[Joe Bloggs]

I actually don't think anyone who has thoroughly studied the scientific side of things would believe that FR is all there is when it comes to sound quality. There may be those who do think this - but I'd suggest those people do a bit more research on the subject. It has been demonstrated that FR is far and away the most important factor, but it is not the only factor. Even Dr. Olive himself mentioned this in a recent interview. I think perhaps the darker characterization of this isn't so much that FR is all there is but rather... target adherence is all there is, which is a straightforward misunderstanding of the science. But yes, I do see this from time to time as well.

And certainly as long as your ears are not the same as an IEC711 or even the new 5128, adhering to the target on those would not be the same thing as being ideal for your ears, even FR-wise, among other things.

If FR tuning were the only thing I was after, I would much rather test for it using my own ears and EQ for that. For my own listening anyway...

 

[fejnomit]

I'm responding to this here because it is after all at least partly a "philosophical discussion" thread. and I also don't want to clog up the EE thread.

At the outset I want to say that I feel this topic is very vast & multi layered-- I'm going to do my best to present some of my thoughts as best I can...a lot of "thinking out loud" will follow...I find this topic very fascinating to ponder.



I would agree that it is perhaps poorly defined but IMHO there is very much a distinction to be drawn somewhere between two distinct, shall we say, ideologies, approaches, temperaments, or underlying philosophical persuasions in this hobby that have to this point been been (perhaps poorly) conceived as the "objective/subjective" distinction. Not only that but I would go further and argue that there is at play here a fundamental ideological/temperamental divide that is rooted in the bedrock of human nature.

The best characterization I've heard so far of what might be described as the "fundamental battleground of human intellectual discourse" was given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the following quote (which I'm pretty sure that I shared some time ago in the Objective/Subjective discussion thread over at the Headphones.com forum):

"As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture."

In this hobby I think this distinction translates to a more analytical/intellectual approach (objectivist/materialist) on the one side, to a more emotive/heart-centred approach (subjectivist/idealist) on the other. It is no coincidence that another word for "subjectivist" in Holt's glossary is "mystic".



This was an interesting statement to unpack.

Fundamentally, what people consciously "believe" is of very little relevance here I think. It's not a question of what any of us believe-- what we should we should be concerned with is what is true. (In this sense I am very much an "objectivist".) Furthermore very few people have a well defined consciously formulated worldview. That is to say, most people have not sat down and taken stock of their beliefs and tried to assemble them into a well-defined or coherent structure. I would agree that most people, if pressed, would not deny that "their experience is caused by something external to them"-- but it's just as true that the vast majority of people would say this without really putting much thought into what "experience caused by something external to them" really means or implies. For example, I will admit that it certainly appears as though there is a world external to me that is impressing itself on my mind (the materialist perspective) however after only a little reflection it becomes apparent to me that the only thing I have ever had direct experience of is my own subjective consciousness (the idealist perspective)-- everything I have ever experienced has come to me through the medium of this subjective consciousness. It's not even remotely clear to me at this point what "external to me" exactly means. At root, the purely subjective element of my experience appears to me to be at least as fundamental as that which is external to me (whatever that means).

All of this has, I think, profound implications in audio where the level of perception involved (in describing things like soundstage, timbre, the changes in sound brought about by a cable swap) are often incredibly subtle. It's not altogether clear to me that people's mental attitudes or expectations can't influence the listening experience in a non-trivial way. For example, someone who is pre-disposed to find differences in sound when changing cables, due to their inherent mental bias...may exagerrate in their minds the differences they do hear. On the other hand it's just as true that someone who, say, based on measurements was convinced what there was no sonic difference between two cables, due to their inherent mental bias may not hear subtle differences that are in fact there.







Maybe they are, maybe they aren't-- I don't think this is the relevant point. What is relevant is where someone's inherent bias is, which is largely informed by their temperament. Speaking for myself, I'm not altogether opposed to the idea that every aspect of my experience is measureable somehow-- but my subjectivist bias leads me to trust my ears and experience first, and measurements second. In the ultimate sense this "objective/subjective" distinction is as much about differences in inherent temperament than it is about differences in belief structures around metaphysical reality. Beyond that, it's not clear to me that even if it were true that there is some "measureable property" responsible for all of my experience, that one will be able to actually discern the specifics from reading the measurements. A classic example of this would be with our thoughts-- I might grant that one could hook up enough wires and apparatus to my brain that they could detect some measureable corollary to my entire thought processes...but I would still maintain that the actual content of my thoughts and the sum total of my experience is fundamentally asymmetrically accessible. Detecting the existence of thoughts is not the same as reading the specific content of said thoughts.

In a similar way I often think of looking at an FR curve as akin to looking at a reflection of a building on the ground-- you can discern the dimensions of the building but not its substance.



I don't think anyone is making this claim-- but I do think there is a line somwhere between objective reality and one's subjective experience...and where this line resides is not altogether clear at this point.



Fair enough. However regardless of what is said of this topic generally, one of the most common "disputes" I see is between those who, for example, believe that all aspects of sound can be discerned in the FR, and those who maintain that the FR is just one piece of a multi-faceted puzzle. Perhaps crudely, it does seem to me that the line dividing these two camps is in many ways consistent with the objectivist/subjectivist temperaments I've thus far been trying to describe.

Fascinating. Well said and well argued.

I would urge anyone interested in this topic to check out Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself. It's about brain-mapping and the body, primarily. But it gives insight into the current state of neuroscience.

Turns out the brain functions off an internally projected map of the world around it, not the world itself. That's what explains phantom limb syndrome in amputees. The limb is gone but amputees still feel it because their brain map still contains the limb. You can do a series of therapies to re-map the brain to accept that there is no limb but you could just as easily do a series of therapies to re-map the brain for a fifth limb and your brain-map would now contain that extra limb.

The implications for the objective/subjective debate are profound: essentially there is no outside world. The brain functions off the nervous system in a feedback loop that creates a brain-map of one's body and environment. That body and that environment, as such, do not exist for the brain; they only 'exist' to us once they are part of the brain map. So really, everything is subjective - the world is only perceivable and tangible and measurable according to the subjective map created within each brain.

This obviously goes for hearing as well. It's what's happens when we refer to brain burn-in...

Anyway, to me, this is also so interesting because the scientific method has taken us to a place where objectivity breaks down... Sort of like quantum physics taking us to a place where physics breaks down. Objectivity is exposing itself as inadequate and in need of new paradigms...

 

[haci]

Speaking of causality and biases, I’d like to promote my book on causal inference, for the non-economist audience

https://www.amazon.com/NONTECHNICAL-CAUSAL-INFERENCE-HANDBOOK/dp/B0CD13FRX4

 

[Rockwell75]

It has been demonstrated that FR is far and away the most important factor [when it comes to sound quality]

Again, I m just thinking out loud here, but I'm curious how this could be taken to be "demonstrated". "Most important" relative to what other factors? Just speaking for myself, one of the reasons I moved on from putting too much stock in what a graph of an IEM says before hearing it for myself is that I found I could not divorce an IEM's graph from its driver configuration, driver type & quality as well as the skill of implementation. Driver type is the most obvious factor for me, as I've indicated elsewhere, and I'm in the camp of people who deny that, say, the intrisnic differences between BA and DD drivers (or between single, hybrid or tribrid driver configurations) can be reflected and discerned from and FR curve. So out of a handful of factors I could perhaps accept that FR holds the most individual weight...but it doesn't tell enough of the story for me to ever feel justified in saying anything absolute about an IEM just based on the graph alone. Or something.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Again, I m just thinking out loud here, but I'm curious how this could be taken to be "demonstrated". "Most important" relative to what other factors? Just speaking for myself, one of the reasons I moved on from putting too much stock in what a graph of an IEM says before hearing it for myself is that I found I could not divorce an IEM's graph from its driver configuration, driver type & quality as well as the skill of implementation. Driver type is the most obvious factor for me, as I've indicated elsewhere, and I'm in the camp of people who deny that, say, the intrisnic differences between BA and DD drivers (or between single, hybrid or tribrid driver configurations) can be reflected and discerned from and FR curve. So out of a handful of factors I could perhaps accept that FR holds the most individual weight...but it doesn't tell enough of the story for me to ever feel justified in saying anything absolute about an IEM just based on the graph alone. Or something.

As long as we're not talking something ultra wonky like bone conduction, the difference could possibly be explained by the difference in acoustic impedance between the test gear and your actual ears. Perhaps e.g. the volume of air sealed by an IEM on the classic test equipment and on your ears is significantly different such that the acoustic impedance interactions play out rather differently between the two such that two IEMs of otherwise same FR on e.g. the IEC711 but different driver config play out differently in terms of FR on your ears because (say) a DD bass driver loses less bass when the sealed volume increases than a BA driver.

Or, in the extreme case, whether the IEMs sealed properly on both the test gear and your ears, but I guess we can be sure on both ends that's probably not the issue

 

[fejnomit]

It has been demonstrated that THE BRAIN is far and away the most important factor [when it comes to sound quality]

There I fixed it.

 

[emdeevee]

Fascinating. Well said and well argued.

I would urge anyone interested in this topic to check out Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself. It's about brain-mapping and the body, primarily. But it gives insight into the current state of neuroscience.

Turns out the brain functions off an internally projected map of the world around it, not the world itself. That's what explains phantom limb syndrome in amputees. The limb is gone but amputees still feel it because their brain map still contains the limb. You can do a series of therapies to re-map the brain to accept that there is no limb but you could just as easily do a series of therapies to re-map the brain for a fifth limb and your brain-map would now contain that extra limb.

The implications for the objective/subjective debate are profound: essentially there is no outside world. The brain functions off the nervous system in a feedback loop that creates a brain-map of one's body and environment. That body and that environment, as such, do not exist for the brain; they only 'exist' to us once they are part of the brain map. So really, everything is subjective - the world is only perceivable and tangible and measurable according to the subjective map created within each brain.

This obviously goes for hearing as well. It's what's happens when we refer to brain burn-in...

Anyway, to me, this is also so interesting because the scientific method has taken us to a place where objectivity breaks down... Sort of like quantum physics taking us to a place where physics breaks down. Objectivity is exposing itself as inadequate and in need of new paradigms...

I got into this debate on the FB group which is full of objectivists. I asked the simple question, "do you trust any of your senses?" as a response to not trusting your ears. Every human sense is run by the brain in that person's head and so objectivity in measurements (or recipes for food if we discuss that sense) would seem to be the (only) objective common sharing point between people. Everything else gets filtered thru each unique set of eyes/ears/noses/mouths hooked to that individual brain. Food and taste sense is an easier one to contrast and seems to be less controversial; no one blinks when one person finds a dish to not be to their taste.

Ultimately, the debate seems a little silly when you're talking about objectively capturing human senses. Humans are so inherently and biologically diverse that evaluations of items made to specifically appeal to the senses, or in our hobby, hearing, that objectivity has to yield to subjectivity. The measurements are what they are, but what you hear will almost certainly sound different in some way through your human filters (the senses plus your brain).

That's a long way of saying you should trust your senses when it comes to things that are specifically designed to appeal to them!

 

[fejnomit]

It has been demonstrated that THE HEART is far and away the most important factor [when it comes to sound quality]

Or this, to put it more in-line with the discussion...

 

[fejnomit]

I got into this debate on the FB group which is full of objectivists. I asked the simple question, "do you trust any of your senses?" as a response to not trusting your ears. Every human sense is run by the brain in that person's head and so objectivity in measurements (or recipes for food if we discuss that sense) would seem to be the (only) objective common sharing point between people. Everything else gets filtered thru each unique set of eyes/ears/noses/mouths hooked to that individual brain. Food and taste sense is an easier one to contrast and seems to be less controversial; no one blinks when one person finds a dish to not be to their taste.

Ultimately, the debate seems a little silly when you're talking about objectively capturing human senses. Humans are so inherently and biologically diverse that evaluations of items made to specifically appeal to the senses, or in our hobby, hearing, that objectivity has to yield to subjectivity. The measurements are what they are, but what you hear will almost certainly sound different in some way through your human filters (the senses plus your brain).

That's a long way of saying you should trust your senses when it comes to things that are specifically designed to appeal to them!

Yes but it goes even further than that. According to the book - the "senses" in the classical sense, are part of the brain map. The brain forms the map, then sends signals to the nervous system to "perceive" according to the map. That's why I said feedback loop. It's not as linear as we used to think where the sense feedback data to the brain and the brain merely processes it. The brain also tells the sense what to sense, according to its mapping. That's where the differences in perception lie between two people encountering the same stimulus. Their brain maps tell their senses to find different data in that encounter. This upended things for me. I urge you to read the book if you have the time.

 

[kevin638880]

I’ve sent the demo back, so I’m expecting my own unit next week at some point. I’ve been sharing stuff on the N30 thread but I’ll summarize here. This was the regular version of the DAP, not the Amber Pearl which I had on pre order. I absolutely love it, it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted the N8ii to be (after I got fed up of the slightly brighter tonality). It has a warmer, analogue, and fuller tonality with excellent technicals. It’s dynamic and punchy, incredibly spacious staging on all 3 axis with wonderful textured bass, an emotive/wetter mid range, and smooth but well extended treble. It would be a good complement to 320Max Ti for a more musical source. It’ll never be a reference or bright tonality no matter what power or timbre mode you choose, so I’d keep that in mind. But it’s a tweakable sound giving you the choice to make it warmer, fuller, and softer with classical tubes or slightly more crunchy and revealing with modern and solid state timbres. It drove Grand Maestro just fine.

It really surpassed my very high expectations, whether it’s my own bias towards the sound and presentation or it’s just “that good” I will never know. It really left a tremendous impression on me and I cannot wait to get it back. I’m trying not to hype it just because it’s a new toy, I had reservations which is why I requested to demo even with a pre order already in place. If it didn’t meet my own expectations at that crazy price there was just no way I was going to stick with it. At the end of the day just like with any piece of gear, it won’t be for everyone. It’s got a coloration to it that I can imagine some people won’t like or won’t enjoy the synergy with their gear.

So between the two chonkers I’d categorize like this:

Neutral/transparent/dynamic: 320Max Ti
warmer/fuller/musical/analogue/adjustable: N30 LE (regular)

Just to clarify it’s not like the Max lacks musicality or the N30 lacks transparency/dynamics, because that’s not the case, but those would be the words I would use to describe both overall.

Crap, sounds like a direct upgrade and not a sidegrade to the SP3K Cu....thanks for the detailed impressions. Luckily I am not into UM stuff in the slightest so I don't have to spend a few thousand more, I guess.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I got into this debate on the FB group which is full of objectivists. I asked the simple question, "do you trust any of your senses?" as a response to not trusting your ears. Every human sense is run by the brain in that person's head and so objectivity in measurements (or recipes for food if we discuss that sense) would seem to be the (only) objective common sharing point between people. Everything else gets filtered thru each unique set of eyes/ears/noses/mouths hooked to that individual brain. Food and taste sense is an easier one to contrast and seems to be less controversial; no one blinks when one person finds a dish to not be to their taste.

Ultimately, the debate seems a little silly when you're talking about objectively capturing human senses. Humans are so inherently and biologically diverse that evaluations of items made to specifically appeal to the senses, or in our hobby, hearing, that objectivity has to yield to subjectivity. The measurements are what they are, but what you hear will almost certainly sound different in some way through your human filters (the senses plus your brain).

That's a long way of saying you should trust your senses when it comes to things that are specifically designed to appeal to them!

Objectivists do trust their ears regarding audio, when that is the only instrument being used, i.e. in a [redacted].

 

[DarginMahkum]

subjectivist A person who has found that measurements don't tell the whole story about reproduced sound.

objectivist A person who believes that measurements tell all you need to know about a component's performance. An auronihilist.

That is a very cartoonish look at it. Let me fix that for you:

Subjectivist: A person that believes that the realities of life must be classified into two like in the cartoons or Hollywood's propaganda movies that divides the world into us and others, and need a justification for avoiding information 'supported' decision making.

Objectivist: A person that is classified to be outside of the self appointed subjectivist group, a.k.a. 'the other' for the self appointed subjectivist person.

 

[Rockwell75]

Yes but it goes even further than that. According to the book - the "senses" in the classical sense, are part of the brain map. The brain forms the map, then sends signals to the nervous system to "perceive" according to the map. That's why I said feedback loop. It's not as linear as we used to think where the sense feedback data to the brain and the brain merely processes it. The brain also tells the sense what to sense, according to its mapping. That's where the differences in perception lie between two people encountering the same stimulus. Their brain maps tell their senses to find different data in that encounter. This upended things for me. I urge you to read the book if you have the time.

I heard a fascinating talk once by a psychologist on the subject of perception. Among other things he said that current research has shown that, contrary to the "commonsense" notion that perception involves us "perceiving objects and inferring meaning" in actual fact it seems that intead we "perceive meaning and infer objects". There was obviously more to it than that but the general idea is that many of our most basic notions of perception have been completely inverted in recent decades.

Edit: Here is the talk timestamped at the relevant part for anyone interested.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I heard a fascinating talk once by a psychologist on the subject of perception. Among other things he said that current research has shown that, contrary to the "commonsense" notion that perception involves us "perceiving objects and inferring meaning" in actual fact it seems that intead we "perceive meaning and infer objects". There was obviously more to it than that but the general idea is that many of our most basic notions of perception have been completely inverted in recent decades.

I think both meaning and objects can only be inferred, the only things we perceive directly are our sensory inputs (which nevertheless can be influenced by other things going on inside us).

edit: then, do objectivists not have a leg to stand on? The thing is, everyone fully acknowledges that the time of day, the phase of the moon, how many beers you've had, all affect how much you like the music. But can your amplifier or your headphones DO anything about all those things? Striking closer to home, we all acknowledge that the branding on your headphones, the appearance of your amplifier, the price you paid for these things, can all affect how you like the sound they play. But do you WANT to factor these things into your purchasing decision? (Well, I would say that a lot of us actually do, for personal enjoyment! But for audio reviews?)

edit2: Sometimes I think the labels objectivist and subjectivist should be inverted, because so-called "objectivists" are actually the ones who more acknowledge the subjective nature of perception, how what one actually perceives can be totally turned on its head by all of the above factors (and hence the requirement for stringent controls, when critically testing audio equipment for their sound quality, using only one's ears), whereas it is the subjectivists who sometimes seem to think that what any one person perceives on one given day, under umpteen confounding influences, can stand as objective ground truth that everyone else will perceive equally under totally different circumstances, even with whole different sets of chemicals, moods etc. feeding each brain...

 

[Rockwell75]

I think both meaning and objects can only be inferred, the only things we perceive directly are our sensory inputs

Strictly speaking the only thing we perceive directly is our own subjective consciousness. Anything perceived by our senses is by definition indirect as the act of sense perception involves input being taken in by our sense nerves, broken down, shipped to the brain, and then reconstructed and delivered to our conscious awareness. If my (admittedly shallow) understanding of this science is accurate presently we know quite a lot about how the signal is broken down and shipped to our brain, but not very much about how it is reconstructed and delivered to our minds.