[Exacoustatowner]

RE "Property" only that phase accuracy can affect placement. What is it in hearing that gives us location cues? Probably a good starting point

Note: I noticed the small number of microphones suspended above.
Really curious about the mastering process used. Slight delay added for the rear mics?

 

[StanD]

RE "Property" only that phase accuracy can affect placement. What is it in hearing that gives us location cues? Probably a good starting point

But amps have little if no problem with phase. That would be more in the realm of headphones, speakers and acoustics. Sometimes changing the treble response, i.e., EQ, can fool one into perceiving spacial cues differently.

 

[StanD]

Note: I noticed the small number of microphones suspended above.
Really curious about the mastering process used. Slight delay added for the rear mics?

To artificially expand space? I seen delay lines used at outdoor rock concerts for sound to come out of speakers that are placed further back to be in synch with sound that travels from the frontal areas. Don't you love technology.

 

[AudioBear]

@castleofargh 
 
Hilarious, or sad but true.  Take your pick.

 

[analogsurviver]

You're assuming ideal transducers. While we have been able to produce audibly transparent electronics for some time, transducers aren't there yet.

se

Although I do agree that any electronics is better than even state of the art transducers, it is equally true the difference in electronics can be heard on Xiaomi Pistons 2 (around 25$ delivered ).

 

[AudioBear]

  But amps have little if no problem with phase. That would be more in the realm of headphones, speakers and acoustics. Sometimes changing the treble response, i.e., EQ, can fool one into perceiving spacial cues differently.

Recording live performances from multiple mikes and laying down multiple tracks is an art and a science.  Very hard to do well enough so that when the mixing is done in the studio something that resembles a live performance with a sound stage and instrument placement can be heard correctly.  The only way it happens is with a lot of expertise at processing and tweaking.  Another alternative is to stereo mike and let the chips fall where they may. Sometimes it works, most times not.
 
The mechanisms, physics, anatomy, and brain-processing of hearing are often over-looked by audiophiles.  For example, I am amazed that people describe the vertical image they perceive when they hear a recording through one DAC that isn't there when they hear it through another.  Animals with ears located on the same vertical plane don't perceive vertical auditory information unless they tilt their head.  So are they hearing a tall soundstage with one DAC, or are they leaning their head differently? Not saying that there aren't imbedded clues about vertical images in music but if people are hearing them it's because they've moved their ears. There are so many examples like this we ought to write a review of how hearing works and make it sticky on every page.  We could for example turn our attention to a statement i just read which I think was "as jitter is lowered you get more bass and smoother trebles" (http://www.head-fi.org/t/766347/schiit-yggdrasil-impressions-thread/45#post_11609682).  Jeez, I didn't know that, somewhere I read that the jitter present in modern digital equipment was inaudible.

 

[analogsurviver]

  But amps have little if no problem with phase. That would be more in the realm of headphones, speakers and acoustics. Sometimes changing the treble response, i.e., EQ, can fool one into perceiving spacial cues differently.

False.
 
Amplifiers that have zero degree error within the 20Hz-20 kHz  band will invariably be with -3dB cutoff poiunt VERY low (far below 20 Hz ) as well as FAR above 20 kHz. And relative difference will stand in comparison with more babdwidth limited designs - even if listening to speakers or headphones that are way inferior in specs than any of the amps being tested.
 
The biggest culprit in amps normally is LF filtering. It reduces bass dynamic range - and sounds wooly at worst. It is sooooo prevalent in usual AC coupled amps that most grew to accept it as "standard" - and will initially react negatively to an amp with accurate response - due to being exposed to music being reproduced trough such limited response amps - practically for life.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Although I do agree that any electronics is better than even state of the art transducers, it is equally true the difference in electronics can be heard on Xiaomi Pistons 2 (around 25$ delivered ).

Just a reminder, this is Sound Science. Please point me to the controlled listening tests that have demonstrated this.

se

 

[Steve Eddy]

The biggest culprit in amps normally is LF filtering. It reduces bass dynamic range - and sounds wooly at worst. It is sooooo prevalent in usual AC coupled amps that most grew to accept it as "standard" - and will initially react negatively to an amp with accurate response - due to being exposed to music being reproduced trough such limited response amps - practically for life.

Huh?

Any decently designed AC coupled amp will have an F3 at a few Hertz. What loudspeakers are you using that get anywhere near this? And if they don't, how can you possibly say it's the amp that's responsible?

se

 

[Exacoustatowner]

  Thanks.  Glad you liked the post.  I don't post here much because I have been busy doing overtime in my professional life trying to inject a little sanity into public understanding of science.  My focus has moved from explaining science, facts and logic to learning the underlying psychology of fear, science denialism, neo-tribal behavior (see Kahan at Yale) and something called moral purchase.  There is so much nonsense out there today I fear the whole country is going to sink under the sheer weight of the BS.  Don't believe me?, watch Dr. Oz.
 
I recently started reading the forum more actively because I am putting together a new desktop system.  I have 1964Ears A12s in hand (awesome), Emotiva Airmotiv 4s (another awesome performer--great performance/cost ratio--chalk one up for @keithemo), and I have a Cavalli Liquid Carbon amp on order.  Now I'm shopping for phones and a desktop DAC.  Emotiva DC-1 is on the list.  Oppo PM-2 home trial should be here this coming week.  I learned about all these products on the forum and by tossing away a lot of BS and unbelievable ignorance, arrogance, and science denialism was able to find some gear that really satisfies me.  I use a FiiO X5 as a portable player and at the moment it's my DAC for the Airmotivs--sounds pretty good.  Do you think I'll be buying a $10K dac?

"My focus has moved from explaining science, facts and logic to learning the underlying psychology of fear, science denialism, neo-tribal behavior (see Kahan at Yale) and something called moral purchase.  There is so much nonsense out there today I fear the whole country is going to sink under the sheer weight of the BS.  Don't believe me?, watch Dr. Oz."
 
This irrational tribal based view of reality drives me nuts. Take Global Climate Change. I am neither FOR nor Against either outcome. But I can't deny that the vast majority of those who have a better grasp on the relevant sciences think it's real.My work lies in the biosciences- analytical chemistry primarily  
It seems that it has become Rebublicans (who KNOW its fake) vs. Democrats(who accept it as Gospel). Obviously there are exceptions.

 

[Exacoustatowner]

You're assuming ideal transducers. While we have been able to produce audibly transparent electronics for some time, transducers aren't there yet.

se

All true. A real Symphony orchestra playing has at least a hundred different instruments producing sound through brass valves, strings, impact, and voice. We require our speakers and headphones to reproduce that- what at best we reproduce is the vibrations transduced by the microphone diaphragms into electrical signals.

 

[AudioBear]

Strange that the majority of discussion of these forums is about how various electronic gear and cables can be selected to play nice with certain transducers.  There is an implicit understanding by some but the irony of this escapes most.  It's all about the transducers.  Starting with mikes, and pickups on instruments.  A lot has been done to optimize pickups to instruments but they don't capture room acoustics.  This should really be the center stage of how to get better sound--make better transducers and use them to make better recordings and playback transducers.  Duh.

 

[cel4145]

I'd like to pick up and extend your comments.  I hope we all agree that making hurtful personal attacks is over the line.  When we attack irrational beliefs we have a dilemma. 

I'm not sure we have much of dilemma. If someone is getting their feelings hurt when talking on the Internet about a controversial topic, such as religion, politics, or audio science vs. subjective evaluations, sounds like a personal problem to me. These topics often hit close to home personally. And invariably, there will often be some amount of jabs thrown in on occasion and conversation may get a little heated, too. This is the Internet. Gotta develop a little bit of a thick skin in life anyway, but especially on Internet forums when discussing controversial issues. If the water is too hot for someone and it makes them upset all the time, the logical thing to do is get out of the water

There is another aspect of this that leads to hard feelings.  Objectivists understand the difficulty in being objective, scientists adhere to a set of principles they call the scientific method to help them keep their prejudices and intuitions out of the process of seeking truth, engineers have their own toolkit and logic for problem solving, doctors are taught a method for diagnosis that helps them kept out of the trap of faulty assumptions.  Believers have no roadmap for arriving at an unbiased answer.  They freely admit they trust their senses and they are proud of how well their senses work.  They also have a liturgy of facts that have been discovered through their approach to inquiry.  It includes beliefs about wires, fuses, balanced circuits, and its own vocabulary (harshness, grit, bass grunt, warm, dark, bright, voiced, etc).  Their belief system has many of the characteristics of a cult, if not a religion.

And we all know what happens when you attack someone's religion.  It's worse than attacking them, and they react strongly because it is an attack on what they believe.  What do facts have to do with it?  Not much.  Psychology research on the consequences of confirmation bias shows that when you cite contrary evidence to someone who strongly believes something that is demonstrably untrue, they not only don't believe the evidence, having heard it actually reinforces the strength of their beliefs.  Let me say that again, trying to prove them wrong makes them believe their erroneous conclusion even more strongly!  That's what the research shows.  Humans are indeed a very perverse species.  So when you tell someone who has spent $1000 on an IEM cable because it really brings out the bass grunt and smooths the mid-treble grit, that blind studies show they can't tell one cable from another, what you do is make them hear the differences more clearly and make them angry at you for suggesting they are wrong.  They are absolutely sure the cable makes a big difference and they are indignant and offended that you say it doesn't even when you prove to them they cannot tell one from another in a test. 

Some of us are ready to be proved wrong if we're wrong. Others seem to get great ego satisfaction by bandying around terms in a way that proves they are a member of an elite group of savants.  It's like mixing oil and water.

While I know it's possible to draw parallels, I don't necessarily agree with calling it a religion because I think there are factors about it that are not religious. For instance, in our daily lives we make observations and use inductive reasoning to create our own heuristics for decision making. This, to a certain extent, is some of what's happening with subjectivist beliefs. It is, after all, based on individual loose application of empirical methods. They are just flawed due to the unreliability of sensory perception in this regard. I also think some resistance to audio science rests in cognitive dissonance. People don't want to believe that their $500 DAC is not any better than the $100 DAC they could have bought, either because it was significant money to them or because they have some kind of pride in it as a status symbol. Finally, calling it a religion is perceived as a slight, and I think it's often being used that way as well.

I do think that perhaps we take the wrong approach pointing to scientific methods and saying they are necessarily better. The key, I think, is to get people to see the infallibility of their human perception. One of the low risk factors for this is the mp3 vs. lossless ABX testing with Foobar. Those who think that they can hear a difference, then try it, and learn first hand that their sensory perception was flawed. From there, the individual might be more receptive to understanding that similar things happen with dacs and amps and other equipment. But that's the thing you have to convince people first: not that science is right, but that their perception is flawed.

 

[cel4145]

@AudioBear
 The one thing about the religeous audiophiles that bothers me the most is how they influence the lay person down a false road at that person's expense and wasted time. IMO that is the worst.

The big issue there is when they convince people for whom the extra expense is a burden to waste their money. There are people with plenty of money who are buying $15K audio setups that would probably still buy expensive DACs and cables because of the status symbol. But it is infuriating when I see college kids on the intro/recommendations forums being persuaded to spend $600 on an amp/dac for $300 headphones when that money means a lot more to them.

 

[AudioBear]

  "My focus has moved from explaining science, facts and logic to learning the underlying psychology of fear, science denialism, neo-tribal behavior (see Kahan at Yale) and something called moral purchase.  There is so much nonsense out there today I fear the whole country is going to sink under the sheer weight of the BS.  Don't believe me?, watch Dr. Oz."
 
This irrational tribal based view of reality drives me nuts. Take Global Climate Change. I am neither FOR nor Against either outcome. But I can't deny that the vast majority of those who have a better grasp on the relevant sciences think it's real.My work lies in the biosciences- analytical chemistry primarily  
It seems that it has become Rebublicans (who KNOW its fake) vs. Democrats(who accept it as Gospel). Obviously there are exceptions.

One of the things Dan Kahan at Yale has done is study liberal and conservative biases,religious based biases, racial biases,  and other factors that might lead people of one  persuasion or another lean one way or another on issues.  His findings are that no party or point of view has a monopoly on science denial when it goes against their tribal belief. On some issues there are no correlations with any party or value and on others like climate change there is clear identification of positions with groups.  We're a weird animal.   Anti-vaxers and pro-organic folks are largely liberal while people who don't believe in man-made climate change are mostly conservative.  What's that about?  All I can say is I have a degree in chemistry and a PhD in biochemistry and have spent  a lot of my life trying to design good experiments and think objectively. It's getting to be a very lonely feeling to be scientific.
 
The really key problem as I see it is the death of the expert and expert knowledge.  Everybody has an opinion.  We have some people right from the industry and academe on this forum who know what they are talking about because they are very well trained and can design the stuff we are talking about.  Some idiot who wouldn't know which end of transistor was up comes in and says the jitter is lower thru an unobtainium wire that costs $2000 which caused my bass to grunt and my treble to bloom and everybody runs out and buys the wire.  I have been taught that when someone knows more than you do about something you give their opinion a lot of weight.
 
This has made me think of a great study.  I wonder if the subjectivists and objectivists here fit into any political, social, psychological or demographic group.  Don't know where I would get the data though.