Testing audiophile claims and myths

[EthanWiner]

Quote:

Let's say one cable has more bass over another, is it possible to measure that bass difference ?

A cable would have to be seriously defective or incompetently designed to affect the frequency response audibly. Regardless, any change in response that can be heard can be easily measured. This is audio engineering 101, and the methods go back to 1940 and even earlier.
 
--Ethan

 

[Mkubota1]

Quote:

Probably not, but maybe. It depends on many factors including each trumpet's contribution to the total volume of the section. But the difference would not be only volume, but also timbre since multiple instruments playing the same note "beat" at various frequencies due to minute differences in pitch and timing.
 
--Ethan

Sure- and even if it were a matter of very slight pitch change (or timing) we could measure those things quite easily as well.
 

 

[Heidegger]

 
Quote:

1. Everything that can be heard can be measured. There are no exceptions. I'm sure I've explained that already.
 
2. BTW, you do indeed hear sound waves and decibels. It's your brain that lets you perceive it as a squeaking gate etc.


--Ethan

1. Maybe, but is everything measured in these tests?
 
2. No, I perecieve it as a squeaking gate because that's what it is. By the time you start talking about hearing soundwaves, you have already modified the primordial phenomenon by stripping it of most of its content and leaving only the bare soundwave in its place. The bare soundwave is a theoretical construct. You listen to music, not to soundwaves.
 

 

[MacedonianHero]

Everything that can be heard can be measured. There are no exceptions. I'm sure I've explained that already.
 
BTW, you do indeed hear sound waves and decibels. It's your brain that lets you perceive it as a squeaking gate etc.


--Ethan

Please excuse my ignorance, but how does one measure sound stage width, depth? Instrumental locations on that sound stage? Instrumental separation, timbre, etc....?

 

[Currawong]

This is the wrong part of the forum for untested claims and opinion 

  It should not be too difficult to ABX your cliam and publish the results. Funny how no maker does that.

Before something can be tested, a theory needs to be put forward. My purpose in stating my beliefs is that it might provoke someone with a proper scientific mindset to do some experiments. Since you mention what this part of the forum is about, it seems to me to be about armchair discussion of other people's experiments, alongside casual interpretations of equipment measurements. With the exception of Nick Charles and a couple of people who set up mp3 blind tests, I don't see anyone doing any actual experiments and posting the results here. While yourself and others have been trumpeting that X, Y and Z of audiophillia are all snake-oil, Tyll (and possibly soon others) have been doing proper research. I have been slowly pondering doing some carefully prepared tests myself.

Regardless, you have to remember that science began for the purpose of explaining people's everyday experiences. It doesn't exist in a vacuum away from these things.

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

Quote:

Everything that can be heard can be measured. There are no exceptions. I'm sure I've explained that already.
 
BTW, you do indeed hear sound waves and decibels. It's your brain that lets you perceive it as a squeaking gate etc.


--Ethan

Please excuse my ignorance, but how does one measure sound stage width, depth? Instrumental locations on that sound stage? Instrumental separation, timbre, etc....?
 

 
Just a few things.
 
Isn't the sound stage and instrument locations on that stage a function of where the recording engineer put them?
 
Aren't the cues for sound stage, room reflections, ambiance, echo, etc, located in the treble range? 
 
Here's a thought.  Plug in your most cavernous sounding headphones, play something that has a very wide and deep sound stage, then, start cutting the treble, and watch the sound stage collapse because you can't hear the cues any more.
 
My feeling is that when dealing with cables, a perceived change in sound stage is as arbitrary as a perceived change in treble or bass. 
 
 
@  Curra
 
I don't see anyone doing any actual experiments and posting the results here.
 
It's unclear who should be doing the experiments and posting the results.
 

 

[Mkubota1]

 
Quote:

My feeling is that when dealing with cables, a perceived change in sound stage is as arbitrary as a perceived change in treble or bass.

 
It's not just a coincidence that gear often described as airy/ open/ lively also has increased high frequencies, and stuff that has intimate vocals or a narrow soundstage usually has a bump somewhere in the midrange region.  Most of what we hear (I'm being generous/ overly cautious by not saying 'all') is known and measurable.  It's like tasting wine:  We have a million different descriptions for what we taste; but to chemists it's all pretty simple to explain.

 

[b0ck3n]

Indeed. A lot can be explained by producing a frequency response graph, but around these boards we often hear things like "FR charts tell nothing of sound quality" etc. I recently asked a very popular amp manufacturer if he could provide a FR graph to help ease my decision making, and he replied in the exact same way.

 
 

 

[Prog Rock Man]

Quote:

Quote:

This is the wrong part of the forum for untested claims and opinion 

  It should not be too difficult to ABX your cliam and publish the results. Funny how no maker does that.

Before something can be tested, a theory needs to be put forward. My purpose in stating my beliefs is that it might provoke someone with a proper scientific mindset to do some experiments. Since you mention what this part of the forum is about, it seems to me to be about armchair discussion of other people's experiments, alongside casual interpretations of equipment measurements. With the exception of Nick Charles and a couple of people who set up mp3 blind tests, I don't see anyone doing any actual experiments and posting the results here. While yourself and others have been trumpeting that X, Y and Z of audiophillia are all snake-oil, Tyll (and possibly soon others) have been doing proper research. I have been slowly pondering doing some carefully prepared tests myself.

Regardless, you have to remember that science began for the purpose of explaining people's everyday experiences. It doesn't exist in a vacuum away from these things.

Are you trying to claim that different cables sound different is a theory? If so it has been put forward ad nauseum here and on other hifi forums for years now. So we need to move on from the theory and do some testing. Yes Nick_Charles and a few others have conducted tests. Yes I and most others are armchair observers having a discussion about such.
 
But, what was new with this thread is that for the first time (and I have checked and with the hundreds of hours finding testing I would have found such by now) a whole series of tests were gathered together as a meta study to see if audiophile claims are myths or are true. Was became abundantly clear was that many an audiophile has sat back and made claims and has asked to be presented with evidence. They have not bothered to look for it and it was easy to dismiss the one or two tests people could find/remember . In the first post I have included the dates of when the tests were done. They range back over the past 30 years and in all that time there has been relatively few, roughly one or two a year. So, to paraphrase you someone has been doing some experiments, but they have been too easily kept in the background and ignored as shown by marginalisation here, banning and ridiculing elsewhere of discussions on the testing audiophile claims, particularly by blind testing.
 
If you are going to come here and state that you can hear a difference without evidence, then I will consider again go elsewhere in the forum and 'trumpet' that you and others are talking nonsense. We have been there before and I would suggest we should do that again. It would be far more constructive for you to stop pondering and do some tests yourself.
 
You do not need to remind me what the science is for. I start and contribute to as many science threads as I can.

 

[jcx]

 
Quote:

Please excuse my ignorance, but how does one measure sound stage width, depth? Instrumental locations on that sound stage? Instrumental separation, timbre, etc....?
 

have you gone to the AES site and typed "image" or "location" into the article search? - you may need to refine the search a little since either give (the max?)  a thousand hits http://www.aes.org/e-lib/online/search.cfm
 
obviously there aren't meters that can tell you the seating spacing in the orchestra from a recording but lots is known about how humans localize sound sources by hearing and how those mechanisms can be manipulated/faked in stereo reproduction for pleasing illusions of "soundstage" "imaging"and what system time, frequency response characteristics aid or interfere with those spatial illusions
 
psychoacoustic lossy data rate compression relies on understanding through intense DBT testing what signal "shortcuts" can be taken to throw out over 75% of the Shannon-Hartley Channel Capacity information in a musical signal and still be "transparent" with almost all musical source - the exceptions are valued by the codec development community to advance the algorithms - today's best codecs at 320 kb are "transparent" - which includes conveying the spatial illusions
 
anybody know what (lossy?) format the clips are in? https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php?file=catalogdetail&valbum_code=HX090368035264

 

[Audio-Omega]

Has anyone ever measured sound difference in cd players and use the same method to measure cables ?

 

[nick_charles]

 
Quote:

Has anyone ever measured sound difference in cd players and use the same method to measure cables ?

Measuring the FR of a CDP is pretty  routine, Stereophile has done this 100s of times, measuring distortion, noise and other unwanted attributes as well, this is not rocket science. Others here have measured the differences between cables numeorus times, if we stick to FR and noise the measurements to date suggest a very low likelihood of audible differences between "conventional" analog interconnects that do not either purposely alter the signal via added components such a zobel networks or distort the signal through defective design. To date no two competent conventional cables of the same approximate gauge and length have been shown to differ by more than low 100ths of a db at any frequency point across the audible spectrum and even these differences may be attributed to measurement error. I have done my own crude measurements and the inter-cable differences between 1m 77c and $140 cables do not indicate a rational reason for the large perceived differences and no blind tests to date have indicated a reliable ability to distinguish between two cables of similar type.
 
 

 

[EthanWiner]

Quote:

1. Maybe, but is everything measured in these tests?

I'm certain I've explained this at least three times so far in this thread. So for the last time: A null test will reveal all differences between two signals, even those you might not have thought to look for by measuring frequency response and distortion etc. I use null tests all the time. Same for an FFT, which shows the spectrum of a signal. So you look at an FFT of the input to a headphone amp, for example, and another of its output. Again, this is not rocket science, and the methods to measure all aspects of audio fidelity have been known for decades.
 
--Ethan

 

[EthanWiner]

Quote:

Please excuse my ignorance, but how does one measure sound stage width, depth? Instrumental locations on that sound stage? Instrumental separation, timbre, etc....?

First, what I've been addressing is measuring the fidelity of audio gear. Look at the first post to this thread, and that should be clear. But the things you mention like sound stage can be "measured" in some sense, by looking for phase differences between the left and right channels. A phase meter is common on high-end mixing consoles, to let the mixing engineer avoid "stereo" problems that would, for example, harm mono compatibility.
 
--Ethan

 

[Prog Rock Man]

Hifi Choice in their reviews use sighted and blind listening (not ABX) and show various measurements of the likes of jitter and distortion. One thing that is abundantly clear, there is no correlation between sound quality and what they rate as an Editor's Choice or Best Buy and any measurement. If any measurement really did make a difference, we would know by now and the hifi makers would have acted upon it.
 
Hifi Choice have been reviewing and publishing measurements for years now. You really need to get the magazine to be able to read the group tests.
 
I can assure you that CDPs, amps etc have all been tested and measured and the information is out there.