Maybe this video doing the rounds of various forums may explain chasing minute time differences:
But I’m guessing the only way such small differences could be noticed is if the final transducer, headphone or speakers was capable of reproducing such minute levels,
The Wilson speakers referred to are around $850k …
This is really frustrating for me to watch. It’s full of accurate and well researched/demonstrated information, but it’s also full of misleading ideas and conclusions, more by omission and cherry picking the magnitudes for the demos, than by actually lying, but misleading anyway. Bringing audiophiles in the middle of it, is for me where clear dishonesty is at play. Then again he got everybody talking about him with that strategic clickbait. So, great success!
In several such amalgams the facts come from experiments under conditions that cannot be matched with actual music and listening conditions, so acting like one is conclusive for the other is a clear mistake and I’m sure that as a researcher he knows better.
Demonstrating the impact of timing by moving the start of one of 2 tones looks like a problem we could have with huge phase shifts from crossovers or BA drivers. But only at first glance. Remove the time aligned reference we can play anytime and it instantly becomes much harder to identify a problem. Add more tones(even a single instrument has more than 2 tones at once) to match actual music and of course it again becomes harder to perceive the specific freq or freqs that are getting delayed. Change the delay, pick a second signal that’s not exactly double of the first, etc and the result will mostly be harder to notice.
Telling audiophiles that the transient response is very important for audibility when the so called demo does nothing short of cutting the entire transient out of the signal... come on! To prove that the brand of paint matters, you go and remove the house as counter example? The phenomenon mentioned is real of course, but it cannot serve to justify audiophile anything as no generic playback system just magically eats up all transients in the music. The very worst that can happen is to lose the higher frequency content of it, for which audibility is IMO hard to prove even now if the filter doesn’t audibly attenuate the audible range.
Hair cells triggerings are much more common than just when we get the one signal we care about. They seems to get triggered for any bodily or external noises, some will activate with head movements, some are bent out of shape and basically alway on, and I seem to remember a triggering no matter what, somewhere around 100 times/s?(might be just as bs as my usual memory of numbers).
My point is that there is constantly noise sent by the hair cells. That obviously changes everything for the brain and what it will treat as an audio cue or when it will even get a signal.
There is also the obvious lack of discussing auditory masking in both time and amplitude with any complex signal like music, even though again, he keeps bringing up audiophiles and their gears. That doesn’t serve his narrative so I get why it’s omitted.
The argument about the sound system that couldn’t convince him there’s a grand piano playing in front of him, well that’s just the wonder of listening with his eyes. There is a high chance that if he was hearing a hidden grand piano while thinking he’s demoing a sound system he saw in front of him, he would still not be convinced that it sounds like a grand piano.
The frack is the last thing he shows while talking interconnects?
I now feel a need to go create a brand of audiophile bananas with all the stuff that neurons need for cleaner action potential that improves soundstage. And maybe also Brawndo Myelin for improved digital connectivity in the head.
