Testing audiophile claims and myths

[bigshot]

There is nothing wrong with adjusting your curve to taste, but I've always focused on accuracy first, and I get that as close as I can before tweaking for personal taste. I learned that from EQing. You always want a baseline curve to work from, because you don't want to drift aimlessly between corrections. There are auto EQ gadgets that can get you in the ball park. You use the curve that generates as your baseline, and make small corrections, one at a time. If you aren't sure you're going in the right direction, pop back to the baseline and try again. It's a lot easier to discern subjective improvement if you correct in one direction at a time and work in small increments. Every frequency affects every other frequency, so you'll find you tend to seesaw a bit. That's natural. You have to strike a proper balance across the range. If you do it a little at a time with a careful approach, you'll probably find that the subjective adjustments you make aren't that far from the baseline. You also learn how to analyze response and identify problems and develop strategies for how to deal with them.

If you throw your hands up and start out from a random curve and make wide adjustments, your ears have a lot more trouble discerning what works and what doesn't. I imagine what is happening is your brain is trying to adjust to the imbalance and confusing the process. You'll listen to one wildly imbalanced curve for a while and your ears will adjust to it. Then a day or two later, the imbalance will be very irritating and you'll readjust again. Rinse and repeat and you end up going from one extreme to the next, never arriving at a curve you really like. You never learn anything about how to analyze and correct imbalances because random methods produce random results.

Calibrating is important to do before you start adding the subjective salt and pepper, because of masking issues. You can't balance frequencies to your own taste when you can't hear all of them. The most detailed, full range and balanced sound I've ever heard have been on the mixing stages I've worked on. My home system isn't quite there, but it that the goal I'm aimed at. Of course in a home, you have to make certain concessions for livability. The more concessions you make, the further you get from accurate. But even if you can't achieve absolute perfection, pretty close to perfect is better than random subjectivity. Would I like to have a calibrated studio in my home? You bet! But I don't have the room for it right now.

 

[magicscreen]

Why do "bit-perfect" music players have different output levels?
Neutron player and UAPP on Android.
I recorded the output of a DAC with a PC sound card and there is a difference.
Neutron 0.68, UAPP 0.72 using Audirvana recording a 1k sinus wave
UAPP is in bit-perfect mode, USB mode
Neutron: DSP off, Follow source freq, Direct USB Access
It was the same problem for JRiver and foobar on PC. JRiver was louder.

 

[redrol]

Why do "bit-perfect" music players have different output levels?
Neutron player and UAPP on Android.
I recorded the output of a DAC with a PC sound card and there is a difference.
Neutron 0.68, UAPP 0.72 using Audirvana recording a 1k sinus wave
UAPP is in bit-perfect mode, USB mode
Neutron: DSP off, Follow source freq, Direct USB Access
It was the same problem for JRiver and foobar on PC. JRiver was louder.

Likely they are not actually sending raw bits to the DAC decode. Some kind of processing going on is my guess.

 

[sonitus mirus]

Why do "bit-perfect" music players have different output levels?
Neutron player and UAPP on Android.
I recorded the output of a DAC with a PC sound card and there is a difference.
Neutron 0.68, UAPP 0.72 using Audirvana recording a 1k sinus wave
UAPP is in bit-perfect mode, USB mode
Neutron: DSP off, Follow source freq, Direct USB Access
It was the same problem for JRiver and foobar on PC. JRiver was louder.

What is "bit-perfect"? More information is needed with regards to the setup and test. Clearly something is different with the signal input or the recorded output, but what is different, we can't tell from the information provided.

 

[magicscreen]

Audio Blind Tests and Listener Training
Why training and exercise is important for blind tests.
If you cannot make a successful blind test between audio cables you have not trained enough.

 

[bigshot]

Sorry. If you have to struggle and strain and study to be able to hear something, it just doesn't matter when you sit down on a couch and listen to music in your living room. I've told this to Amir too. Test tones and direct switching between two sources that have been level matched are already an order of magnitude or two beyond what you actually need to listen to music for enjoyment. You mind will adjust to accommodate fairly large colorations. Accommodating a difference that is so tiny that you have to "train" yourself to hear it just doesn't matter at all. Training yourself to hear the unbearable is just silly. And if it doesn't show up in a blind test even after you've trained yourself, it flat out doesn't exist. There are enough tests that include golden eared audiophiles that fail dismally in blind tests to show that.

Now you can be obsessive about it and demand that your sound be the purest of the pure. If you have the slightest doubt it can be a burr under your saddle or a pebble in your shoe. But that has nothing to do with sound quality. That is a psychological issue. Perhaps the best way to deal with that is appealing to bias to create a placebo effect to calm your doubts and quiet your mind from focusing on niggling little details that make no difference to normal people. But I don't think that is what the snake oil salesmen are really intending with their manipulation and prevarications. And even if it is for the person's own good, they are grossly overpaid for pulling the wool over people's eyes like that.

People who are satisfied with themselves don't work to become better at perceiving. They work on discerning and producing. They develop a skill. They go to school and study a subject. They analyze and publish their thoughts. They get accolades for achieving something to help other people or society as a whole. They don't work to become a better passive consumer, and they don't invest their ego in something that every human being in the world can do, and bats and dogs can do even better.

Listen to MUSIC and train to understand it. Don't waste your time training yourself to jump off a ladder at progressively increasing heights until you can fly like Superman.

 

[bfreedma]

Have to love those differences that are “night and day” when the average audiophile does an uncontrolled subjective test, yet those same differences can’t be measured and humans require training to (maybe) hear them in controlled testing.

Kind of hard to rationalize that.

 

[redrol]

If the argument is that music enjoyment doesn't need this kind of stuff.. that is subjective so.. sorry, no argument to be made really.

 

[bigshot]

There is a purpose to the audio equipment we buy. Fitness for the purpose matters more than just esoteric and theoretical virtues. That’s the big problem with audiophiles. They run down the rabbit hole of better and better numbers without ever trying to equate that with real world sound. We aren’t just slathering on science tas thickly as we can. We are solving a problem. Practicality and efficiency is objective and completely relevant... maybe more relevant than much of what gets discussed among audiophiles.

 

[DuncanDirkDick]

Have to love those differences that are “night and day” when the average audiophile does an uncontrolled subjective test, yet those same differences can’t be measured and humans require training to (maybe) hear them in controlled testing.

Kind of hard to rationalize that.

The average audiophile can't even decide if a given phone is bright, warm, lush or whatnot. Tough everyone agrees on "cable sounding" between silver and copper. Strange, eh

 

[118900]

The average audiophile can't even decide if a given phone is bright, warm, lush or whatnot. Tough everyone agrees on "cable sounding" between silver and copper. Strange, eh

And the sound matches the colour of the cable. Copper is “warmer” and silver is “brighter”....

and when people hear these same differences in digital cables.....

there is a valid point made by some that hearing is far more complicated than can be properly measured and in particular the way the brain processes signals is far more complicated than current equipment can process, but I genuinely find it hard to believe the copper/warmer - silver/brighter thing, especially for digital cables.

 

[DuncanDirkDick]

Is there a pseudo-scientific argument against null-testing for analog cables?

 

[castleofargh]

People having different feelings about headphones can be explained by HRTF, seal quality, previous headphone, music tastes, and the vast freedom of interpretation for flowery vocabulary. So it doesn't work as an argument to reject feeling differences from silver cables. But having a great many people feeling the same thing from the simple mention of silver, now that strongly suggests it's BS, because silver alone doesn't magically enforces RLC values in a wire. While actual sound changes from the circuit will be set by RLC values.

 

[bigshot]

Frequency response curves are personal. There is no "one size fits all", just a ballpark place to start. The idea is to keep sound calibrated throughout the chain until it reaches the last stage, the amp. That is where you adjust the tone controls to taste. You can do it by selecting cans that fit your taste too. But if coloration was incorporated earlier in the chain, some sources would be properly colored and others wouldn't. That's why the goal is transparency up to the final output.

 

[DuncanDirkDick]

I can see where you're coming from with your argumentation, but I wouldn't necessary agree depending on the type of sources used. There is merit in introducing coloring in the source component. Take vinyl and a digital source. They will inherently sound different due to a different mastering process (e.g. mono cutoff) and SNR. I probably want my vinyl to sound different nowadays and using different cartridges is an easy way to do it. With a sounded last stage - rather than a amplification wire - I have an additional effort to match components if possible at all.