[71 dB]

So nothing should be better than required?Good enough is good enough?Thats gonna kill a lot of hobbies bud.

Nothing is better than required in every area. It's about putting effort on things that matter.

 

[Glmoneydawg]

Nothing is better than required in every area. It's about putting effort on things that matter.

right...but if you improve things that matter and your system cant show improvement because you drew a line at good enough?

 

[71 dB]

a deviation from what? do you assume your playback system is flat and your TV ideally calibrated without doing anything to them?

Just watched Twin Peaks seasons 1-2 on Blu-ray and I used color mode "cold" on my TV which increases blue and reduces red, because I found the colors better.

 

[71 dB]

right...but if you improve things that matter and your system cant show improvement because you drew a line at good enough?

Then the line of "good enough" is clearly wrong. Good enough should mean improvement don't matter.

 

[Glmoneydawg]

Then the line of "good enough" is clearly wrong. Good enough should mean improvement don't matter.

agreed...i think lol

 

[castleofargh]

I don't think "good enough" is the issue. we probably all have a different "good enough" for most things by ability or desire. the matter in audio is often that people are delusional about what to expect. they will look with a magnifying glass at a tiny portion of the recording or playback chain, while missing how that tiny stuff they want to preserve to the nᵗʰ level was squashed before it came there, and will be squashed again before it reaches the brain or even the eardrum. yes every part of the chain participates in the final level of fidelity. but it's just as true that the final level of fidelity will still be limited by the worst element in the chain. losing sight of this is the only reason why we have all that false hifi hobby where we are told to run after meaningless but easily marketable variables. and in the meantime, almost nobody stops to wonder why a headphone, by far the weakest link in fidelity, is also the only one usually sold with no data relevant to fidelity.
deciding if noticeable is enough, that's up to the user IMO. but it would really be good for everybody if those obsessed about fidelity were driving the industry toward ... well, fidelity instead of new ideas to better polish a turd.

 

[Glmoneydawg]

I don't think "good enough" is the issue. we probably all have a different "good enough" for most things by ability or desire. the matter in audio is often that people are delusional about what to expect. they will look with a magnifying glass at a tiny portion of the recording or playback chain, while missing how that tiny stuff they want to preserve to the nᵗʰ level was squashed before it came there, and will be squashed again before it reaches the brain or even the eardrum. yes every part of the chain participates in the final level of fidelity. but it's just as true that the final level of fidelity will still be limited by the worst element in the chain. losing sight of this is the only reason why we have all that false hifi hobby where we are told to run after meaningless but easily marketable variables. and in the meantime, almost nobody stops to wonder why a headphone, by far the weakest link in fidelity, is also the only one usually sold with no data relevant to fidelity.
deciding if noticeable is enough, that's up to the user IMO. but it would really be good for everybody if those obsessed about fidelity were driving the industry toward ... well, fidelity instead of new ideas to better polish a turd.

Yep definitely need some fresh thinking in the industry. ....much as i like a nicely polished turd.I think that fresh thinking needs to be in the analog domain(if i am to believe what i read in sound science)differences are most likely in the analog part of our hobby?

 

[bigshot]

I hear stuff today that is better than anything I've ever heard. I don't think technology is the problem when it isn't good. Lack of passion is usually the problem when something sucks.

 

[Glmoneydawg]

I hear stuff today that is better than anything I've ever heard. I don't think technology is the problem when it isn't good. Lack of passion is usually the problem when something sucks.

100% agree....didnt see that one coming. .you keep surprising me my friend. ...not a very scientific comment lol.Of course i expect graphs with spikey lines ect

 

[71 dB]

What I mean by "good enough" is that we don't hear the differences. In audio we don't need t get to 100 % if 99 % is enough, but we better target that 99 % aggressively because 98 % is NOT enough! When technological advancements allow us to get to that 99 % we can start having that for less money, cheaper.

 

[bigshot]

100% agree....didnt see that one coming. .you keep surprising me my friend. ...not a very scientific comment lol.Of course i expect graphs with spikey lines ect

When I first started getting interested in music, I had a turntable and a cassette deck. Distortion and noise were important issues that I constantly had to try to find workarounds to fix. Now I have an AAC file that sounds better than my old reel to reel deck and is a million times more convenient. The struggle to improve sound quality is what took us from hissy cassettes and crackly records to where we are today. But once you've reached audible transparency, pushing further is pointless and it's a waste of time. If sound quality still isn't good with formats capable of audible perfection, then you have to turn your attention to the source of the problem. That would be the quality of the recording and engineering. If the people making the music don't care, then the quality is going to suffer for it. Equipment doesn't record music by itself.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Here's a general question for the science-minded. With an unlimited budget, is it even possible today to build a transducer (or set of transducers) with zero audible distortion? I mean if you had the budget of CERN and NASA put together, is it even possible in principle? (for now, let's pretend that room / and personal HRTF doesn't matter) I think the file format, DAC and amp can probably reach that standard, but as far as I know even the best transducers that exist are far from theoretically perfect?

 

[bigshot]

Those Magnepan flat speakers are supposed to have very low distortion levels at reasonable listening levels- down around .2% give or take a bit. I would call that inaudible. But you'd need a sub for bass, and I don't think you could do that with the same kind of accuracy.

I guess it depends on what you define as zero audible distortion. The ear is less sensitive to distortion in some frequency ranges than others. And distortion can be defined as any deviation from the original signal, so room acoustics would have a huge impact on it too. If you're just talking for the purposes of listening to music in the home, I'm sure you can get close enough that it wouldn't matter. The law of diminishing returns would be in full force though.

Even if you had zero distortion, it doesn't mean that your music would sound exactly like a live musician in your living room, because music isn't mixed for realism. It's mixed for a balance and perspective that is better than realism.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Those Magnepan flat speakers are supposed to have very low distortion levels at reasonable listening levels- down around .2% give or take a bit. I would call that inaudible. But you'd need a sub for bass, and I don't think you could do that with the same kind of accuracy.

I guess it depends on what you define as zero audible distortion. The ear is less sensitive to distortion in some frequency ranges than others. And distortion can be defined as any deviation from the original signal, so room acoustics would have a huge impact on it too. If you're just talking for the purposes of listening to music in the home, I'm sure you can get close enough that it wouldn't matter. The law of diminishing returns would be in full force though.

Even if you had zero distortion, it doesn't mean that your music would sound exactly like a live musician in your living room, because music isn't mixed for realism. It's mixed for a balance and perspective that is better than realism.

I definitely won't hold the speaker responsible for acoustics. But yeah that's what I mean. Say you took a laser scan of the speaker in motion and compared it to the input signal from the DAC. Ideally those two signals would null out to a degree that the residual signal would be considered technically inaudible.

 

[bigshot]

The capturing of the sound from the speaker would introduce all kinds of messing up, but in theory, I would say yes for all intents and purposes, you could achieve that. It would be a lot easier to do with headphones because you don't have the space of the room to mess things up.