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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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In Reply to: Disagreed posted by Phelonious Ponk on June 27, 2010 at 05:01:04:
I object to the dogmatic definition of "hearing" which is equated by the audio denialists as passing a short time double blind test. If the ear were the detecting instrument, perhaps that would work, but it's the entire person. So, for example, one "hears" bass with one's gut. But more important is the assumption that consciousness is unitary, and that one either hears something or doesn't hear it. While this may be true (perhaps for evolutionary reasons) for hearing objects in the foreground, where the brain (or mind) quickly picks out features, there is also a much slower perception of the background, the auditory environment out of which the mind pulls interesting objects. In normal life this changes slowly and so it is entirely possible that the mind uses different processing with different time constants to pull information out in this category. One way of looking at it is that the mind is creating a framework to better optimize its detection of new foreground objects, so as to better eat, but not be eaten.
If you conduct rapid switching tests you will never be able to detect any slow time constant processing by the brain if the testing is blind, because the mind won't possibly be able to create and reference separate contexts for long term signal processing. It will be stuck averaging everything together. Perhaps long term blind tests, where each trial lasts for days or weeks will work, but to get statistically validity no one is going to do this unless someone is paying them for this mental torture.
Understand, this is purely a speculative theory of mine and I haven't articulated it well. However, the mere possibility that this can happen negates the argument that if you can't hear a difference short term it isn't there. It's unfair to the denialists, but they are trying to prove a negative, something that can not be done without rigorously enumerating all of the alternatives and specifically excluding each one.
A simpler example, but not so general, is to note that sometimes when you play a recording on a better system you will hear things that you missed on lesser equipment. (An example would be a musical part that has been doubled up.) Once you've heard it, you will continue to hear it on the inferior equipment because you have trained your mind better, or just your mind is filling in the details from memory.
More to the point, as it relates to the demise of the recording industry, is that there are sonic distortions that aren't readily audible that cause listener fatigue. A recording can sound better, short term, and yet be so fatiguing that you can't listen to a complete album. This is one of the problems with many early digital recordings, which were over etched with lots of glaring energy, possibly ringing at 22,050 Hz due to the brick wall filter which should never be used in recording but which are still common.
Obsessiveness is the driver for progress. Unfortunately, the obsessive suffer for their perfectionism. The problem with Audio is that it has become socially structured so that the obsessive suffer and get good sound, but the denialists, in the name of Science, deny this and there is no net progress. As a result, the run of the mill consumers do not get an progress in the form of better sound. All of the technological progress has been directed into reduced costs, reduced size, and reduced convenience at the expense of sound quality, which is to be expected since better sound has been scientifically proven to be an illusion.
Many of the obsessive audiophiles may be fools who waste time and money on useless gadgets, but these people harm only themselves. The deniers harm music lovers everywhere in ways that none of us can even imagine, through their denial of progress.
It is common in many fields to ignore things that don't really matter. This is just what lazy people do. I used to see this when working with programmers writing software. The program was uncompetitively slow, but each person said that his code only ran 10% of the time and even if it was made to run infinitely fast there wouldn't be any significant improvement in the product. The end result of this attitude, since it wasn't possible to educate these people or get them fired, was that the company went out of this line of business.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: Disagreed - Tony Lauck 06:30:40 06/27/10 (1)
- RE: Disagreed - Phelonious Ponk 17:15:16 06/27/10 (0)
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