[jax]

 
Quote:

 
 
Sound reproduction is not about perception, it's about stimulus. Response to a stimulus varies from person to person, thus your choice would be to get the equipment that you have the best response to, I think that's the point you are trying to make. But, by getting the reproduced stimulus as close to the original stimulus, you would get a response as close as possible to the original response you had, that's why high-fidelity is important to me.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Your analogy to a translation is good. Suppose that you have novels written in French, that's the live performance, now because you can't read French or go to the concert, you are using headphones or reading the English translation. Above all, you want to read a well written novel, with good figures of speech (not sure of the English word  I mean things like metaphors, alliterations, innovative metonymies...) and thus you would want the translation to be well written. I would rather have a a faithful translation, if the novel was well written in French, the same characteristics should be found in English, if the author wrote like an uncultured lout, the translation should reflect that, and not attempt to present a more civilized language.
 
In short, it brings us to the point where should I learn French and read the original novel, I can tell "the translation is good, but the novel itself was badly written, or the translation is good, as was the novel" rather than "Wow, the English version was good, but its style was not that of the original version". To me audio equipment is the translator, it should remain as faithful as possible to the original within the technological limits.
 
 
As I said and repeated, measurement does not define the response of an individual, merely the stimuli. And for that matter, I remember writing that I thought we haven't developed all the means to measure the "fidelity" of audio equipment yet.

I hate this new interface.  I can't seem to break up my response to follow the paragraphs I'm responding to.  So here goes another rambling response part IV:
 
Everything is about perception, because everything that you and I are reading, writing, speaking, acting on and doing is a human response.  We are not machines and do not respond to "stimulus" like a machine.  You can talk "Fidelity" and "truth" till the cows come home and in the end it still means absolutely nothing where a human's actual response to it is concerned.  What is the truth in an auditory experience.  If a sound is made in a concert hall, which truth represents "fidelity"?  Row 4 left of center?  Row 20 in a full hall dead center?  Wherever the mike is?  Is truth before that engineer did the compression, or after?  Or is it the audiophile minimalist recording with only one mike and no mixing?  So then do you only listen those eight esoteric albums you have that are recorded that way to remain faithful to this "fidelity" that is so important to you?  Is High-Fidelity important to you because you feel that your life will be made better by a representation of sound that can be somehow declared by all the proper authorities and measurement devices to be a verbatim reproduction of the actual event?  Have at it.  I don't share the same criteria, and instead prefer to rely on the interface of my perceptions simply because it is the only way I actually experience the world around me.  Faithful or not to the truth, if it moves me, it moves me, and if it does not it does not.  Fidelity does not rule that either way. 
 
Given your agreement with the connection of a "translation" with what a component may be doing, and the relation to translating a foreign language to another; there are word and turns of phrase that simply do not translate, and or are so ambiguous as to be wide open to interpretation.  Is one correct and the other wrong?  Does it matter?  The original intent the author may have had in mind might even be lost or interpreted entirely differently by a person whose shares the same native language. Authors are often baffled by what the world makes of their words.  Ask a machine to translate words and you get Babblefish.  What's the point of these attempts to ascribe an objective value to an item that is to be experienced by a wide variety of humans, each entirely unique...what purpose does this serve?  Don't get me wrong, basically, I agree, and audio component should do a good job at reproducing music in a way that creates an effective illusion of the musical event.  I'm with you there, and I appreciate that too (though I don't think everyone does, nor would I expect they would or should). 
 
As for grains or bags of salt; I'd buy those bags of rock salt they use to melt the ice on the sidewalks in the winter. 

 

[khaos974]

Quote:

So then do you only listen those eight esoteric albums you have that are recorded that way to remain faithful to this "fidelity" that is so important to you?

Ideally all albums should meet this criterion, stereo mics from the 10th rank center in the Carnegie Hall

 
But more realistically, I actually find that most albums that aren't brick walled or have glaringly obviously faults are pretty listenable. Of course, sound quality is important and some albums are better recorded than others, but music itself is the most important thing. I'd rather have an ipod + ibud with 128k mp3 that I like rather than "not interesting but made for audiophiles" albums and a 100000€ stereo. For example, Brahms' 4th Symphony by Kleiber 1st movement gets me a "magic moment" whether it's on my home setup or via my mobile phone's output (+Ety ER6i). I like it more at home but, my phone still tell me that Kleiber's Brahms is genius.
 
The reason I'd prefer what I call a faithful sound, or in audiophile terms, perfectly neutral "wire with gain" is that albums are mastered differently, you would need several headphones to compensate the individually different deviations from live sound since the wrong headphone would worsen the deviation. Considering that situation the "wire with gain" approach the most reasonable one. It's a sensible approach to built a system, otherwise, it's always one component to compensate for another's "extra tubey" sound/ harshness, etc. and in the end, you can't change components form every album (you can but it would be too expensive and time consuming).

Of course, the other extreme is pretty good too: individual dsps for every album to get the optimal sound for my ear for each album, but that's too much work.

 

[Spareribs]

Reading reviews can be fun but if you are serious about this hobby please attend a meet with your reference CDs. You ears are the judge. Remember reviews are for entertainment.

 

[khaos974]

Find me a meet in Beijing and I'll gladly attend. With English speaker preferably since my Chinese is not that good, especially with audio terms. Cheers!

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Reading reviews can be fun but if you are serious about this hobby please attend a meet with your reference CDs. You ears are the judge. Remember reviews are for entertainment.

Thank god someone finally used the F word

 
Reading and writing reviews, like this hobby in general, is supposed to be FUN, people.  Reading this thread, you'd have a hard time imagining this was a hobby.
 
I strongly encourage everyone to bring all the salt they can possibly find when they read my reviews.  They are absolutely, positively my opinion and nothing more.  I enjoy writing them, and as long as someone still enjoys reading them, as a part of the enjoyment of the hobby, I will continue to do so.  This is a hobby, and a great outlet for me to think about something other than my very stressful job. 
 
No one should every make buying decisions strictly on reviews.  I've said this many times, and will say it again.  If you're unsure of a buying decision, buy used where you can re-sell at little to no loss, or buy where there is a return policy if you don't like what you bought.  I've returned a number of things I bought because I was disappointed, and I have bought and sold more used gear than I can remember.  This too, is part of the hobby.
 
But reading this thread, it's clear that there are some people who need to lighten up, and remember that this is a hobby, and hobbies are supposed to be fun.  We aren't talking about reviews of health insurance plans here, people.

 

[jax]

Good advice on reviews from a reviewer! 
 
Threads of this nature bring to mind images that I'd really rather get out of my head. A vision of a sweaty audiophile huddled over a centerfold of straight-line response graphs and square-wave replication, trembling with excitement.  It gets worse...I'll stop there.  I really need to see someone about this!
 
Does the listener with the more linear HD800's actually get more satisfaction from his/her music than the one with the more colored Grados?  Is the Grado listener wrong for enjoying their colorations on the "truth"? Is the guy who prefers the sounds from a Moth 2A3 wrong for not being more reasonable and dropping to their knees to worship the B22 gods?  Albums mastered differently will occur differently through hypothetical straight wire or through a colored delivery vehicle...what is objectively good about either that applies to all listeners?  Some folks consistently prefer 2nd order harmonic distortion and find it more pleasing to listen to music that way as opposed to attempts that are what, by the numbers may be closer to neutral.  For you, straight-wire standard may be the ultimate goal, but it is most certainly not the case for everyone.  If I were more inclined to music reproduced with leanings to certain colorations, why would I pay attention to a review written by someone who holds a straight-wire standard as the second coming?  Different strokes for different folks....oh god there's that vision again!!!

 

[Deep Funk]

From what I have notice with myself, it is hard to always be sure of what you are hearing, hearing different or not hearing at all while listening to your audio set up. Example, my Pioneer Monitor 10R for me first sounded bass light, even after burn in for which I blame myself because the Sony MDR V6 was still in my memory regarding bass. There was a time I thought the AKG K240 DF sounded bass light. Now I know better. 
 
Tracks like Massive Attack's 'Angel' really help for such matters. 
 
Review, I do not like the word. I prefer impression for that word most truly describes what you deal with. Still, always ask questions.

 

[khaos974]

A thought just occurred to me concerning the unreliability of reviewers, at least one of the factors of this unreliability. it's about listening volumes.
 
The problem is  "equal loudness contour", to sum up, human hearing is less sensible to low and high frequencies at low listening volumes. As the listening volume gets higher, the response curve of human ear gets flatter. Thus a headphone with a lot of highs sounds sibilant at high level and perfect ok at lower levels. And the "not enough bass issue" comes from the fact that because you are listening at low volumes, at higher volume, the headphones would sound flatter despite the low frequencies proportion being the same.
 
I propose we add an SPL measurement to for the standard listening volume of each review... (that was a joke

)

 

[Ypoknons]

Actually, it's not a bad idea. Skylab volume matches everything he reviews, for example. 

 

[Skylab]

 
Quote:

A thought just occurred to me concerning the unreliability of reviewers, at least one of the factors of this unreliability. it's about listening volumes.
 
The problem is  "equal loudness contour", to sum up, human hearing is less sensible to low and high frequencies at low listening volumes. As the listening volume gets higher, the response curve of human ear gets flatter. Thus a headphone with a lot of highs sounds sibilant at high level and perfect ok at lower levels. And the "not enough bass issue" comes from the fact that because you are listening at low volumes, at higher volume, the headphones would sound flatter despite the low frequencies proportion being the same.
 
I propose we add an SPL measurement to for the standard listening volume of each review... (that was a joke

)

Not a joke to me.  I actually think it's 100% essential.

 
Quote:

Actually, it's not a bad idea. Skylab volume matches everything he reviews, for example. 

Yep.  I use an SPL meter and the Stereophile Test CD 3  to match everything to 80dbA (using pink noise).  This way the comparisons are not influenced by variations in loudness, which otherwise make any sort of real comparison very difficult at best.

 

[khaos974]

Quote:

Not a joke to me.  I actually think it's 100% essential.

 
It was a joke because it was meant for all reviewers, a single reviewer like you may have a standard "reviewing SPL", but forcing all reviewers on Head-Fi to review at 80 dBA would be nigh impossible.