[bigshot]

For what variables are components potentially relevant and below the threshold for human perception? Frequency? Timing? Loudness? Signal/Noise and distortion? Channel separation? Timbre?

Every one of those (except timbre isn't a variable. It's part of frequency response.)

I bet the marketing department muzzled the designer of that DAC fast!

Fish are fun! This hangs on the wall in my theater/listening room. His name is Brando...

 

[knownothing2]

Every one of those (except timbre isn't a variable. It's part of frequency response.)

I bet the marketing department muzzled the designer of that DAC fast!

Fish are fun! This hangs on the wall in my theater/listening room. His name is Brando...

Love it!

 

[KinGensai]

For what variables are components potentially relevant and below the threshold for human perception? Frequency? Timing? Loudness? Signal/Noise and distortion? Channel separation? Timbre?

This depends on which components we are talking about. Transducers have the biggest effect on all of these, but every part can potentially have an effect based on how they are selected and implemented in a system.

Frequency aught to be, but not always because manufacturers have to differentiate their products to justify selling their products for thousands of dollars when DACs like the ES9219 can play back audio transparently for a relative pittance (I picked up my V60 for less than $200). FR is noticable and subtle enough to evoke emotional responses.

Timing is vague, I'll assume you mean things like jitter which is measured in μs. Transducers can vary a lot more, but μs and picoseconds are inaudible to humans.

https://www.hypethesonics.com/dapti-database?LG_V60
SNR can sometimes start encroaching into audibility, but I'd put that blame on the amp vs the DAC. In ABX testing, I can discern distortion down to -36dB somewhat reliably, below that I can't hear anything, and the V60's SNR is below double that.

Channel separation can vary by amp and whether the output is balanced or not. I suppose some situations where the transducers are sensitive enough to cause audible problems with bad cables and amp exist, I haven't run into them though.

Timbre is a function of the transducer, including FR and harmonic distortion profile and IR among other metrics I might be forgetting.

 

[gregorio]

Your “science” ignores the fact that thousands of audio enthusiasts believe they hear differences between different electronics and cables, and there is an entire industry catering to these first world tastes.

It’s not my science, it’s the world’s science and it doesn’t ignore thousands of audiophiles who believe they hear differences, it just discounts them as a tiny niche of consumers deluded by audiophile marketing BS, on the basis that after half a century of testing them, their claims are empty.

Now let’s look at what you’re ignoring! We can start with the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), which employs around 60,000 scientists worldwide and has employed countless hundreds of thousands more since it started in 1865. Then there’s the countless thousands who work for the EBU, ATSC and other organisations, the tens of thousands who work for commercial telecoms and other broadcast, entertainment and tech companies involved in audio, plus the many tens of thousands of sound and music engineers worldwide, not to mention all the independent, academic sound/audio departments in universities around the world. The “entire” audiophile industry you mention is laughably tiny, probably worth no more than a couple of tens of millions or so but you’re ignoring the entertainment and telecoms industry, worth a couple of trillion dollars or so!

Many of us have significant training in scientific method and practice and are of the opinion that you are missing some important elements in the methods and rigor in testing human subjects ability to distinguish differences in HiFi equipment performance in real world applications.

“Many of us”, is how many, maybe a few dozen or so? How many of you in the audiophile community are actually scientists trained/specialising in “the methods and rigor in testing human subjects” with audio/sound? Are there any at all, is there even one? Who do you think invented controlled listening tests such as ABX, analogue and digital audio, speakers, headphones, signal transfer, etc? The audiophile community does not contribute any science, on the contrary it does the exact opposite, it tries to discredit any science that demonstrates the audiophile myths/BS, although it does easily lead the world in contributing audio pseudoscience!

I’m sorry but your argument is ridiculous, you’re putting the unsupported opinion of “many of us”, which in reality is based entirely on marketing BS and is a tiny minority, against some of the most well researched and established science in history by millions of scientists and engineers over the course of a century or so!

For what variables are components potentially relevant and below the threshold for human perception? Frequency? Timing? Loudness? Signal/Noise and distortion? Channel separation? Timbre?

You’ve demonstrated here that you don’t even know what the ”variables are [for] components”, let alone what are below the human threshold of hearing. Therefore obviously, you cannot be one of your supposed “many of us” with scientific training in this field!

I think there is a mishmash here of classic bench measures of things like frequency response, thd, and jitter with the aggregate sonic performance of a piece of gear in a system as perceived by a listener in a room or via a pair of headphones.

There’s the problem: “I [you] think” (your opinion), is based on what, on not even knowing the science/facts or the variables for components? What is it based on other than just marketing, self aggrandising reviewers and other biased testimonials with no formal training or credentials who deliberately eschew proper reliable/controlled listening tests. Case in point:

The original Benchmark DAC 1 measured very well, but nearly every reviewer reported that it sounded noticeably different from the Benchmark DAC 2 and DAC 3 variants, even though the designer said the “improvements” should be generally inaudible.

The objective measurements and even the manufacturer itself said no audible differences but no, you’re going to ignore all the objective evidence, go with reports from some audiophile reviewers performing sighted tests, who wouldn’t have much to aggrandise themselves with if there were no audible differences and argue that “Many of us have significant training in the scientific method”?!

So NO, we cannot “agree to disagree” here in a science discussion forum, your opinion is ill-informed, self-contradictory, contradicted by the actual facts and is just yet another fallacious argument (see here)!

G

 

[bigshot]

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but audiophile reviewers are often in the pocket of the marketing departments of high end audio companies. They produce “advertorial”, making subjective claims that manufacturers probably couldn’t legally get away with saying without factual backup. They give glowing reviews because if they don’t, their supply of free equipment gifted them to review would end. There was a time when publications required their writers to maintain an arm’s length distance from the companies whose products they reviewed. In the Internet age, those days are long gone. YouTube influencers are the least trustworthy. Even here on Head-Fi, there are posters who comment regularly who are considered influencers, and receive free equipment in return for favorable comments in posts. These relationships are rarely revealed publicly. Caveat emptor when it comes to reviewers and opinions being expressed in forums. Do your own research. Don’t rely on influencers to think for you.

 

[BS5711]

Even here on Head-Fi, there are posters who comment regularly who are considered influencers, and receive free equipment in return for favorable comments in posts. These relationships are rarely revealed publicly.

I questioned a few such folks in a particular forum here. All I wanted to establish was when they were chatting in the forum versus providing a specific review were they still essentially providing advertising for the company. If they were I suggested perhaps they should be more transparent so that casual readers could use appropriate judgement in how much importance they placed on these guys comments which on the face of it seemed like guys just chatting. A casual observer of the forum would have no idea they were essentially providing advertising in the seemingly casual banter.

Eventually several pages of mostly polite discussion were deleted by admin because the conversation was “off topic” based on the private message from admin.

These particular guys clearly get gear “in exchange for an impartial review” but at the same time literally comment in the forum about different terminations for IEM cables and go to lengths to explain the sonic difference between the rhodium plug and the other options, a plug not even a cable !

I wasted thousands of dollars chasing improvements in DACs and amplifiers for IEM and headphones because everybody said that this stuff makes a huge difference. After learning for myself I eventually compared listening to several IEM off an Apple dongle and a $1,000 USD DAC/amp and as best I could volume match they sounded the same. It frustrates me greatly to see some the utter BS put forward as fact in the audio hobby.

I have gear that suits practical considerations now and put my money into the IEM and headphones when the desire for something new arises.

 

[71 dB]

Because "open" and "closed" don't involve the placement of sound objects between the two channels. They involve the degree of envelope of sound around the sound objects. A vocalist smack dab in the middle of the mix is going to be smack dab in the middle with both open headphones, and with closed sounding ones. For lack of a better word, the difference is the "air" around the sound, not the sound itself.

Air? What are you talking about? Sound is sound, not air. Sound needs air. There is no sound in vacuum.

With speakers, soundstage involves the triangulation of space between the two channels and the listening position. This is an established standard, and it places sound objects at a fixed distance from the listener and spread along a left/right axis, just like if you were sitting in an auditorium hearing a performance on a stage a distance in front of you. The triangulation is scalable, so if the distances are increased, the relationship between the three remains the same and the soundstage is maintained. All mixing stages are set up to do this. The room itself adds a further element of reflections that add realism to the dimensional cues.

As I have wrote multiple times, ears can estimate the distance from the speakers only by decoding the spatial cues. Only very primitive spatiality makes the sound appear at the distance of the speakers (sound source collapse). Room acoustics don't help here because the speakers are in the same room with the acoustics. There needs to be spatial information on the recording to make the sound appear originating elsewhere. That's how some recordings have depth: some sounds appear further and some closer than the speakers. This works even with headphones. Not to same extent of course, but the result is a miniature soundstage.

The main difference between speaker and headphone spatiality is that the latter is orders of magnitude harder. With speakers any kind of half ass spatiality is going to work thanks to the listening room acoustics "prepairing" the sound for the listener. I believe this easiness stagnated the know how of spatiality in recordings for decades. With headphones the parameters have to be very very precise. Only a recording made having mics in the ears of the listener is going to give really immersive soundstage. Anything less and it is a miniature soundstage if even that.

Since headphone spatiality is so demanding while speaker spatiality is more forgiving, I mix the spatiality of my own music mainly for headphones, but I make sure it works with speakers too (this is the opposite of what most people do!). Spatiality tailored for headphones is going to sound narrow on speakers (and spatiality made for speakers sounds excessive on headphones). This is why headphone spatiality has to be constructed by "sneaking in" as much spatiality as possible without making it blow up. When it comes to mixing bass, I do the other way around since bass is tricky with speakers, but controlled with headphones.

Problems with speaker spatiality:
- Narrow monoish soundstage
- Lack of depth (everything on the line between speakers)

Problems with headphone spatiality:
- Excessive unnatural spatial cues
- Sound inside head

Fixing narrow soundstage for speakers is going to make the spatial cues even more excessive for headphones unless this is done cleverly. Large ILD at low frequencies is problematic with headphones, but ITD is less problematic. ITD can be also be used to move the sound outside listeners head. Decreasing ILD can make the sound move further away from listener on headphones (because sound being at one ears creates the maximum ILD), but with speakers this makes the sound move closer to the center (so it can make headphone spatiality wider, but speaker spatiality narrower!) As if this wasn't complex enough, all of this is frequency based. At bass frequencies the behavior is different from high frequencies. As for depth with speakers go, manipulating the delay (say ±45 microseconds = 2 samples at 44.1 kHz) between Mid and Side channels can "bend" the sound away (M delayed) or toward (S delayed) to the listener. Of course, other spatial tricks should be used also such as controlling the balance of direct sound and reverberation and how much high frequencies are attenuated.

Headphones can present "headstage" which involves the envelope of air around the sound, but they can't provide the dimensional triangulation of soundstage, the perception of physical distance, and the room reflections the way speakers can. Instead of presenting the left/right placement at a distance in front of the listener, they present it as a straight line through the middle of the head. That is a separate thing than the feeling of open or closed.

It is not about if headphones can do it. It is about how difficult it is. Perhaps it is just me and my spatial hearing, but I hear more than jut "air" outside my head with headphones (given the spatiality of the recording is sophisticated enough and the spatiality mixed for speakers is tamed to headphones with crossfeed). With best recordings (such as organ music recorded in a church creating massive amount of spatial information indicating a very large acoustic space) the miniature soundstage I experience extends about 3-4 feet from my head. However, typically I get only a feet or so of miniature soundstage around my head and the worst stereo recordings tend to collapse inside my head no matter how much I crossfeed them. The thing is, I am content with this. I accept the fact headphones won't give me similar soundstage speakers give. Instead of crying my eyes out because headphones don't sound like speakers, I try to enjoy the music.

Secondary depth cues are the spatial indicators embedded in the recording itself... reflections and reverberation added in the mix itself, phase tricks, that sort of thing. Those can create a feeling of space, but that is not a product of the playback equipment. It's created in the mix and simply recorded as the signal. Normal aspects of fidelity, like frequency response, distortion, signal to noise, etc. will reproduce that with accuracy just like any other kind of sound. Both headphones and speakers can present secondary cues equally well.

The bolded part is why secondary cues (I'd call then spatial cues in the recording, but whatever...) are important.

 

[71 dB]

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but audiophile reviewers are often in the pocket of the marketing departments of high end audio companies. They produce “advertorial”, making subjective claims that manufacturers probably couldn’t legally get away with saying without factual backup. They give glowing reviews because if they don’t, their supply of free equipment gifted them to review would end. There was a time when publications required their writers to maintain an arm’s length distance from the companies whose products they reviewed. In the Internet age, those days are long gone. YouTube influencers are the least trustworthy. Even here on Head-Fi, there are posters who comment regularly who are considered influencers, and receive free equipment in return for favorable comments in posts. These relationships are rarely revealed publicly. Caveat emptor when it comes to reviewers and opinions being expressed in forums. Do your own research. Don’t rely on influencers to think for you.

I miss the Youtube of the past when 80 % of videos weren't sponsored by Skillshare, Squarespace, Pianote, Brilliant, NordVPN, etc...

 

[71 dB]

I wasted thousands of dollars chasing improvements in DACs and amplifiers for IEM and headphones because everybody said that this stuff makes a huge difference. After learning for myself I eventually compared listening to several IEM off an Apple dongle and a $1,000 USD DAC/amp and as best I could volume match they sounded the same. It frustrates me greatly to see some the utter BS put forward as fact in the audio hobby.

I have gear that suits practical considerations now and put my money into the IEM and headphones when the desire for something new arises.

It sucks to waste money, but at least it led to deeper knowledge and you are wiser now. You are much less likely to waste money on snake oily audio gear in the future.

 

[bigshot]

Speaker soundstage is the way professional engineers at sound studios intend for their mix to sound. They may check the mix on headphones and make tweaks to accommodate cans, but the first pass of the mix is always done on speakers. If you only mix with headphones, you run the risk of creating a mix that doesn't work at all on speakers. I saw a lousy engineer do that once. He screwed up a show I was working on.

Secondary spatial cues are approximations of real space and require your brain to process them to work. Physical distance cues present the way the world presents. It's the way we hear distance in real life, and in the specific listening room. With speakers, the initial distance from the listening position and the left to right spread is physical. The depth beyond that is indicated by secondary cues.

With the proper triangular layout, speaker soundstage does not sound like mono, it has an even spread across the width of the speakers, and it is scalable by means of a center channel and spreading the distances to create life size soundstages, and even larger ones to match the size of the screen in a movie theater.

 

[71 dB]

Your “science” ignores the fact that thousands of audio enthusiasts believe they hear differences between different electronics and cables, and there is an entire industry catering to these first world tastes.

As if it was surprising that in capitalism there would be companies selling products that exploit human weaknesses such as expectation bias and placebo effect. I'd be surprised if there weren't any.

In theory there might be some tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny microscopic differences in cables in certain extreme situations, but if they matter enough to spend a lot of money, then the differences in speakers and headphones are so massive in comparison that it is worth robbing a bank and kill innocent people to get the best speakers and headphones on market. Cables do not matter compared to some other things.

 

[bigshot]

I have gear that suits practical considerations now and put my money into the IEM and headphones when the desire for something new arises.

That's a good strategy.

 

[bigshot]

In theory there might be some tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny microscopic differences in cables in certain extreme situations, but if they matter enough to spend a lot of money, then the differences in speakers and headphones are so massive in comparison that it is worth robbing a bank and kill innocent people to get the best speakers and headphones on market.

And the next step in the chain beyond speakers and headphones are the human ears. What is the point of piping sound into your ears that your ears are incapable of hearing? There is such a thing as good enough.

 

[bigshot]

In ABX testing, I can discern distortion down to -36dB somewhat reliably, below that I can't hear anything, and the V60's SNR is below double that.

Just a quick kibitz... Since the decibel scale is logarithmic, -70dB is far more than double -35dB.

 

[71 dB]

Speaker soundstage is the way professional engineers at sound studios intend for their mix to sound.

Yes, but is this the best possible way to do things?

They may check the mix on headphones and make tweaks to accommodate cans, but the first pass of the mix is always done on speakers.

Yes, but is this the best possible way to do things?

If you only mix with headphones, you run the risk of creating a mix that doesn't work at all on speakers.

Yes, but I don't do that.

I saw a lousy engineer do that once. He screwed up a show I was working on.

You don't know how lousy I am because I haven't screwed up shows you are working on.

Secondary spatial cues are approximations of real space and require your brain to process them to work.

Yes, and this is why these spatial cues should be effective in fooling our spatial hearing. Perhaps the most important thing is to avoid logical contraditions that are likely to confuse the brain causing chaotic interpretation of the soundstage and even mental fatigue.

Contradictions in spatial cues are less of a problem with speakers, because room acoustics will mitigate and regulate these contradictions quite effectively, but with headphones all the contradictions enter the ear "as is." That's why secondary spatial cues suitable for headphones should be emphased on the expense of spatial cues suitable for speakers. That doesn't mean ignoring speakers completely. We don't want too narrow soundstage with speakers.

Physical distance cues present the way the world presents. It's the way we hear distance in real life, and in the specific listening room. With speakers, the initial distance from the listening position and the left to right spread is physical. The depth beyond that is indicated by secondary cues.

This explains the differences in soundstage between speakers and headphones, but it is not an excuse to keep mixing music primarily for speakers in the era when headphone listening is very widespread. Since proper secondary cues can help a lot in making headphone sound less "inside head", they should be used as much as possible. We have the technology. It is only the matter of knowing how to use the tools and the will to do things differently from how they were done in the past.

With the proper triangular layout, speaker soundstage does not sound like mono, it has an even spread across the width of the speakers, and it is scalable by means of a center channel and spreading the distances to create life size soundstages, and even larger ones to match the size of the screen in a movie theater.

Mono sound played on stereo speakers should ideally sound mono (phantom source). The less this is true, the more there are problems with the speaker set up (asymmetries such as level differences). Spatiality made for headphones isn't mono of course, but is tends to be narrow (toward mono) meaning most of the sound appears to be located near the center of the speakers.