow! What a total lack of interest in the most important abstract concepts.

Any musician who purchases something is acting as both a musician and a consumer. Their skill does not unburden them from being subject to consumer psychology. I am mentioning this precisely because you did not intend to address it and I do not think that you speak on behalf of all musicians in saying that consumer psychology is uninteresting.

What I see here is that you regard musicians as these ethereal humans with supernatural aural acuity, privy to the sort of subtleties that an untrained person could never hope to appreciate, much less a dry grouchy scientist. Consider for a second that this is not the case, that the reason you think that audio science looks primitive and irrelevant may be because, as Ethan mentioned, you don't know that much about it. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this, I'm trying to challenge your preconception.

You mention that few people are trained musicians, that they may not have been studied as much because they are in the minority. This is incorrect. On the contrary, people who by training or gift or accident turn up as statistical outliers are the very bread and butter of research in the cognitive sciences. There are many approaches to studying what happens when musicians think about or play music. For instance, some of these have provided interesting results like fMRI studies showing activation in the same areas of the brain whether a musician is listening to music, playing it or merely thinking about it, indeed similar patterns in neural activity show up whether or not the subject happens to be a musician. When I say that there is a large body of research in this field I am aware of where you are coming from. There are wonderful books that comment on some of this research that I think you might like, such as Sacks' "Musicophilia" and Jensen's "Music with the Brain in Mind".

 

[7nationarmy]

IMO what is important is whether you yourself can notice the difference. If some say a $1000 cable improve SQ while you cannot notice the difference why bother to believe that? In simple words your ears speak for yourself. Trust them. Same thing, some non-audiophiles cannot notice the difference between $100 and $500 IEMs, so there is no point for them upgrading. The problem is that many people have this mindset "these are great because other people say so". This is why people should audition before buying. In the end your ears are the ones who will be enjoying the music, not other people's.

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Originally Posted by anetode /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
I am mentioning this precisely because you did not intend to address it and I do not think that you speak on behalf of all musicians in saying that consumer psychology is uninteresting.

 
Okay I speak for myself, and I haven't formally interviewed musicians to see what they care about. But look, I know people who have practiced for 20,000 hours on their instruments, and do you think they are focusing their efforts on how good they look on stage? No, can we agree they focus their efforts on the sound they make? Is this not obvious?
 
Quote:

What I see here is that you regard musicians as these ethereal humans with supernatural aural acuity, privy to the sort of subtleties that an untrained person could never hope to appreciate, much less a dry grouchy scientist.

No, this is a parody of what I said. I admit, I don't know a lot about the total field of cognitive science. What I mainly know is how the scientists here respond when I mention simple ideas. It's telling that you can't repeat my statement back to me accurately, without making a parody of it.
 
Here's why it is a parody. Would you say that a human that can recognize, say, an emotion on a face, requires "supernatural visual acuity"? Ordinary visual acuity suffices. Just please think about this analogy.
 
"dry grouchy scientist" is just a ridiculous parody of what I said. A scientist can learn to hear abstracted rhythmic quality as easily as anyone else if they train themselves. On the other hand, if a scientist dismisses the whole idea, it leads me to have lowered expectations.
 
Are you trying to say that the 10,000 hours of training a musician is insubstantial and irrelevant compared to a person who has no training? Why is it so  implausible that they can perceive things an untrained person can't? Why isn't it obvious that an autistic person can't perceive emotions on a face?
 
Quote:

Consider for a second that this is not the case, that the reason you think that audio science looks primitive and irrelevant may be because, as Ethan mentioned, you don't know that much about it. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this, I'm trying to challenge your preconception.

 
I'm willing to consider it. That's fine. Maybe I should say that the things that interest me (and don't try to tell me "it's only me" because they are the same things that interest my teachers, my fellow students, the professionals I've talked to) -- well, I don't see any consideration of these things.
 
I read Musicophilia and it's a fun book, but it doesn't have much to do with the specific things I'm talking about here.
 
fMRI's of musicians can tell you a little.
 
I am familiar with some of the fMRI studies of meditation masters. I practice Buddhist meditation. What scientists have learned from fMRI studies will not help anyone learn to meditate. There's a huge gulf between the details of a skill as someone experiences it while learning it, and fMRI pictures.
 
I haven't read the fMRI studies of musicians, but I would ask the question: do these fMRI pictures help anyone learn to make and perceive music in the first person? That's the kind of enormous gulf we are talking about between the attempts of scientists to gather objective (i.e., 3rd-person, outside view) data on music-making, and the act of learning to make and perceive music directly.

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

IMO what is important is whether you yourself can notice the difference.

This brings up a point. So much audio science seems to be devoted to the question of whether device/codec/whatever A sounds different than device B.
Not characterisizing the difference or identifying A and B -- just, "do they sound different?"
 
When Navy Seals raided the Bin Laden compound and used their scanner to take an image of Bin Laden's face and confirm his identity, do you think they were concerned with the question of whether the image of his face looked different than another militant standing nearby? No, they wanted to identify the specific face.
 
This is why all this emphasis on the question "do they sound different" seems odd to me, and only a small part of a bigger picture.

 

[anetode]

Okay I speak for myself, and I haven't formally interviewed musicians to see what they care about. But look, I know people who have practiced for 20,000 hours on their instruments, and do you think they are focusing their efforts on how good they look on stage? No, can we agree they focus their efforts on the sound they make? Is this not obvious?

Err, I wasn't talking about how musicians look on stage. I was saying that musicians are humans and prone to human behavioral patterns, like those of consumerism.

No, this is a parody of what I said

Yes it was. Hyperbole, to be specific. I don't necessarily think that was what you meant but it was an expedient way of explaining what aspect of your response I disagreed with.

Are you trying to say that the 10,000 hours of training a musician is insubstantial and irrelevant compared to a person who has no training? Why is it so  implausible that they can perceive things an untrained person can't? Why isn't it obvious that an autistic person can't perceive emotions on a face?

Not what I said or implied at all. Musicians develop unique skills, their learning processes and perceptions have been fertile grounds for study.

fMRI's of musicians can tell you a little.

I am familiar with some of the fMRI studies of meditation masters. I practice Buddhist meditation. What scientists have learned from fMRI studies will not help anyone learn to meditate. There's a huge gulf between the details of a skill as someone experiences it while learning it, and fMRI pictures.

I haven't read the fMRI studies of musicians, but I would ask the question: do these fMRI pictures help anyone learn to make and perceive music in the first person? That's the kind of enormous gulf we are talking about between the attempts of scientists to gather objective (i.e., 3rd-person, outside view) data on music-making, and the act of learning to make and perceive music directly.

That was a popular example of the sort of research that goes on. By tracing metabolic connections between portions of the brain and between the CNS and the body researchers learn more about how human beings result to specific stimuli, it's only one avenue of research and only gains meaning when incorporated into the larger picture. Cognitive neuroscience is a relatively new field and there remains much to be done, meanwhile acoustics research has really flourished since the early 20th century and since slowed around the middle of the century; work on combining the two (& music theory) has already resulted in notable findings as summarized in the two books I mentioned.

To go back to my original reply to you, my point is to suggest that many of the differences attributed to measurably identical products have to do with the human mind. If you plan on studying human predilections over the long term, as opposed to response to rapidly switching between stimuli in brief trials, you have to factor in many complexities. Couple that with evidence that human auditory memory doesn't test well past some seconds and you have the competing hypothesis that long-term product comparisons may be subject to greater bias.

To finish up, the most important lesson I've learned from cognitive science is that most things we take for granted, like the continuity of consciousness or the ability to pay attention to more than a small portion of sensory input at any one time, are illusory. That's one of the main reasons that people are hostile to DBTs - they shatter illusions.

 

[mike1127]

Quote:

Originally Posted by anetode /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
Yes it was. Hyperbole, to be specific. I don't necessarily think that was what you meant but it was an expedient way of explaining what aspect of your response I disagreed with

It's the least clear way I could imagine of explaining what you "disagreed with" because now I have no idea what you disagreed with. You are going to have to explain it again, but just explain it. You did make one statement that is a common misconception, which is that musicians develop "acuity" of hearing. This is wrong for the same reason that claiming autistic people can't recognize emotions is because they need glasses. If this is not what you actually think, you are going to have to clarify.
 
 
Quote:

that most things we take for granted, like the continuity of consciousness or the ability to pay attention to more than a small portion of sensory input at any one time, are illusory. That's one of the main reasons that people are hostile to DBTs - they shatter illusions.

Meditation also demonstrates that continuity of consciousness or the features of attention are illusory, but it goes one step further and shows how perceptual experiences are altered through training.
 
It would be really interesting if you had made any specific statements addressing any of my specific points. You have totally failed to address my analogy to facial recognition. You have said nothing about abstracted perceptions. You've made the error of thinking that musical training is about developing "acuity" of hearing. I'll be more impressed when someone can at least make a specific answer to these very simple points.

 

[Chris J]

Don't most amps have a large power supply rejection ratio? Meaning that small ripples in rail voltages should have close to zero effect on sound.

Keep in mind that PSRR decreases as frequency goes up.
The power supply may or may not be designed to reject powerline conducted EMI/RFI.

There's another guy floating around in this thread who can explain this better than me.

 

[Chris J]

Pretty funny, the thread starter with the question hasn't posted here in over four weeks, you guys are like a top, pull the cord and let it spin.:veryevil:

Are you surprised?

 

[dallan]

No, just amused.

 

[bigshot]

I can't decide which argument is more amusing.... The tl/dr discussions of thick scientific theory without any mention of audibility, or the zen argument that double blind tests are invalid because all perception is illusion, or the SHOCKING! Shocking lack of interest in abstract concepts!

We're all crazies on this bus.

(lobbing anothe grenade into the nuthatch) Hey guys! Do cables make a difference? Thanks in advance for your replies!