[old tech]

I know that in theory there's a difference between an "audible difference" and a "perceivable difference," but does it really make a difference in practice? It seems to me that the theory of that difference operates on the assumption that we can separate ourselves from our biases, that we can somehow operate in a perceptual vacuum.
I feel like there's some aspect of the argument that I'm probably missing here, but... well... I'm missing it.

Perception of sound, if it is not based on actual sound, can be changed, ie "seek and you will find the truth". One example I can give is that many Beatles audiophiles believe that the first 1984 issue of Abbey Road on CD (the Japan B/T Odeon) is the best sounding CD version and compared with the later 1987 issue, it is a night and day difference and the 1987 CD sounds muffled and dull. This was the stuff of uban audiophile legend which most people just accepted as a given. One day a guy on the Hoffman forum set up an on-line level matched blind test to prove his contention that there is hardly any difference between the two issues and that the 1984 may have come from a higher generation tape so the differences are so subtle that one really has to concentrate on certain parts of the music to notice any subtleties. After that, most of the participants no longer heard a night and day difference and many of them started to listen and actually enjoy their 1987 CDs. In an extreme sense it is a bit like having a phobia which later disappears when one becomes desensitised to it.

3. Another basic question! Is there such a thing as "as the artist intended?"
Dr. Dre said it about his Beats and the audiophiles all scoffed and laughed in unison; Neil Young said it about the Pono Player and everybody oohed and aahed. Like "transparent," it's a term that's applied to a lot of things, and, in fact, in some cases the terms are probably interchangeable... but I don't think the concepts are quite the same. Is there any one sonic vision that an artist (whoever that may be) has that can be replicated by the listener?.

It depends on what one means by 'as the artist intended'. If we assume the finalised production master is what the artist intended, then the closer the home stereo can replicate the master then the closer it is to how the artist intended. Simple measurements can determine how transparent the playback chain is up to the speakers, but the speakers and room acoustics will cause the sound to be different to what the artist or producer heard in the studio.

 

[bigshot]

It doesn't matter what the artist intended when you are listening to music for pleasure. All that really matters is if it sounds good to you. Now, that might mean absolutely nothing to someone else who might have different tastes, so you shouldn't go around recommending your choices to other people. But if you're happy, you've achieved your personal goal. The whole "as the artist intended" thing is over blown.

 

[aukhawk]

1. To be honest, it does seem to be well beyond the ability of most audiophiles. Many/Most audiophiles don't even seem able to level match when they're comparing different gear, so a Null (or pretty much any objective) test is beyond them. In practice it's not difficult but you do need an ADC, although it doesn't need to be an expensive ADC and once you have one, you can do a Null Test on just about any piece of gear. Once you've recorded the input and output, you then just need a couple of pieces of free software, which firstly automatically time aligns and level matches the two recordings (to eliminate these differences) and secondly, automatically "nulls" them (sums them together with a flipped polarity), analyses and displays the differences. You can even get some free DAW software and spectrally analyse the difference (see what specific frequencies are different). This all sounds more complex/difficult than it is.

All true but there is an easier way, I think, and that is simply to ease up on your inner audiophile and trust more to common sense. These tests have been done by others, and reported here and elsewhere - there is no need for me to re-invent this wheel.
For example, it seems to me that all science and common sense suggests that (within reason) cables make no audible diffenece - a lot of people (here and elsewhere) have done listening tests and reported that this is indeed so, and for me that's an end to it. It's of course true that other people (here and elsewhere) have reported hearing differences, but (because of the science as I understand it, and all common sense) I choose to discount these reports as mistaken (eg expectation bias) or even occasionally wilfully inaccurate (marketing).
I apply the same logic to (modern) DACs - admittedly the science is a lot more complicated but in the most simplistic terms it still works for me, and in addition we have bigshot who has tested a lot of this stuff on his kitchen table in a slightly obsessive way (meant nicely !) and reported "nothing to hear here" - that's good enough for me, it's what I would expect, I don't need to do these tests myself.
Same again with portable DAPs - I have two that I regularly use, different makes, no audible difference (although one of them is slightly better with 'difficult' headphones). I use the two because one (Fiio X5-II ) is a satisfying form factor and UI, I enjoy it in the garden - the other (Shanling M0 ) is miniscule and so ideal for cycle-touring.

Unfortunately in the case of amplifiers whilst in general I would like to say the same again applies, my personal experience is different - I have three 'audiophile' power amps at home (one designed/marketed about 45 years ago, one about 20 years ago, one less than 10 years ago), and while two of them sound indistinguishable (as far as I can tell, sighted not blind) the other one (the most recent design) sounds very different. The first two are both very reputable marques (Quad and Arcam) and so I assume the odd one out (Temple Audio) is 'not transparent' (well, I would say 'faulty' except it is 2x monoblocs). The one I keep hooked up permanently is the 20-year-old Arcam.

So anyway my message is, enjoy the gear, enjoy the music, don't over-think any of it.

 

[castleofargh]

I often think science is kind of hard and doing science-like things are kind of beyond my purview, so, again, I leave it to the experts.

nothing wrong with that. there is a massive misunderstanding in the audio community that we're trying to force everybody to blind test everything. it isn't true and for the most part, we really couldn't care less that someone test things or goes with his guts when in the comfort of his home or when sharing his personal preferences. we jump on people making claims and tell them to properly demonstrate their claims(even more so if the claim happens to be something we doubt). the act of coming to this forum telling people "I can fly and I can notice the change in soundstage when my copper cable isn't really 99.999999 oxygen free", will logically trigger a reply along the line of "pic or it didn't happen". we very much doubt the claim and wish to see proof of it, not really an extraordinary response to some noname dude on the web making a surprising claim. for claims of hearing something special, a controlled listening test is the best, most straightforward method to demonstrate the claim, so we bring that up.
but all this time it is very important to remember that the trigger was some dude making an empty claim on the forum. when someone goes "I like that cable", I won't ask him to prove that he has a subjective preference. that would be pretty dumb. but if he develops and says "because the silver really opens up the soundstage", now of course I'm triggered. can silver "open up the soundstage"? what does that even mean? how could he possibly know that the silver is the cause for his impression? I want answers and if the guy doesn't have them, I'm going to be pissed that he dared make such a claim out of nowhere.
otherwise you can claim that you love Beethoven but only as trap remix, and while some may not agree with your taste, nobody is going to ask you to prove it. (now that I've said it, someone might for the lolz, I'm decline all responsibility)


in audacity you find "invert" in the "effect" list at the top. you do that to one of the tracks, then mix the 2 and if they were very carefully aligned in time and were essentially the same, the result will be nothing or close to nothing. null test is kind of the easiest sort of test but also the most hardcore when it comes to demonstrating inaudibility. because if you end up with almost nothing in a null test you know that almost nothing is different, and of course that's not going to sound like anything. but on the other hand, you can end up with some pretty big stuff in a null test and still not be able to notice the difference in a blind test. the most obvious example would be out of phase tracks(we assume you have aligned them but some frequencies may have a different shift). people are really not that sensitive to phase shifts(unless it's a shift between ears), but if the shift between tracks you null, causes a frequency to shift to opposite phase, you're going to to have signals that add up and the null will show some loud stuff remaining. so it's sort of the opposite of an abx test, with a null you can sometimes prove without a doubt that there is simply nothing different to be heard, but you might not always be clear if an existing difference is audible. while with the abx test, you can prove that you can hear the difference, but you can never prove that there is no audible difference between the tracks. ^_^
different tools do different things. the very obvious example where a null test is the wrong tool, is if used on lossy formats. the remaining signal is always going to significant and audible as a standalone file, because it's signal that was supposed to be masked by the rest of the music. we removed the rest of the music, we removed the mask and lost the very function of that encoding.

I think one of my main points is that I wonder if hearing and perception (and our biases) are really separable?

it's all really just a matter of properly defining something and then sticking to it. if a guy goes to say that X sound different from Y in such and such ways, he very much implies that the differences are in the sound and he can perceive them with his ears. if some of those impressions were caused by the fact that visually he sees 2 completely different devices, and know one to be an expensive and famous brand, then it's not about hearing anymore, it's about the impression of hearing. and those 2 can be vastly different as the brain likes to pick information from all our senses and previous knowledge to help interpret stuff. so as with @gregorio's favorite McGurk effect, sight can and will have some impact on what we "hear". so the important distinction here is really the good old objective vs subjective. are we talking about sound and only sound? or are we talking about our impression of the sound and only the sound(which will include notions such as audibility), or are we talking about impression of the sound caused by the complete multi sensory experience? in which case, what I had for lunch, the color of the box, how long it's been since I heard device X, etc, will all be likely to play some role in our final impression of how we felt the devices "sounded".
here too, the trigger for all the evil zombies saying "blind teeeestttttt" while walking toward their victim, isn't that we have a problem when people happen to enjoy a tube amp because the glow is calming to them. it's that they may talk as if everything they feel is cause strictly by sound when under sighted condition, that is simply never the case. it's really just a matter of not claiming something for all the wrong reasons. I get that it can be tricky, I get that sighted impression are all that most people will ever have in this hobby, and I get that most don't even suspect how so very flawed a human brain and senses are when it comes to making assessments about the objective world. but should typical ignorance of an issue mean that the issue doesn't exist? of course not. we're looking for the truth, not a subjective truth someone happens to believe but is really just being wrong without knowing it.
anyway, if you remove sight(the very dominant sense that our brain trusts over any other) while listening to stuff, you already have drastically improved you chance to have sound as the cause of your impressions of sound. which is important if you're going to come on a forum to tell others about how device X sound is warmer and blablablah, instead of saying that you felt as if it was warmer. the second statement is never false so long as you believe it, it's not claiming that the sound is a certain way, only that you felt a certain way. it's usually the right way to describe a sighted experience.

3. Another basic question! Is there such a thing as "as the artist intended?"

yes there is. at each step of the production, someone had an intent when doing whatever he was doing. now what remains of the guitarist's intent on his CD, hard to say. his power of decision might have gone all the way, or maybe he played in the booth someone told him they had all they needed and he was never asked anything ever again.
the follow up problem is that your speakers or room or headphones are almost certainly not giving you a sound like they had while playing or like the engineer had while mixing or listening to the final master one last time. so I'm tempted to say that anybody using that argument might have good intent, but is most likely full of crap in the context he's talking about.

 

[megabigeye]

1. Perception of sound, if it is not based on actual sound, can be changed, ie "seek and you will find the truth". One example I can give is that many Beatles audiophiles believe that the first 1984 issue of Abbey Road on CD (the Japan B/T Odeon) is the best sounding CD version and compared with the later 1987 issue, it is a night and day difference and the 1987 CD sounds muffled and dull. This was the stuff of uban audiophile legend which most people just accepted as a given. One day a guy on the Hoffman forum set up an on-line level matched blind test to prove his contention that there is hardly any difference between the two issues and that the 1984 may have come from a higher generation tape so the differences are so subtle that one really has to concentrate on certain parts of the music to notice any subtleties. After that, most of the participants no longer heard a night and day difference and many of them started to listen and actually enjoy their 1987 CDs. In an extreme sense it is a bit like having a phobia which later disappears when one becomes desensitised to it.



2. It depends on what one means by 'as the artist intended'. If we assume the finalised production master is what the artist intended, then the closer the home stereo can replicate the master then the closer it is to how the artist intended. Simple measurements can determine how transparent the playback chain is up to the speakers, but the speakers and room acoustics will cause the sound to be different to what the artist or producer heard in the studio.

1. Right. Of course. This is the part of the argument I was missing last night. Biases, perceptions, and points of view change. I was even thinking about that yesterday and had attempted a post earlier in the day (actually, I attempted three times), but was interrupted every time and subsequently forgot some of my points.

2. Isn't the idea of a home stereo replicating the master kind of... (for lack of a better word) logically incorrect, though? A master is a piece of recorded media, and a home stereo is the equipment for the playback of media. The master is software, the home stereo is hardware. So what you really have to replicate is the system that it's created / produced on. If everything were perfectly transparent, then all would be well and good, but, as @bigshot pointed out, transducers are the wildcard when it comes to transparency. So you can have a perfectly transparent system— that is to say, you're able to replicate what's heard in the studio— up to the point of the transducers, at which point it falls apart if you don't have the same speakers/headphones/etc. that the producers use. And if the system is no longer transparent at the transducers, does it really matter if the rest of the system is completely transparent? There's coloration being introduced at some point, so what does it matter (so long as it's enjoyable) if it's coming from the speakers, the amplifier, the DAC, or the cables?
Further more, isn't music produced on many systems, using many headphones and speakers? Isn't part of the production process to listen on crappy headphones and in cars to make certain it sounds correct (that is to say, as the artist intended) even in those scenarios?

It doesn't matter what the artist intended when you are listening to music for pleasure. All that really matters is if it sounds good to you. Now, that might mean absolutely nothing to someone else who might have different tastes, so you shouldn't go around recommending your choices to other people. But if you're happy, you've achieved your personal goal. The whole "as the artist intended" thing is over blown.

Yes, this is the logic I try to follow for myself. I think I was asking mostly out of intellectual curiosity and because I see so much reference to "as the artist intended."

 

[castleofargh]

Perception of sound, if it is not based on actual sound, can be changed, ie "seek and you will find the truth". One example I can give is that many Beatles audiophiles believe that the first 1984 issue of Abbey Road on CD (the Japan B/T Odeon) is the best sounding CD version and compared with the later 1987 issue, it is a night and day difference and the 1987 CD sounds muffled and dull. This was the stuff of uban audiophile legend which most people just accepted as a given. One day a guy on the Hoffman forum set up an on-line level matched blind test to prove his contention that there is hardly any difference between the two issues and that the 1984 may have come from a higher generation tape so the differences are so subtle that one really has to concentrate on certain parts of the music to notice any subtleties. After that, most of the participants no longer heard a night and day difference and many of them started to listen and actually enjoy their 1987 CDs. In an extreme sense it is a bit like having a phobia which later disappears when one becomes desensitised to it.

the way modern research suggests the human brain works is pretty fun TBH. for starters our memory is forever changing but our impression on the contrary is always that what we remember is and was what happened. the rupture becomes hilarious when we see that on average, if we thought something to be true, and get convinced that we were wrong(which is hard as we do tend to reject being wrong, sometimes violently), then we very often start thinking we always believed the now corrected version of events.
some say it's cognitive dissonance at play and we remove traces of us ever being wrong. but some suggest that it's even more natural and unavoidable than that. our memories are in a way rebuilt every time we call for them(as strange as it feels to me as a human, it seems to be the most accepted model nowadays). so it's not that we change our previous memories, and more that the new memories of that given belief are the old memories(no idea if it's similar to writing over the old data, or if it's more that the path toward that belief has been rerouted toward new neurons so we lose the access to the old path?) .
and then, because the fun never stops, each time we call it back again, we are likely to alter the memory some little more. apparently just how often we recall a memory impacts how important it becomes to us and how much we're going to pass it as normal or on the contrary exaggerate some of the key details so that it's easier to remember. we're so screwed. ^_^
on the bright side, even our memories have imagination. we're artists through and through, just horrible hard drives. \o/

 

[bigshot]

Unfortunately in the case of amplifiers whilst in general I would like to say the same again applies, my personal experience is different - I have three 'audiophile' power amps at home (one designed/marketed about 45 years ago, one about 20 years ago, one less than 10 years ago), and while two of them sound indistinguishable (as far as I can tell, sighted not blind) the other one (the most recent design) sounds very different.

Assuming there's no impedance issues, I would guess that the newer one is the correct one. My brother has a McIntosh system he bought in the mid 70s. It sounded exactly like my Sanyo power amp when I compared them back in the mid 80s, but he says now the caps have gone south and the sound isn't great any more. It supposedly costs a fortune to recap an old McIntosh. My first receiver, that I bought back in the mid 70s definitely wasn't transparent either. It had a persistent hiss and I think a high end roll off. But every amp I've gone through since I went to CDs has sounded the same. It also could be that your modern amp has a manufacturing defect and isn't performing to spec.

By the way, my "all amps sound the same" mantra doesn't apply to some tube amps and old amps, just current ones. It's easy to make an audibly transparent amp. I can't think of a reason why someone would want to make one that wasn't.

And as I have said for a couple of years now, I would like to find a current audio component that isn't audibly transparent to test and find out why it isn't... but all I get is crickets.

 

[bigshot]

Isn't the idea of a home stereo replicating the master kind of... (for lack of a better word) logically incorrect, though? A master is a piece of recorded media, and a home stereo is the equipment for the playback of media. The master is software, the home stereo is hardware. So what you really have to replicate is the system that it's created / produced on. If everything were perfectly transparent, then all would be well and good, but, as @bigshot pointed out, transducers are the wildcard when it comes to transparency.

The biggest difference is going to be the room. With speaker systems, the room is just as important to the sound as the equipment. Studios as designed to have carefully controlled acoustics designed from the ground up... the walls, the layout, the listening position are all carefully designed and built with a specific purpose in mind. The average living room is nothing like that. It's usually designed with the wife's aesthetics. And those are usually at complete odds with how a studio would be built.

Conceivably, you could take a back house or garage and rebuild it from the ground up to be a replica of a sound studio, and you could hear what the people who made the record heard. But even that wouldn't necessarily be what was intended, because even though mixes are monitored in studio, the mastering takes into account the sorts of situations that the music will be listened to in the real world. They will be trying to make it sound good in a range of typical living rooms.

It's really not correct to take a dogmatic "artist's intent" attitude to justify spending a lot of money on a home audio system. In fact, the people I see making that sort of claim usually have never set foot in a recording studio. They are taking an audio salesman's word for it. It ultimately doesn't matter whether you listen with earbuds, speakers or surround sound. The thing that fits your lifestyle and sounds good to you with the music you like to listen to is all that really counts.

 

[old tech]

Isn't the idea of a home stereo replicating the master kind of... (for lack of a better word) logically incorrect, though? A master is a piece of recorded media, and a home stereo is the equipment for the playback of media. The master is software, the home stereo is hardware. So what you really have to replicate is the system that it's created / produced on. If everything were perfectly transparent, then all would be well and good, but, as @bigshot pointed out, transducers are the wildcard when it comes to transparency. So you can have a perfectly transparent system— that is to say, you're able to replicate what's heard in the studio— up to the point of the transducers, at which point it falls apart if you don't have the same speakers/headphones/etc. that the producers use. And if the system is no longer transparent at the transducers, does it really matter if the rest of the system is completely transparent? There's coloration being introduced at some point, so what does it matter (so long as it's enjoyable) if it's coming from the speakers, the amplifier, the DAC, or the cables?
Further more, isn't music produced on many systems, using many headphones and speakers? Isn't part of the production process to listen on crappy headphones and in cars to make certain it sounds correct (that is to say, as the artist intended) even in those scenarios?

Yes, that is what I was saying, ie it is possible (IMO easily achievable) to have a transparent playback chain up to the point of speakers (or cans) which are transducers. That, along with the room acoustics play a significant role meaning that it is unlikely a home listening environment would replicate the sound of a studio.

Having said that, there is merit in aiming for total transparency as a goal. There is no need to be dogmatic around "just as the artist intended" because the benefits are apparent when the stereo enables the listener to listen through the stereo, rather than to the stereo. What I find is that the more transparent the stereo and listening environment, the more I can hear the differences in various masterings (even different issues of the same album). Good recordings/productions shine but the downside is that poor recordings/productions can sound worse with transparency as every flaw stands out.

Of course we should listen to music how we enjoy it. Personally I rather aim for transparency and use my time to find the best issues of an album rather than colouring all music the same way, even if it is a euphonic colour.

 

[bigshot]

There's more to coloration than just personal taste. My listening room has a resonant frequency. Stuff rattles, the walls rattle if specific frequencies are at a healthy level. A little notch filter fixes it and doesn't impact the sound quality.

 

[gregorio]

Others have covered some/all of the points but I'll add my bit:

[1] Although... Now that I know something about null tests... I do "need" (as much as an audiophile ever needs anything) to get a new portable headphone amp/DAC... and I do happen to have an ADC for ripping my vinyl... do you happen to know if you can do null tests in Audacity? I'll look into it...
2 and 2a. I think one of my main points is that I wonder if hearing and perception (and our biases) are really separable? I know that in theory there's a difference between an "audible difference" and a "perceivable difference," but does it really make a difference in practice?
3. Another basic question! Is there such a thing as "as the artist intended?"
[4] PPS— Heeding @bigshot's advice, I changed the title of the thread. No longer stupid. Now Basic. Like a Pumpkin Spice Latte.

1. Yes, you can do it in any audio editor. As castle mentioned, you have to accurately time align and level match the two recordings, otherwise the unavoidable time and level "differences" will result in a relatively big "difference file". You can do this manually in an audio editor program or use this bit of free software (https://www.libinst.com/Audio DiffMaker.htm) which will do it automatically for you.

2. Yes, they are separable, that's pretty much the whole point of blind/double blind tests; to separate what we're actually hearing from what we're perceiving. A "perception" is a combined image/impression/experience which includes not only what we hear but also what we see and what we know (memories and knowledge). Our knowledge and what we see is liable to change plus, our memories are typically quite inaccurate and we'll usually gain new ones, so our "perception" can change over a short period of time or may take years and this change in perception may have nothing to do with the audio entering our ears.

3. Absolutely, "what the artist intended" is why a Beethoven Symphony sounds different from the latest (or any) popular music hit. The issue isn't if there is such a thing but how far do we take it? Obviously we expect every playback system to reproduce the (distribution) master accurately enough to easily distinguish between a pop recording and a Beethoven Symphony but what about fine details in say the timbre (tonal characteristics) of a particular bass guitar performance? Some audiophiles do take it too far, not because their opinion of "too far" differs from mine but because what they are aiming for is based on a false assumption! The assumption is that a mastering engineer alters the final mix in order to take advantage of and sound as good as possible in the mastering studio and the conclusion is therefore that in order to more fully replicate the "artistic intent", the audiophile should attempt to replicate the mastering studio or at least, get as close as practical. If this assumption were correct, then that conclusion would also be correct but as @bigshot effectively stated, that's not really what a mastering engineer does and that's not the purpose of a mastering studio in the first place. The audiophile assumption is false and therefore, so is their conclusion (what they're aiming for)!

4. I was going to mention that too. Your questions were NOT stupid at all! And even though they are rather basic, they're still pretty advanced compared to many audiophiles. The previous point is a good example, some audiophiles spend years and considerable sums of money trying to achieve some notion of fidelity to mastering studios, without ever asking the most basic of questions: What is the purpose of a mastering studio and what is the purpose of mastering itself? Let alone the entirely pertinent but more advanced questions such as: How is mastering done, what are mastering engineers looking for, what is it that they alter and why?

[1] These tests have been done by others, and reported here and elsewhere - there is no need for me to re-invent this wheel.
[2] For example, it seems to me that all science and common sense suggests that (within reason) cables make no audible diffenece ...
[3] I apply the same logic to (modern) DACs - admittedly the science is a lot more complicated but in the most simplistic terms it still works for me, and in addition we have bigshot who has tested a lot of this stuff on his kitchen table in a slightly obsessive way (meant nicely !) and reported "nothing to hear here" - that's good enough for me, it's what I would expect, I don't need to do these tests myself.

1. Although typically the tests that have been done are effectively generic. The specific make and model (or models) that someone might be interested in comparing may not have been tested. Although ...

2. In the case of cables, the previous point is irrelevant. Given fairly obvious conditions, differences between specific makes/models of cable are never audible. In the case of DACs/DAPs though, it is not necessarily always true, unless we add some other conditions that may not be so obvious to some, which eliminate the few outliers (when it may not be true).

3. We have to be very careful here though, because although "hypocrisy" is either not recognised as such, is actually acceptable and is apparently widely employed in the audiophile world, that's not the case in the world of science (and therefore in this sub-forum). BTW, I want to make it absolutely clear that I'm NOT calling you a hypocrite or "having a go at you" in any way, just pointing out the very real danger of ending up in a position of hypocrisy, so to continue: Of course, it's entirely up to you how "simplistic" you are prepared to accept, how much you trust bigshot's tests, how it aligns with what you "would expect" and what's "good enough for you". For the vast majority, this basic type of approach is the only practical one and your application of it has far more merit than most IMHO, because what you "would expect" doesn't appear to be based solely on audiophile marketing and bigshot's tests are far better/more controlled than the average audiophile's. Nevertheless, it still comes down to fundamentally the same thing: What you "would expect", your level of trust in someone (their reported test conclusions) and the correlation between the two. This is exactly what so many audiophiles do (although exactly what they would expect, who they trust and therefore their final outcome/conclusion would likely be very different). Unless we (this sub-forum) are willing to be hypocritical, we can't accept bigshot's test conclusions or what you "would expect" purely on trust and because it aligns with what we believe. Science is not based on who we trust, what we expect and the correlation between the two, and this fact is what so commonly separates science from audiophilia! In other words, your approach may very well be the most practical for most people and your application of it will almost certainly give more accurate results than most audiophiles' (IMHO) but it's not scientific and we can't really condone it here (at least not without a whole bunch of conditions and caveats).

G

 

[bigshot]

I'd recommend not trusting other people's opinions or tests without making an effort to try it yourself. It doesn't matter how stringent your standards are for the controls. What matters is that you learn an awful lot from doing it. I have more of a sense of the proportions of things than most audiophiles, and that came from experimentation and tests. The thing that sometimes gets lost in all the arguing is that even if a difference exists, if you have to jump through hoops to discern it in controlled testing, it probably doesn't matter at all in practice. When you're using tones and straining to hear differences, that is an entirely different standard than when you just sit down to listen to Mozart in your living room. It's good to get very close to ideal, but the old audiophile saw that "the last 1% is the most important" just isn't true. There is such a thing as good enough.

 

[BobG55]

There is such a thing as good enough.

Yep. My headphone collection and amplifiers can attest to the fact that I believe that also. I've owned some very expensive HPs & amps in the past and with my present collection, I'm finally satisfied. It's good enough.

 

[megabigeye]

Here's another question: Is there an inherent sonic difference between driver technologies?
I often see electrostatic drivers described as being more transparent than planar drivers, planar as having "faster" bass than dynamic drivers, dynamic as having "more natural," bigger bass, and better extension on both ends than balanced armature drivers, and balanced armature as being more detailed than dynamic. I've also seen 1,001 other claims of how each technology might be different and/or superior to the others. It seems like planar is the most popular request, while e-stat is the most aspirational. I think dynamic is more sought after than BA.
I don't think I have enough experience with all of the different technologies to know, and, even if I did have experience, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference between individual tunings and technologies. Further more, I'm not sure what "transparent" means in regards to headphones (less distortion?), I don't know what "faster" sounds like, and I mostly dismiss "natural" as being a nonsense term, detail I can mostly wrap my head around (though, to be honest, even that seems like it's a kinda catchall term)... But that hardly matters because those terms are really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the differences people perceive.
My experience is that dynamic drivers are capable of being hugely detailed and seemingly very transparent (though, again, I'm not sure I know what that sounds like or if it even applies), that BA drivers are capable of massive amounts of bass that, to my ear, sounds very natural, etc.

So, is there an inherent sonic difference between technologies? If so, what are those differences and what do they sound like?

PS— I wonder if this is actually a question of semantics and jargon and what the hell people actually mean when they're talking about audio. A thread addressing those questions is one I've been wanting to start for a while, but I honestly think it'd take a linguist to parse it all out. Do we have a linguist in the house??!

 

[bigshot]

There's an audible difference between all headphones, even ones of the exact same brand and model. There's no such thing as transparent for transducers. Terms like faster and transparent as you are quoting them are pretty much meaningless. Many of the descriptions of how things sound you see in audiophile forums are just describing placebo and bias. The descriptions that matter are the ones directly related to specific aspects of sound fidelity: frequency response, distortion, signal to noise, etc.