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I'd like to see an audiogram (hearing test) posted beside each critics byline
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Hearing ability has much less importance to a reviewer, than the ability to describe what he/she does hear. Reviewers are writers, not reference measurments.
Audiograms are designed to diagnose hearing problems that affect the ability to understand speech. They use a limited set of test sounds which cover the frequency range required for this purpose (100 - 8000 Hz). Music is more than just a bunch of sine waves in this limited frequency band.
In any event, the "mind stuff" between the ears is more important than the ears themselves when it comes to enjoying music and evaluating equipment. This is not just a question of the "hardware" (good physical health), it includes the "software" (training and experience in how to listen).
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Otherwise it would lead to confusion.
If all reviewers and readers had them.. then they same audiogram pattern of reviewer and reader could be matched and then all would be well in the world.
nt
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My speaker building site
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Unless you decide that you should match your own hearing to that of the reviewer, I fail to see the relevance here.
Precious few reviewers are under 40, so they will have some degree of age-related hearing loss. Most will have been around the block some and have hearing damage from too many concerts. Which fits perfectly with most of the audiophiles who buy this stuff.
If the audio world was chock full of 20-somethings wanting to buy high-end gear, I could understand the need to get reviewers with similar hearing profiles. But the reviewers we've got are as deaf as we are, within normal operating parameters.
Besides, what advantage would this really bestow? We tend to follow the work of particular reviewers, because we find them consistently in (or out of) agreement with our tastes. Chances are, if we knew that reviewer X's hearing rolled off at 13kHz, we'd refuse to take their work seriously, even though our own hearing may be far, far more rolled off.
Think about it a moment. You tend to agree with the reviews of BJ Hardick and bought your Truculent Fudgetunnel V preamp on the basis of his reviews. You then discover his hearing falls off in the early teens. Do you suddenly decide the product is no good because it was recommended by someone with less than perfect hearing? Do you instead go with the conclusions of Dick Thrust because he's 24 and has near perfect hearing, despite every time you hear one of his recommendations, the product sounds like someone emptied a sack of ball bearings into a spin dryer?
a
The Harman research found that ability to rank loudspeakers wasn't affected by a reasonable amount of age-related hearing loss, in that the group with it ranked loudspeakers in the same order as everyone else.
What did damage the ability to rank loudspeakers was a loss of as little as 10 dB down in the 1 kHz area, which is surprisingly common in all age segments of the population. People with that kind of hearing loss rate loudspeakers idiosyncratically and inconsistently.
So now, when we meet those audiophiles who have really weird tastes, we can harbor the secret suspicion that they're deaf. In that case, an audiology test would be useful -- but how many readers would know how to interpret the results? More likely, people would make the same kind of mistake they make when they look at the test results in Stereophile, forgetting that what looks bad on paper doesn't always sound bad and vice-versa.
Anyway, I doubt though that someone with that kind of hearing loss would get very far as an audio critic. Unless he started his own magazine, LOL.
In one respect, though, I do agree with you -- we middle aged or older guys shouldn't be reviewing the top octave. I remember feeling as a kid that a lot of high frequency crap that drove me crazy -- msitracking, beaming tweeters, pilot tone FM Stereo -- would be fixed if middle-aged engineers could hear what I did. Now that I'm a middle-aged engineer myself, and am no longer nearly as bothered by those problems as I was then, I've decided that I was right. So middle-aged critics -- and engineers -- should call in someone who still has good top octave hearing to evaluate what they can't.
But I for one would trust the experienced ears of an older critic over the more acute but less experienced hearing of someone who's just starting out.
In my experience, what matters is that the critic hears the same things I do and has tastes similar to my own. And the only way to determine that is to read some of his reviews of equipment with which I'm familiar, and see if he makes the same observations, and expresses the same preferences, that I did. More often than not, I find that they do.
The late Richard Heyser had a saying “nature has no frame of reference; well apply those to make things easier to understand”.
For example, we choose to assign Time and Pressure to a waveform but Velocity, Pressure, Temperature and so on would have worked also .
It is a sad fact that NO ONE has ears with anything even remotely like flat frequency response and on top of that, our ears frequency response changes with level as well. NO ONE here has the high frequency response they had as a teenager (unless they are still a teen).
Also, if one had a friend run an oscillator while you guessed what frequency was playing, one finds most people greatly over estimate HF tones, guessing them to be much higher than actual while low tones are usually guessed to be lower than actual.
The idea of “flat” is only desirable as a ruler when dealing with the hardware.
None of this personal hearing matters to us because we have NO other frame of reference, how our hearing is, is the only thing each of us knows. That is why adapt to hearing loss, often without our knowledge, we update the program to accommodate less and less of a range or frequency..
How we hear is also entirely different than how a microphone works.
In developing loudspeakers at work, we started using a “generation loss test” because of that. This turned out to be a very useful tool.
One can take a good sound card and measurement microphone and at home or anywhere else and capture a very real sounding MONO recording with no compression, eq or processing.
While Stereo is another issue, in Mono things are simple, you are sampling air pressure from a single point.
The funny part is, if you record your friends and family and normal household sounds and listen with good headphones, the hair on the back of your neck might stand up as you listen to events you just experienced first hand.
The real funny thing, while everything will sound very familiar, if you record loudspeakers, even without any room reflections, they often do not sound like first hand, why?
A measurement microphone samples air pressure from one point in space, it can do this very accurately but has no directionality.
Your hearing system is comprised of two ears and an adaptive processor that has been continuously programmed as you grew up.
It takes the separate information arriving at each ear and from that extracts the “image” of one sound coming from in front of you.
With the single mic, you cannot hear left / right, up / down or front / back, there is NO 3d sound, ALL of that is what happens when your brain compares the two ears against what it has learned.
It is said our Eyes provide about 20% of the visual information our brain sees, it is that reason that illusions like the inverted face and other work even when you know the face is inverted.
Your hearing is like that too (based on a learned reference library) AND subservient to your eyes.
Yes, that’s right, what you see DOES effect what you hear. The problem again is we only have the one frame of reference but in the study of perception, they have found some ways to highlight the fact that your eyes and prior knowledge overrule what your ears actually hear even when you know what is happening. Try out the McGurke effect, it’s from a great documentary about the senses and recent breakthroughs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
Funny, the only time you can hear genuine reality here is when you’re not seeing the face.
Sounds a lot like blind testing eh?
So far as the reviewers, they all, like each of us, has a learned hearing system. More important than minor variations between people is the learned hearing system that interprets the air pressure into an image or sound. In addition to that, they are writers with a job to do.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
"We can't always trust what we hear because sometimes our sense of vision takes over."
In the video example it's the *sighted* approach that trips us up and produces the error. Ironic. ~:)
Yes, that is the point in fact (not wanting to directly evoke the dreaded hifi B word).
An example of how you can only hear reality, when your ears alone are used as the input. Sight as well as prior knowledge are unavoidably woven into our hearing perception, without our knowledge as that is our only frame of reference.
If one were approaching the issue from the perceptual science point of view, this mechanism would apply to just about every sighted comparison wouldn't it.
as in people rate a cheap-looking but good-sounding speaker more highly when they can't see it -- and that includes not just unskilled listeners but trained professionals who are convinced they're immune to such effects.
If their ever was a snake oil factory it would be that of professional audiology. Ask any one of them what the bandwidth and amplitude response of their "probes" are and they will look at you as though you are from another planet. Just the placement of the "eartips" can vary as much as 8dB with very slight movements. Two identical tests in a row from 2 different technicians yielded difference with my hearing of 15dB.
Edits: 11/20/11
...they are using that same hearing to listen to live music as a reference.
If their hearing has a HF roll-off at 16kHz or even 12kHz, what would that tell you?
Their room dimensions and treatments will have a greater impact on what they hear there, IMO.
I like to state everything I say within a comparative perspective, such as A versus B. This bypasses some of the differences in room, hearing, etc. between the reviewer and the reader.
...audio equipment reviews are for entertainment only.
a
aka an uncritical emotional (subjective) commitment!
;-).
If you've read this, a response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
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