[pibroch]

No doubt that there's lots marketing BS and it has some influence. But I suspect that there's even more influence from reviews, opinions expressed in forums like this, opinions expressed by friends, etc. Other influencing factors would be product specs, product aesthetics, brand reputation and heritage, etc. All of those factors are big-time influential with performance cars, and I think these issues are general to the consumer mindset.

My current thinking is that the biggest issue with audiophilia isn't inaccurate or incomplete objective understanding of how different things affect sound quality, but rather the relentless search for better sound quality far past the point when 'plenty good enough to enjoy music' was reached. If people truly 'trust their ears' and recognize that what they have is good enough, the question of what makes sound better won't come up because people won't care about it. As I've said, I'm not immune to this problem myself. Does something like an Audioholics Anonymous exist?

Nonsense. Aren't you a guitarist (or former one)? As such you strive for ever more ecstasy-inducing sound. To reproduce that level of ecstasy from recordings we need a system capable of resolving as much of the nuances of timbre as possible - way past the "good enough to enjoy music" level. This especially applies to non beat driven music where lack of timbral detail produces quite sub optimal listening pleasure.

I don't see any problem in the noble pursuit of joy!

 

[Phronesis]

Nonsense. Aren't you a guitarist (or former one)? As such you strive for ever more ecstasy-inducing sound. To reproduce that level of ecstasy from recordings we need a system capable of resolving as much of the nuances of timbre as possible - way past the "good enough to enjoy music" level. This especially applies to non beat driven music where lack of timbral detail produces quite sub optimal listening pleasure.

I don't see any problem in the noble pursuit of joy!

LOL, hit from both sides, I may have found the moderation Aristotle recommended!

I think it's a question of how good is 'good enough'. With today's technology, we're lucky that it's possible to get excellence at reasonable cost. My argument has been that too much attention to sound quality interferes with enjoyment of music. It's like watching a great movie and focusing on judging how good the acting is - that will inhibit getting lost in the characters and the story.

The guitar analogy is interesting. I find that some guitarists these days have incredible chops (far beyond what I can dream of) and tone, but their music is formulaic, unimaginative, and lacks overarching themes. It's as though the focus on technique has made them more like athletes than musicians/artists. Fortunately, other guitarists have the whole package (e.g., Plini), and give me hope that the future is good hands with the younger generation. Won't be everyone's cup of tea, but this blew me away when I first heard/saw it and made me happy:

 

[colonelkernel8]

LOL, hit from both sides, I may have found the moderation Aristotle recommended!

I think it's a question of how good is 'good enough'. With today's technology, we're lucky that it's possible to get excellence at reasonable cost. My argument has been that too much attention to sound quality interferes with enjoyment of music. It's like watching a great movie and focusing on judging how good the acting is - that will inhibit getting lost in the characters and the story.

The guitar analogy is interesting. I find that some guitarists these days have incredible chops (far beyond what I can dream of) and tone, but their music is formulaic, unimaginative, and lacks overarching themes. It's as though the focus on technique has made them more like athletes than musicians/artists. Fortunately, other guitarists have the whole package (e.g., Plini), and give me hope that the future is good hands with the younger generation. Won't be everyone's cup of tea, but this blew me away when I first heard/saw it and made me happy:

I love Plini. Saw him in St. Paul, MN last year and actually I think 2 weeks from now I'm seeing him open for Tesseract in Minneapolis. Sorry, off topic.

 

[KeithEmo]

I was kind of thinking the same thing. Most of the pros I know are even more prone to various preferences in equipment than a lot than the rest of the audiophile community. For example, I know several who absolutely insist on using their favorite model of Neumann microphone... and no amount of proof will convince them that any good $100 microphone can, with proper adjustment and EQ, sound "just the same for 1/10 the price". Likewise, from an engineering standpoint, it's dead simple to design a perfectly neutral microphone preamp... yet the market is flooded with hundreds of different, and often quite expensive, models. Now, obviously, many of them simply have some sort of coloration that some pros or performers like. And I'm sure some just have a preference for one or another style of controls or readouts. But, oddly, many pros seem to insist that even the ones with excellent specs, which "should" sound exactly the same, really don't. Ditto for ADCs and other equipment. In fact, I don't know many real pros who say things like: "It all sounds the same; I'll use whatever you've got". (I would agree that, when it comes to cables, most pros acknowledge that there isn't a significant difference in sound.)

I still remember back when people were insisting that "nobody could tell the difference between a tube amp and a solid state amp - as long as the THD was below 0.5% and the S/N was better than 80 dB". However, nowadays, most people I know acknowledge that, at least if you connect both to a speaker without a lot of mechanical damping, the difference between the tube amp's damping factor of 5 and the solid state amp's damping factor of 500 will be rather obvious. The big pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars every year on product testing, and individual studies still often arrive at conflicting conclusions... sometimes because of errors, sometimes because of bias, and sometimes simply due to minor differences in protocol. And, as I've mentioned before, every "major study" I've seen where the test protocol was fully documented, suffered from what I would call significant weaknesses.... like not even confirming that the sounds whose audibility we're supposed testing for are actually arriving at the ears of the test subjects. And, to be honest, very few of them are properly documented to begin with, which makes it impossible to even guess where the flaws are or may be. Also bear in mind that most oversights and variables CAN be controlled for - if you're willing to expend the effort.

I posted a link to a study about "whether people could hear the subsonic noises made by wind turbines" (it was apparently prompted by a number of complaints from people who claimed to be "disturbed" by living close to wind farms). Since there's always going to be some question whether, at below 10 Hz, someone actually heard a sound or felt it as a vibration, after confirming that many of their test subjects claimed that they heard sounds as low as 8 Hz, they confirmed the fact using an fMRI machine. By doing so, they not only confirmed that their subjexts claimed to hear the sound, but confirmed that activity in the auditory portion of their subject's brains actually "lit up" - which shows that they did in fact hear sounds as low as 8 Hz rather than felt them.

I've noted that many people, especially in this group, fail to grasp the difference between statistics and statistical studies and actual measurements. For example, if you're designing a new turntable for the consumer market, and you want to know how accurate the motor has to be to satisfy most of your intended customers, you can use statistics to analyze whether "the majority of people can hear if a musical note is off-pitch by +0.01%"... however, if your goal is to determine, once and for all, "whether humans can hear a speed variation of 0.01%", using a statistical analysis will probably fail to note the one person in a thousand with perfect pitch, who finds that variation, which is inaudible to most of us, totally unacceptable. To find that out, you're going to have to either test a whole lot of people, or offer some sort of incentive for people with perfect pitch to join your study.Which of those results you're actually looking for will depend on whether you're doing a marketing study or a full scientific study. Many people involved in this group seem to habitually conflate "no difference audible to a human being" with "no significant difference" and "no difference big enough to matter to most people". This difference is important - especially in areas like audio - where there's a huge difference between what people usually notice, what they notice if they're paying close attention, and what they consider important enough to pay extra for.

As I noted in a previous post (you may have missed it), I've read it. IMO, those tests aren't sufficient to 'settle' things. No question that people often hear differences that aren't really there, but not all conclusive that none of the heard differences are real. Broad conclusions need large-scale studies which are carefully designed, and even then there always questions about how far the conclusions can be generalized. If it can't be sufficiently settled based on theory, you need empirical data, and the empirical data we have is both insufficient and inconclusive.

FWIW, I had a conversation this morning with a guy who worked in pro audio for many years (recording and mixing). I asked him whether people in his world think DACs can sound different. He said that they do think so (and he personally does), but the differences generally aren't large.

 

[KeithEmo]

Unless, of course, you're playing one of the hundreds of CD4 format vinyl albums produced...
In addition to the standard stereo audio content, each of those also has a pair of ultrasonic analog audio carrier waves recorded on the audio tracks.
These carriers are centered at 30 kHz, with harmonics from 18 kHz to 45 kHz, and require the appropriate special CD4 phono cartridge to play.
Each carrier stores an AM modulated difference signal, one each for left and right, which are processed to recover the four discrete channels stored on the record.
(And, yes, CD4 phono cartridges have response up to at least 45 kHz.)

I personally own tens of thousands of records. I think “rekkid collectin’“ is great. But I’m not so far gone that I refuse to believe that CD is the superior format. Records have only two advantages over CDs... The covers are big enough to read the liner notes without glasses, and there's a lot of music on records that never made it to CD release.

The only frequencies above 15 to 17kHz on an LP record consist of noise.

 

[KeithEmo]

OK.....

So, all DACs produce some ringing, which is exactly what it sounds like - the DAC continues to produce audio energy at its output after the input signal has stopped.
However, because it is a transient phenomenon, ringing only appears with non-steady-state signals, and so does not show up at all in standard frequency response, THD, or S/N measurements.

Just to be clear, you are claiming that, if I have two DACs, one of which produces 0.1 milliseconds of ringing, while the other produces 10 SECONDS of ringing, they will sound identical.
(Since both will show the same low steady state noise and THD, and the same flat steady state frequency response.)

You wouldn't be willing to consider that, just maybe, there was an important measurement you'd missed?

By looking at your measurements If all noise and distortion products fall way below -100 dB (with some measure of leniency depending on the frequency), I’d consider that audibly transparent.

I should say, thank you for the wonderful service you provide!

 

[Phronesis]

Many people involved in this group seem to habitually conflate "no difference audible to a human being" with "no significant difference" and "no difference big enough to matter to most people". This difference is important - especially in areas like audio - where there's a huge difference between what people usually notice, what they notice if they're paying close attention, and what they consider important enough to pay extra for.

And the hearing ability of an individual can change too. I started with guitar, and a few years later I added drums. After a while playing drums, I heard music differently. I noticed details in the sound of the drum kit that I never noticed before, and never could have noticed before. My perceptual ability increased through experience. Similarly, in my more recent foray into headgear, my ability to hear differences has unquestionably increased as I've tried a lot of gear and actively listened to its sound quality. Meanwhile, my wife wonders why I'm wasting money on this stuff, because it all sounds "good" and about the same to her. I'll wager that no one in this forum finds that all "good" headgear sounds essentially the same.

 

[colonelkernel8]

OK.....

So, all DACs produce some ringing, which is exactly what it sounds like - the DAC continues to produce audio energy at its output after the input signal has stopped.
However, because it is a transient phenomenon, ringing only appears with non-steady-state signals, and so does not show up at all in standard frequency response, THD, or S/N measurements.

Just to be clear, you are claiming that, if I have two DACs, one of which produces 0.1 milliseconds of ringing, while the other produces 10 SECONDS of ringing, they will sound identical.
(Since both will show the same low steady state noise and THD, and the same flat steady state frequency response.)

You wouldn't be willing to consider that, just maybe, there was an important measurement you'd missed?

Sure. If someone can't design a reconstruction filter or at least just use a built in one, I'd also look at the transient response. But ringing is generally speaking, above the audible range frequency-wise, and there aren't too many dirac-delta level impulses in recorded music...

 

[Phronesis]

I love Plini. Saw him in St. Paul, MN last year and actually I think 2 weeks from now I'm seeing him open for Tesseract in Minneapolis. Sorry, off topic.

Common ground on music, I dig it! My fault for taking us OT, but good discussions do wander ...

 

[KeithEmo]

I think you're right.....
And that's where the difference between "the hobby" and "the science" comes in.

The differences between how various albums are mastered usually far exceed the differences between various high quality audio components - and this is especially true of DACs and amplifiers. Likewise, the single biggest factor is almost always the speakers, and how they interact with the room. Therefore, if the discussion was about "whether there are significant differences between amplifiers or DACs", I would probably agree that, in most cases, there are not. And, of course, each of us has a different list of the factors we individually consider significant, and in what order of priority. While I can notice the location of various instruments in the sound stage, I simply don't find it to be terribly important, while others find it to be very important to their listening enjoyment. In contrast, I tend to notice small differences in the attack characteristics of struck cymbals and drums, while other people may not find those to be especially important at all. I also find any added pitch variation - vibrato - in voices to be especially annoying, but my overall sense of accurate pitch is average at best.

However, that's all what I would consider "practical engineering"...

But, if we're talking about real science, then we should stick to the rules for real science.
And, in real science, if you make a generalization, you should be able to prove it FOR ALL CASES - and, if not, then you should not phrase it as a generalization.
If you mean "most of the time" or "for most people" - then you should be concise and phrase your claim in that language.

I am quite certain that, with most well designed preamps and amplifiers, if you connect them together using various different interconnect cables, there will be no audible difference.
And, if I chose to, I could falsely claim that was true with ALL well designed preamps and amps and all well designed cables....
(I would simply claim that any equipment for which that wasn't true wasn't "well designed". However, in practice, that's just a creative form of circular logic.)
The reality is that certain older tube equipment, which was considered in its day to be well designed, had a very high output impedance.
And, over the years, a certain number of interconnect cables, also considered to be well designed, have had significantly different amounts of capacitance.
Because of this, when you combine certain equipment with certain cables, there is a clearly audible - and easily measurable - difference in frequency response.
This does NOT in any way suggest that, for MOST people, and MOST equipment, and MOST cables, there will be an audible difference.
It simply means that, just as my friend with the peanut allergy must avoid peanuts, the owners of certain specific equipment may notice audible differences between cables.
(And, yes, for most everyone else, they can safely assume that most or all cables will sound exactly the same with their equipment.)

I DO apologize to the people whose lives this makes more difficult....
And for those whom it deprives of a cherished life-simplifying generalization....
And it in no way suggests that MOST people should worry about which cable they buy.
(Just as most people I know don't bother to read the fine print on food labels to check for traces of peanuts.)

And, no, as long as MOST audiophiles believe such differences exist, that belief will drive the product sales market...
And, as long as that remains true, there is no need or incentive for manufacturers to even attempt to prove it...
(Remember that, even if they were to prove a difference, but it turned out to simply be less significant than anticipated, it would still be bad for business.)

No doubt that there's lots marketing BS and it has some influence. But I suspect that there's even more influence from reviews, opinions expressed in forums like this, opinions expressed by friends, etc. Other influencing factors would be product specs, product aesthetics, brand reputation and heritage, etc. All of those factors are big-time influential with performance cars, and I think these issues are general to the consumer mindset.

My current thinking is that the biggest issue with audiophilia isn't inaccurate or incomplete objective understanding of how different things affect sound quality, but rather the relentless search for better sound quality far past the point when 'plenty good enough to enjoy music' was reached. If people truly 'trust their ears' and recognize that what they have is good enough, the question of what makes sound better won't come up because people won't care about it. As I've said, I'm not immune to this problem myself. Does something like an Audioholics Anonymous exist?

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Sure. If someone can't design a reconstruction filter or at least just use a built in one, I'd also look at the transient response. But ringing is generally speaking, above the audible range frequency-wise, and there aren't too many dirac-delta level impulses in recorded music...

I got into this on another thread where I made a bit of a fool of myself, but there are plenty of dirac-impulse like sounds in certain electronic recordings. (Ryoji Ikeda makes a lot of use of such sounds.) Enough out there that you can't call it irrelevant to music listening in general.

 

[colonelkernel8]

I got into this on another thread where I made a bit of a fool of myself, but there are plenty of dirac-impulse like sounds in certain electronic recordings. (Ryoji Ikeda makes a lot of use of such sounds.) Enough out there that you can't call it irrelevant to music listening in general.

Fair enough. My point on its frequency still remains relevant.

 

[KeithEmo]

Quite so......

But, if you switch rapidly between the various filters offered by certain DAC vendors, using certain types of content, and listening on certain types of speakers and headphones which seem to either accurately reproduce or even exaggerate those differences, you will notice certain consistent differences. Ringing not only constitutes extra content, which may or may not be audible, but also a time-shift in energy distribution, which may be what's audible.

I tend to notice these sorts of differences most significantly with well-recorded wire brush cymbals - which consist of a complex series of many separate short sharp taps of metal on metal - each with its own overlapping pattern of ringing. What I tend to notice is that, on some recordings, the strike of a wire brush on a cymbal sounds like a simple burst of white noise (like a steam valve hissing), while on others it seems to sound more distinctly like a series of separate small metallic taps. My THEORY is that my brain is able to make some sort of sense of the semi-random pattern of sharp taps, slightly separated in both position and time; that some recordings reproduce this sense of distribution more accurately than others; and that, on recordings that do it especially well, some DACs tend to also reproduce it better than others. I do not purport to notice this distinction on all speakers, nor with most recordings... but, with certain speakers, and certain recordings, different DACs seem to reproduce it with slight differences.

I'll even suggest that, in a typical multi-track recording, the cymbal resides on a single track; so, in the final mix, the cymbal sounds all occur at a single physical position. However, if the cymbal itself is recorded in stereo, or using multiple microphones, the fact that the wires actually strike the cymbal in slightly different locations, spread out in both time and space, somehow allows my brain to more easily identify them as separate events... even though they are very closely spaced in time. (To use an optics analogy, something like the difference between a single point source and a specular highlight.)

As I said, this is a theory.... perhaps someday I or someone else will test it.

Incidentally, in case anyone does want to try and duplicate my results, I'll give specifics......
I notice that this track sounds different when played through many different filter choices on many different DACs....
- I notice it with most strongly with the recent HDTRacks 24/192k re-master of the song Hotel California
- I notice it with Koss ESP/950 electrostatic headphones
- I notice it with Emotiva Airmotiv 5 speakers (with the folded ribbon "AMT" tweeter)
(both headphones and speakers have their own built-in amplifiers and electronics)
- I did NOT notice it with AKG K240 MKII headphones (using the headphone amp in my Emotiva DC-1 DAC)

Sure. If someone can't design a reconstruction filter or at least just use a built in one, I'd also look at the transient response. But ringing is generally speaking, above the audible range frequency-wise, and there aren't too many dirac-delta level impulses in recorded music...

 

[bigshot]

Then why not just leave? What are you really protecting people against?

We're here to help people get great sound for a reasonable price by doing things the smart way. The fact that some people don't want to do things the smart way doesn't mean that we can't help the ones that do. The people who should go away are the ones who are more interested in the sound of their own words than communicating with others. But that isn't just a problem in this forum. That is common all over internet forums. There are always people who become overly argumentative or take deliberately contrary opinions and repeat them over and over to grandstand. I usually stop reading their posts after a few lines and skip over them. Other people enjoy slapping them down over and over. That is fine with me too. But I don't have the patience for it.

OK, but how big is the audience here?

There are many more people who lurk than there are ones who post. And google searches bring in many more. I've noticed when I google certain keywords, my own posts get pulled up at the top of the list. HeadFi gets good traffic.

how many regulars in this forum are actual practicing scientists?

Many of us are professionals working in various areas of production sound or engineering. Some folks here have experience as statisticians. Others have degrees in electrical engineering. Still others are music lovers and hobbyists. Everyone contributes to the mix to help find practical scientific applications to the problem of achieving high fidelity sound in the home.

I’m trying to understand the dynamic of the forum, since it doesn’t fit my expectations of a science forum.

The best way to understand is to lurk and figure out the personalities and point of view of the posters. Not everyone here is interested in science. Some are just here to be contrarians. But the purpose of this group when it was created wasn't really to create a place for science discussion. When they created this group, they banned any discussion of expectation bias, blind testing and placebo effect from the rest of the site. Those subjects were making the subjectivists on the rest of the site very upset and they knew all of us objectivists would get along fine in our own group. So they walled off discussion of scientific testing from the rest of the site and put us in our own playpen so we could play nice without making other people cry.

 

[castleofargh]

Not at all, I wouldn’t waste any of our time by doing that, and am not a fan of needless aggravation of anyone. I’m trying to understand the dynamic of the forum, since it doesn’t fit my expectations of a science forum. The dynamic is more like if this was called a religion forum, but the regulars are all atheists who attack any whiff of a religious idea because it lacks their definition of ‘proof’ (ps - I'm not religious). Nothing wrong with having an atheism forum, just don’t call it a religion forum. That said, I struggle to come up with a good alternate name for this forum. It’s anti something, but hard to put a name to it.

Addendum:

Another analogy is the frontiers of science itself, for example the search in physics for a 'theory of everything' which unifies the fundamental forces and brings quantum theory and relativity theory together without contradictions. I haven't read about this topic in a while, but as of a few years ago, there were heavy debates among respected physicists about various hypotheses, the limits and capability of theory and math, the value of 'elegance' and unification of ideas, validity of different kinds of evidence, what to do when empirical testing isn't possible in practice or even in theory, etc. For example, there are several books like this: https://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wro...preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

With audio, the situation is perhaps at least as messy, since the processes underlying perception and their fallibility are central to the topic. Brain science and psychology are murkier than physics, and when you bring consciousness and mind into the picture, we're getting into rather uncertain and speculative territory.

this section is obviously focused around a few leading concepts. if you wonder why, it's in the TOS:

If what you want to post includes words/phrases like "placebo," "expectation bias," "ABX," "blind testing," etc., please post it in the Sound Science forum

this section is the only place where we can really discuss such ideas instead of being stopped after 2 posts. so of course all the people with similar ideas about the dire need to stop calling a sighted test a "listening test", are gathering here. by force as much as by choice. you think the name of the section doesn't properly reflect this, go ask the admins to change the name. I didn't pick it nor did I make the rules of this forum.

now if you cooled down your philosoraptor arguments in a topic about testing stuff, and focused on one audio question or idea at a time, you may come to realize that there are plenty of things we can test, and plenty of knowledge to be had from those tests.
you may also notice how you preach for caution when drawing conclusions on the most skeptical section of the forum. you argue about flaws in methodology in pretty much the only section of the forum that tries to control variables in a test. I'm not trying to get away with all we do wrong, we have people of all kinds with opinions of all kinds and various ways of thinking. plus we're still just lowly humans, so BS will be claimed and hypocrisy will be used in stead of argument. but maybe instead of comparing what you read here with some ideology of ultimate proper science, you could just look at the rest of the forum and put things in perspective about claims and their legitimacy? just so that it doesn't look like you have a 2 tier kind of righteousness.
I don't mind that you hit me on the head when I do something wrong, TBH I hope you will do it because I can't learn if I don't know that I'm wrong. but I'll find it very frustrating if the guy next to me does much worst and you leave him be as if he did nothing wrong. and that's the vibe I've been getting for a while now. I haven't seen you posting tens of messages in the cable section to tell people about how to reach a conclusion correctly, or blaming them for some of the most ludicrous claims you'll ever get to read about electricity(did you know that gold sounds warm?^_^). anyway you got the idea, I don't think this section deserves to be the bad guy of your story. nor do I think that 3 guys with the same views represent the Sound Science section entirely.



also, modo again, stop it with the religious analogies. discussing religion is not allowed on Head-fi for the most obvious reasons.