[PhilS]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot If there is more than 20 or 30 seconds between two very similar sounds, it's impossible to tell what difference there is between them.

Can you cite any authority for that statement? I'd be interested in reading about the study that determined it is "impossible." Or perhaps you could detail the parameters of the study if you can't identify the study itself?

 

[bigshot]

Try googling "echoic memory". I gave you a citation once before, if I remember correctly. Auditory memory is a short term sensory memory. For fine differences, it generally lasts about 4 seconds.

See ya
Steve

 

[Riboge]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot Generally, human memory for sound is very short. If there is more than 20 or 30 seconds between two very similar sounds, it's impossible to tell what difference there is between them. Direct A/B switching is the most accurate way to discern small differences. Long listening sessions are not going to reveal anything that can't be detected by careful listening and A/B switching at balanced volume levels. Describing differences in sounds is a very straightforward thing... dynamics, frequency, distortion, signal to noise, etc... these are all descriptive terms that describe specific sounds. Poetry about warmth and veils sounds great, but it really doesn't communicate anything more than the creative verbal skills of the person reviewing. Learning a vocabulary capable of expressing ideas without ambiguity is much more useful than anything one learns by listening to music for long periods of time. See ya Steve

Are you just going to go on talking past the difference between sound in general and the highly organized, patterned meaning and feeling laden sounds of a musical passage? This is just mindless. I repeat studies about sound retention are about relatively brief sounds laden with nothing and so connect to nothing in the mind that would help retain it. We could go into such as the ways memory is organized by emotion and other meaningful sensations like the smell of food, etc. These are very well known to serve as markers and containers for sounds and other experiences in such a way that they become storable in longterm memory and evoked by these markers. Read Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, one of the great novels, which is structured on this idea. Just think of all the oldies but goodies from earlier in your life you can remember word for word with all the music and phrasing exact.

And of course most of us here, even if not you, are interested in how cables influence listening to music not sounds. So even subtle and hard to define differences in the way the music is experienced are significant to us. Poetry and music are highly related in just these ways, so your dismissal of poetry demonstrates how much you are missing the point. You are just pompously wrong claiming poetic-like metaphors and phrases don't communicate anything. They definitely do to many people I know, certainly all those who post praise for good reviewers, etc. And what a silly attempt to reduce poetry to a showing off of verbal skills and nothing else. What takes skill is choosing the poetic words that do convey a meaning/feeling to readers.

 

[Melchior]

Well, I was gonna skip over posting anything in this thread but today made me reconsider. I was about to start a new one but I figure this is pertinent here. Statements have been made to the effect that the mind has a much larger effect on your audio than cables do. I've always believed that once you get past basic radioshack interconnects your mind has more effect on sound than cables do, and today I just proved it to myself.

I had this oddball channel imbalance favoring the right side that I just couldn't trace, I noticed it listening to music yesterday and I'd been trying to figure out what it was. At first I figured it might be speaker positioning, no good, sure I could change it but I could tell the positioning was way off what it should be (since I hadn't had this problem with them in their original placement before). I started using test tones, just to see if it might be the music or maybe my level outputs were off, maybe a room acoustic issue, and the balance was indeed off. I even tried changing where I sat while I listened, this shifted it a bit but like the speakers I was way off where I knew I should be. Then I closed my eyes, and it dissapeared, *poof* properly balanced channels. Opening my eyes I noticed a large crack in my blinds facing me on the right side, It had been there for a day or two but I never bothered to close them since the glare didn't really bug me. On a whim I reached over and fixed it real quick and that permanently fixed the issue.

Point being, never ever discount the direct influence your mind has on anything related to sound. Ears can be tricked very easily, even when things don't sound different at all.

 

[PhilS]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot Try googling "echoic memory". I gave you a citation once before, if I remember correctly. Auditory memory is a short term sensory memory. For fine differences, it generally lasts about 4 seconds.

I read a number of articles on the subject that were generated by a search in Google. It is clear that the studies you are referring to deal with the ability of memory to recall and/or distinguish between various simple tones of very short duration. They do not deal with the ability of the memory to distinguish a change in sound that has been "learned" as a result of long-term exposure, such as would be the case with someone who is familiar with a child's voice over long term periods. Nor do they deal with the ability of the brain to perceive a subtle distinction in the sound of a musical composition, for example, when the brain has had prolonged expsoure to the composition under a fixed set of conditions. Indeed, the studies are as irrelevant as would be a study of whether people could remember precise colors after the passage of a few seconds to the issue of whether someone could remember what someone's face looked like after knowing them for an extended period of time.

Nevertheless, I may be missing the particular studies that support your statement. So if you have some support for the particular absolutist statement you made, I would like to see it.

P.S. I posted while Riboge was posting his thoughts. His first paragraph says it better than I could. But keeping an open mind, and understanding your emphasis on, and appreciation for, scientific fact and accuracy (as well as your emphasis on carefully listening to and interpreting what others say and write), I'm confident that you are certainly not merely referring to the studies on "echoic memory" referenced above. Certainly, you had something more specific in mind that would support your dogmatic statement about the impossibility of remembering what something sounds like after a few seconds (insofar as it pertains to the alleged audible differences at issue).

 

[Kees]

I can't help myself to chime in, be it only to say: I bow for the valiant effort of Riboge (& PhilS) to explain what is essential in listening.
I agree completely with what you are trying to bring across.
For me that is: Not the ears, but the mind. Not the sound, but the music.

 

[eyeteeth]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JohnFerrier Personally, I'm interested in the whole picture of audio.

Same here. I enjoy and understand PhilS and Riboge's view but I am familiar with those views. I also enjoy bigshot's views which I am much less familiar with. Poets versus the clinician. Byron and Shelley versus James Watt. Labs make drugs that affect my emotions, heart and soul, PhilS and Riboge describe those affects in an attempted soulful reverse engineering way, bigshot knows the lab and how the drugs were made.

 

[Vul Kuolun]

So when you read a poem twice, and one time it makes you cry and one time it doesn't you find it logical to blame the different cover for it?

But seriously: All that the cable has to do is transport max. 650MB of Data. it cannot do any more than that. What your brain does with that data, how it is interpreted and what you feel during this process has nothing to do with the cable. Unless the knowledge about pricing, haptic appearance, promised charcteristics,etc. influences your emotions during your interpretation process- which is dangerously near what is called "placebo" in this circles. Fortunatly, this source of error can be eliminated by a secret testing method.
Knowing that most people can live peacefully with maybe 150MB of Data for the same playingtime, carefully screened by today's knowledge about psychoacoustics, doesn't make things look much better.

For the unconscious but perceptable differences: I'm quite sure it would be easy to distinguish two twins/ body language and voice patterns in a metrological way. The discussed cable phenomenons are about unmeasurable processes, which makes your sophisticated examples pointless imho.

The "face"-example would be closer to the subject if it was modified like this: Would you be able to distinguish between two pictures of a face of a well known person that can not be distinguished between by technical analysis? Would it be a valid test if you knew which picture is which before you had to give your answer?

BTW, Kees, i do not have the impression that any of the participants here need an "explanation about what is essential in listening". Get off that high horse.

Quote:

I can't help myself to chime in, be it only to say: I bow for the valiant effort of Riboge (& PhilS) to explain what is essential in listening.

 

[Riboge]

Quote:

Originally Posted by eyeteeth Same here. I enjoy and understand PhilS and Riboge's view but I am familiar with those views. I also enjoy bigshot's views which I am much less familiar with. Poets versus the clinician. Byron and Shelley versus James Watt. Labs make drugs that affect my emotions, heart and soul, PhilS and Riboge describe those affects in an attempted soulful reverse engineering way, bigshot knows the lab and how the drugs were made.

I like the spirit of balance in what you offered but the distinction is misapplied. I was a clinician of psychiatry by entire adult life. I am, literally, a little bit a poet also having written maybe 30 poems. These are not antipodes, for heaven's sake.

The responses of people to music are quite amenable to quantification if you are willing to train a large number of subjects in listening and verbalizing first and offer them musical passages to listen to thru different cables or whatever. It is a problem practically to do so but not theoretically.

Melchior, of course "the mind has a much larger effect on your audio than cables do" or than anything else does for that matter. What does that prove? The question still is what effect do cables have. Once again the proportionality strawman.

Vul Kuolun, about reading a poem twice with different effects: did you even bother to read my response to JohnFerrier not too many posts below on this very issue? You may not agree but at least you could address what I said about that, which I am confident is more cogent than your simply contemptuous reference to the effect of the album or book cover, an idea no one but you would even think of.

 

[Vul Kuolun]

Sorry Riboge, i did not intend to be contemptuous.

But there are reasons for "inner responses", be it body language, external circumstances or whatever. The question is, are we looking at the right place for the reason of this "inner responses". And: is it prudent to concentrate the search for the reason on one of the multiple factors coming into question ? I chose the example with the bookcover, because i know that for many bibliophiles the appearance of a book can be quite atractrive. Just like 5mm frontpanels and thick cables do to the audiophile (including me).

 

[Riboge]

I agree that the inner response is affected by any number of things and can mislead one in listening. That is why one would have to demonstrate over multiple trials a statistically significant preponderance of ones that indicate a difference the cable is making despite the interference of other factors.

 

[Steve999]

I'm as right-brained as the next person, and most often moreso. But the answer here is simple, and there is very rich body of knowledge to support it. How many ways are there to argue what is not true to be true? This thread and this forum are brilliantly lit answers to that question. Bigshot is clever yes, and knows what he is talking about, but his real advantage is that he starts from the right answer. It is a simple fact. His logic and manners could be atrocious (though they're not), and he'd still have the right answer. This is not relativity or string theory or quantum mechanics or psychiatry or poetry or whatever. I don't know what his motivation is, but there is always some inherent moral value in rebutting false information, particularly where it is ruthlessly exploited to empty people's wallets.

In any event, this argument is endlessly amusing, so I will read on...

 

[Patrick82]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot Generally, human memory for sound is very short. If there is more than 20 or 30 seconds between two very similar sounds, it's impossible to tell what difference there is between them. Direct A/B switching is the most accurate way to discern small differences. Long listening sessions are not going to reveal anything that can't be detected by careful listening and A/B switching at balanced volume levels.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot Try googling "echoic memory". I gave you a citation once before, if I remember correctly. Auditory memory is a short term sensory memory. For fine differences, it generally lasts about 4 seconds.

To hear the smallest differences your brain needs to adjust to the sound for many weeks before making the switch.
Making the test in a system you have never heard before is silly, and then trying to adjust to it in 4 seconds!?

It's like a muscle memory, after you do something over and over again it sticks. If a pro gamer switches from a CRT monitor into an LCD you bet he will see the difference in the <4 ms slower response time. But if doing the opposite he wouldn't see a difference because his brain isn't experienced enough.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JohnFerrier Audio is extremely complex, but our hearing ability has boundaries. If I listen to music a second time, I can have a completely different response to it and notice new aspects even if I've not changed anything else in my setup. These differences can be large (and I contend much larger than many setup changes).

The only time it sounds different is if your brain hasn't adjusted to your system for many weeks. For me it takes a few hours to make the adjustment and then it sounds the same everytime I listen to it. You just need to have a neutral state of mind.

If it still sounds different everytime you listen then you aren't listening consistently enough. I can imagine a skeptic sitting there whiskey swirling and vacuum cleaning...



Quote:

Originally Posted by JohnFerrier Where are you going with this thought?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vul Kuolun But seriously: All that the cable has to do is transport max. 650MB of Data. it cannot do any more than that. What your brain does with that data, how it is interpreted and what you feel during this process has nothing to do with the cable.

Don't skeptics know about jitter? Jitter is all that matters, it changes how ears interprete the sound. Same data, different sound.

 

[Riboge]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve999 I'm as right-brained as the next person, and most often moreso. But the answer here is simple, and there is very rich body of knowledge to support it. How many ways are there to argue what is not true to be true? This thread and this forum are brilliantly lit answers to that question. Bigshot is clever yes, and knows what he is talking about, but his real advantage is that he starts from the right answer. It is a simple fact. His logic and manners could be atrocious (though they're not), and he'd still have the right answer. This is not relativity or string theory or quantum mechanics or psychiatry or poetry or whatever. I don't know what his motivation is, but there is always some inherent moral value in rebutting false information, particularly where it is ruthlessly exploited to empty people's wallets. In any event, this argument is endlessly amusing, so I will read on...

Simply because You decree it to be so? Congratulations! Others have done their darndest, but the above might be the most arrogant and disrespectful posting in this thread.

 

[joojoo2915]

Quote:

I was a clinician of psychiatry by entire adult life.

I wonder, would you be inclined to listen to the average electrical engineer make a call on someones mental well-being? What if the person in question was screaming at a lamp post like a maniac and otherwise seemed perfectly crazy?