[Shike]

Quote:

 
No problem.  Inaccuracies/misrepresentations in bold below.

 
So a different interpretation than you makes it fail, lovely.  How dare we interpret results differently, rage rage rabbalrabbal and all that jazz.
 
Quote:

 
Yes. I'm afraid to say that you only know a little bit of what are talking about. Everything you've said only confirms this with me.
 
Most of what you've said I've only agreed with, save a point or two (one discussed later which is a unique argument I've only seen you present out of numerous articles and studies.)
 
CSDs are of little concern to me as a speaker builder because speaker drivers (woofers, midranges, etc.) are crossed over well before they ring. As long as I can bury the resonance with a deep enough crossover slope, I am fine. Also, speaker measurements are much easier than headphone measurements because they lack issues with head/ear interactions. If we see a significant spike or null on an FR graph on a speaker driver, it's always going to be resonance (hence the CSD is not really needed.) This may not be true with headphone FR measurements, which are really difficult and tend to be screwy
 
This just agrees with what I said regarding speakers.
 
A serious limitation of headphones is that they use a single driver. Every driver is going to ring. Good engineering can get around it somewhat. Most above-average headphones measure very poorly to above-average speakers in CSDs. We are not talking about "speed", which you keep mentioning, but rather driver resonances at specific frequencies. Driver decay is inherent, but how that energy is released is critical. If the energy is blurted out at specific narrow sets of frequencies, the effect can be rather nasty.
 
So you're arguing that it's not how short the decay is, but how frequency oriented it is.  Is that correct?
 
I never once said that headphone drivers didn't ring, but rather that I believe many are short enough to be a non-issue for me - and more importantly that some exaggerate results greatly based on this.
 
So far nothing you've said actually disagrees with anything I've said, just expands on one of your interpretations of the measurements.  At least, that's what I'm seeing.
 
The CSD plots are objective data after all. Not all people can hear ringing or do they mind it. Some people even like it in certain areas of the audio band. Just because you can't subjectively hear ringing doesn't mean that it isn't there for most other people.
 
And that's cool, I'd love to see a study regarding the audibility of it.  Thus why I said "IME" in relation to decay specifically, because people abuse them for all the wrong reasons - see Audeze early marketing material once again going on about fast decay, and various Stax users mentioning "speed".
 
If you have some documentation regarding the narrowness of the frequency impacting audibility including a relation to ringing I'd definitely take a look at it.  But so far this is the only thing you mentioned I wasn't aware of/comprehending from your post.

 
@Ultrabike
 
I have yet to hear Stax TOTL stuff, just the 202 & 404 and a lot of the earlier stuff.  I guess I did forget closed headphones, I could see those having more of a problem in the right circumstances now that I think about it - CSDs for that make a lot more sense to me.  Once again, that's just my thoughts on it.

 

[estreeter]

Thanks for the response, Steve. I'm bugging out - its getting hot in here !  

 

[purrin]

Quote:

My cousin is the head of a food lab for Nabisco, PhD in organic chemistry and a BA in culinary arts. He tests samples of all the food that facility produces, and a taste test is an important part of it. Why would he do that? Because it's food and its taste is one of its most important qualities. Why do they trust what he's tasting? I can't think of anything that's much more subjective than that. Why do fragrance companies trust their chemist's noses? I'll guarantee companies that make skin cream wouldn't sell an ounce of it until they've slathered it on someone.
Audio companies can run all the objective tests they want, and they are valuable, but they don't mean as much until someone gets their ears involved.

 
Shame on Nabisco. You mean they haven't made a taste-o-meter!

 

[Shike]

Quote:

 
Shame on Nabisco. You mean they haven't made a taste-o-meter!

 
Of course they have, its name is Gabe Newell:
 

 

[germanium]

Quote:

Can someone either confirm or deny the assertion made earlier in the thread  that full Class A amps take the power out of the equation (assuming you have a reliable 120V/230V source, of course) ?  Does that mean owners of class A amps can dispense with conditioners and expensive power cords etc ? 

 Full "class A pushpull transformer coupled" tube amps, not  class A single ended or not class A transistor amps. The reason is that power is drawn from a single power supply rail that has a constant current that does not vary untill you get very close to going into class B & the grid starts to draw current. When one tube is drawing near max current in class A the other tube is drawing near nothing balancing the current drawn from the power supply. This does not happen in any other class A type amp other than push pull transformer coupled Class A tube amps.
 
Class A transistor amps almost always are direct coupled & have 2 rail power supplies, as a result even though the overall current is constant the current from each power supply rail is not constant but varies just like a class AB or class B amp.
 
Class A sigle ended amps have no opposite phase output tube to balance the current so even though the average power draw at full power is the same as at idle the current does vary with  the output of the amp at any given moment in time just like a class AB or class B amp.
 
Yes most class A transformer coupled push pull tube amp can be run just fine with no audible loss in qualty without power conditioners but I will say that most of these type amps already are very well coditioned internally already with pie filers that use 2 capacitors to ground & one 10 henry inductor in series between the two capacitors as well as between the rectifier & the amps output transformer. The inductor would cause problems in the sound of a Class B amp due to its resistance to varying current but since the current does not vary in a class A pushpull transformer coupled tube amp it has no audible effect on the sound  other than to reduce noise from the rectifier & line noise. This is as I said befor the power supply on said amps is not  in the signal path as there is no signal on the power supply on these amps untill you get very close to clipping.

 

[ultrabike]

@Ultrabike
 
I have yet to hear Stax TOTL stuff, just the 202 & 404 and a lot of the earlier stuff.  I guess I did forget closed headphones, I could see those having more of a problem in the right circumstances now that I think about it - CSDs for that make a lot more sense to me.  Once again, that's just my thoughts on it.
 

Yes. Closed headphones usually seem to have a harder time judging by the ones I've heard (and their corresponding measurements.) However, open headphones still have to deal cups to some degree, along with the pads, driver angle, etc... There is a library of mods applied to the Grados and KSC75/35s to improve their sound, and those are all open (granted, not TOTL though.) Pads and driver distance reportedly much improved an SR225 according to this article:
 
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/grado-diy-project-starving-student-audiophile-gives-new-meaning-music
 
I even was surprised to see that the mod actually had an impact on the headphone impedance!

 

[Magick Man]

Shame on Nabisco. You mean they haven't made a taste-o-meter!

Would you want to eat what a taste-o-meter said was good?

 

[Chris J]

Quote:

Which is why the sound science forum is irrelevant and no one cares.  Let's take a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about, put them in an isolated forum, and pontificate endlessly about an objective only approach to a subjective experience. 
 
You all need to get out more. 

 
+1
 
Quote:

 
Then it would consist mostly of people with no practical understanding of what they are talking about, discussing things which have, essentially, no practical application to our hobby. When that happens, a handful of people end up, in the manner of religious fanatics, trying to convert and belittle people and the forums as a whole end up trashed, to nobody's benefit.
 
Science is supposed to be for people's benefit, not detriment. It is not an exclusive club for people who only think in a certain way and nor is it flawless. Not only that, its greatest flaw is, as purrin pointed out, how people will take results, in this case measurements, and derive generalised facts from those results that are false. That is totally removed from what science is about!

 
Yep.
The first paragraph is my read on this forum in general.
 
Quote:

 
That might not be a bad idea. But you know that's going to piss off some "objectivists" who parrot other people's claims such as "op-amp based circuits sound no worse than discrete circuits", because they are going to have to back that statement up with actual blind tests rather than take the stance that such a null hypothesis is absolute truth to begin with (and beat people over their heads with such "truths".)
 
It seems the opposite of "I trust my ears" now on HF is "I know X because Y says so and has Z measurement (which in reality only relates a little bit to X) to conclusively prove so. And everyone who doesn't know X is a retard bourgeois subject to placebo and wasting their money. And BTW, I'm not trolling, I'm just calling it as it is." All you have you to do is to read the first two posts from the OP. I think you are arguing semantics with Currawong and not knowing where he is coming from as a moderator.
 
There's a reason why people who have the ability to take measurements don't post them here anymore nor even want to discuss them here. Inexperienced people, for whatever reason, come to all sorts of wild conclusions like dismissing important key measurements or overemphasizing very basic and simple measurements of limited scope. You are making an assumption that inexperienced or less knowledgeable people will ask intelligent questions rather than vomit assertions to "prove" their subject matter expertise when they in fact know very little about what they are talking about.

 
True, but you can also read these types of "viewpoints" and "opinions" (to a lesser degree) anywhere on Head Fi.
It's nice to have most of it rounded up in one forum.

 

[Chris J]

Quote:

Can someone either confirm or deny the assertion made earlier in the thread  that full Class A amps take the power out of the equation (assuming you have a reliable 120V/230V source, of course) ?  Does that mean owners of class A amps can dispense with conditioners and expensive power cords etc ? 

 
In ten words or less, NO.
Running your amp Class A does nothing to reduce the effect of EMI/RFI, noise conducted down the power line or radiated noise.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

My cousin is the head of a food lab for Nabisco, PhD in organic chemistry and a BA in culinary arts. He tests samples of all the food that facility produces, and a taste test is an important part of it. Why would he do that? Because it's food and its taste is one of its most important qualities. Why do they trust what he's tasting? I can't think of anything that's much more subjective than that. Why do fragrance companies trust their chemist's noses? I'll guarantee companies that make skin cream wouldn't sell an ounce of it until they've slathered it on someone.
 

 
And this has what exactly to do with audio?
 
Like with loudspeakers and headphones, there's no doubt that different foods can taste different and different fragrances can smell different. That's because with such things as loudspeakers and headphones, their distortions are significant enough that they're within known, established limits of audibility.
 
But once you get to electronics and cables, it's possible to keep their distortions far below known, established limits of audibility. And when they are, no one to date has demonstrated under properly controlled conditions that there are actual audible differences between such components.
 
Quote:

Audio companies can run all the objective tests they want, and they are valuable, but they don't mean as much until someone gets their ears involved.

 
Sure. But those ears are connected to a brain that's known for not being so reliable. So if you want to get some meaningful answers with regard to what's actually audible and what's not, you need to adequately control for that unreliable brain. And that's what blind testing is designed to do.
 
se

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

Thanks for the response, Steve. I'm bugging out - its getting hot in here !  

 
WIMP!

 
se

 

[Magick Man]

And this has what exactly to do with audio?

All senses have their limitations and susceptibility to bias, but the reason for their inclusion is plain once you see all the information displayed together.

Sure. But those ears are connected to a brain that's known for not being so reliable. So if you want to get some meaningful answers with regard to what's actually audible and what's not, you need to adequately control for that unreliable brain. And that's what blind testing is designed to do.

You're still acting as if I'm saying audible analysis should replace graphs and figures, and I most certainly am not. Each aspect has more value when, as I said before, they're viewed together.

 

[rhythmdevils]

Quote:

 
So a different interpretation than you makes it fail, lovely.  How dare we interpret results differently, rage rage rabbalrabbal and all that jazz.
 

 
"different interpretation"  ie subjectivity?  So while subjective impressions of gear is invalid, subjective impressions of objective measurements are?  We just get to make up whatever we want about measurements to fit our ignorant sonic impressions? 
 
No one said you need to know how to read a CSD plot or have good hearing.  But if you're going to lecture people, then you certainly do.  You should be more humble and start listening more because you might learn something. 
 
This is so typical of this forum.  Arrogant people set on rigid fundamentalist views they don't understand.  Maybe subjectivity seems useless to these people because they have bad hearing.  And measurements seem so amazing because their simplistic, limited understanding of them make more sense than their dull sonic impressions. 
 
Such a fail. 

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

All senses have their limitations and susceptibility to bias, but the reason for their inclusion is plain once you see all the information displayed together.
 

 
But the subjective doesn't really tell you anything meaningful until you've properly controlled for its limitations. At least in the context of trying to determine whether or not there are actual audible differences.
 
Quote:

You're still acting as if I'm saying audible analysis should replace graphs and figures, and I most certainly am not. Each aspect has more value when, as I said before, they're viewed together.

 
Quite frankly, I'm not sure just what it is that you're trying to say as much of what you say is rather vague and ambiguous.
 
se

 

[germanium]

Quote:

 
 
This is so typical of this forum.  Arrogant people set on rigid fundamentalist views they don't understand.  When it comes down to it they neither understand the objective measurements they praise as the word of God, or the subjective impressions they think are so useless.  Maybe subjectivity seems useless to these people because they have bad hearing.  And measurements seems so amazing because their simplistic, limited understanding of them make more sense than their dull sonic impressions. 
 
Such a fail. 

 
I don't think that it is nessessarily a lack of hearing that is the problem but not knowing what to listen for as when you hear what your missing when you move to better equipment then you start to listen for it in lesser equipment you find that while the thing that you thought was missing in the lesser equipment is there but clouded in most cases. There are some cases that certain soft sounds can be completely lost in the cloudiness.
 
I think most of the people here are discussing it honestly with an open mind but there are a few that fit your arrogant discription. It is the few bad apples that spoil it for many here. I like to take a balanced approach to listening & measurements but most of my mods are done by ear as I found that most of the time measurements really don't reveal anything good or bad as they still measure nearly Identical after the mods I do but they do sound different (better to my ears).