The merits of high fidelity audio in the real world

[interpolate]

I typed that on my mobile telephone at about 2% battery power left  hence the slight grammar error and rushed answer.

 

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I came to a conclusion that all debates on Head-Fi are philosophically-challenged..... 
 
I'm glad the Chicken and the Egg paradox doesn't get discussed here.

 

[jcx]

philosophical debates do happen http://www.head-fi.org/newsearch?search=epistemology&=Search
 
can't say the engineers find them terribly useful, care about identifying as "rational materialist" or if some ivory tower type has "discredited" some assumption and now thinks we need "scientific rationalism"
 
advanced tech seems to have arisen from even poorly examined, "philosophically improper" use of the scientific method "on the ground" by the majority of technologists
 
 
for instance we commonly do attach some weight to an accumulation of negative results beyond "fails to reject the null hypothesis" - tend to make the possibly unjustified leap to "there's nothing there" when "enough" negative results in thought to be related tests pile up - probably has to do with finite lives, resources leading to reliance on heuristics that work "well enough"

 

[maverickronin]

for instance we commonly do attach some weight to an accumulation of negative results beyond "fails to reject the null hypothesis" - tend to make the possibly unjustified leap to "there's nothing there" when "enough" negative results in thought to be related tests pile up - probably has to do with finite lives, resources leading to reliance on heuristics that work "well enough"

 
That actually is justified since all empirical knowledge is probabilistic anyway, positive results included.
 
There's nothing logically impossible about seeing an apple falling upwards tomorrow and discovering that our carefully crafted theory of gravity was just one massive coincidence.  It's just not very likely.  Simply failing to reject the null hypothesis doesn't usually count for as much but after it happens enough times you can plug all those numbers into a Bayesian assessment and get a probability worth acting on.

 

[Music Alchemist]

  There's nothing logically impossible about seeing an apple falling upwards tomorrow and discovering that all our carefully crafted theory of gravity was just one massive coincidence.  It's just not very likely.

 
Now I'm thinking about how I read somewhere that the laws of physics are in a state of constant flux...except out there in space, or something like that. Yay for unrelated physics discussions!

 

[interpolate]

Oh what have I started?!

 

[arnyk]

 
for instance we commonly do attach some weight to an accumulation of negative results beyond "fails to reject the null hypothesis" - tend to make the possibly unjustified leap to "there's nothing there" when "enough" negative results in thought to be related tests pile up - probably has to do with finite lives, resources leading to reliance on heuristics that work "well enough"

 
Science and Engineering have many basic fundamental rules, such as the "Laws of Thermodynamics" that were long thought to be valid and relevant only because nothing but failures to find contrary evidence (failures to reject the null hypothesis) were found to exist.
 
Compared to how long we've understood the problems related to say the Laws Of Thermodynamics, and their relative lack of complexity, the similar rules related to Audio are far newer, more complex and not unexpectedly still somewhat controversial.
 
For example, I could not explain many of the null results that we obtained in our audio DBTs until the publication of Zwicker and Fastl's ground breaking papers and books in the late 1980s. If all we knew about audibility were limited to Fletcher and Munson's ground breaking work in the 1930s, our "Can't hear" results would still be mysteries. 
 
Similarly, if all one knows is a ca.1930's view of audible perceptions, MP3 encoders and related products simply can't work at all. There should be no music to hear st all, just hash. 

 

[arnyk]

   
Now I'm thinking about how I read somewhere that the laws of physics are in a state of constant flux...except out there in space, or something like that. Yay for unrelated physics discussions!

 
"All findings of Science are provisional, valid only until we obtain more accurate and relaible findings."

 

[nick_charles]

 
Similarly, if all one knows is a ca.1930's view of audible perceptions, MP3 encoders and related products simply can't work at all. There should be no music to hear st all, just hash. 

 
Actually those 20s/30s and 40s dudes had a pretty good handle on many of the fundamentals such as auditory masking (Wegel and Lane)  and loudness contours (Fletcher-Munson) , distortion audibility (Harry Olson) and without Claude Shannon of course we have no digital audio, well not much digital anything perhaps, so these guys were well on the way (theory wise anyway) of course the tech was a bit limited