|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
206.255.200.146
In Reply to: RE: Sorry but... posted by lancelot on June 23, 2015 at 17:14:30
I was responding to Pat D's apparent lack of understanding how folks are able to hear what speakers are available. Let's review his comments:
So, the idea that one can select speakers just by listening to them ignores the whole process of how one gets around to listening to the speakers in the first place.
There is no magic to the formula. Do you share his opinion that the answer is reading graphs?
Follow Ups:
"There is no magic to the formula."
No, there isn't. There are methodologies, however, to coming up with a list of speaker one would want to audition. You have yours, I have mine.
"Do you share his opinion that the answer is reading graphs?"
Of course, I said nothing of the sort. Answer to what?
If you thought about it, you would realize that no one could find a good set of measurements for every speaker in the world, anymore than one could audition every speaker in the world.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Answer to what?
How to select loudspeakers. I listen. You interpret measurement graphs.
If you thought about it, you would realize that no one could find a good set of measurements for every speaker in the world, anymore than one could audition every speaker in the world.
You cannot find a good set of measurements (in the sense of providing enough relevant information) for any speaker in the world!
I'm with John Atkinson when he says (from the lecture linked to elsewhere in this thread):
"All measurements tell lies...The only reliable judge of quality in a speaker, of how good it is, is in the listener's ear." :)
Amen, John.
You still choose to misrepresent what I say.
"How to select loudspeakers." No, one of the things I have talked about is how to select loudspeakers to audition. To suppose that you do solely by listening unreal. You can only listen to a small proportion of the loudspeakers available and there are various ways to figure out which ones to actually audition. You rely on other people's impressions, and I do, too, to some extent. I also like to use measurements, which I use to screen out lots of speakers and which indicate to me that other speakers are worth listening to.
"You cannot find a good set of measurements (in the sense of providing enough relevant information) for any speaker in the world!"
Enough relevant information for what? They certainly can tell me that there are some speakers that I would not like, or would not like very well, or that the speaker would be difficult to place, and that there are some speakers that I most probably would like. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you, don't use measurements as screening tools. I have not suggested that one buy speakers without auditioning them, much though you try to imply otherwise.
I can only take these remarks by JA as metaphorical: "All measurements tell lies..."
You see, measurements are not the kind of things that can lie. Lying requires and intellectual being who intends to say something false or misleading. Measurements may not tell you what you want to know, or you may misinterpret them, but they do not lie.
"The only reliable judge of quality in a speaker, of how good it is, is in the listener's ear."
Of course, ears on not very reliable for that unless steps are taken to eliminate bias in the listening situation.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
> I can only take these remarks by JA as metaphorical: "All measurements
> tell lies..."Indeed.
> You see, measurements are not the kind of things that can lie. Lying
> requires and intellectual being who intends to say something false or
> misleading. Measurements may not tell you what you want to know, or you
> may misinterpret them, but they do not lie.The measurements do not lie as such. But the person performing a
measurement has to have an idea of what the outcome will be, before he
performs it, just as with a slide rule, which I instanced in my 2011
Richard Heyser lecture (scroll down at the page linked below).The example of this that sticks in my mind was back in late 1989, when
Stereophile had first purchased a MLSSA system for speaker measurement.
My assistant that that time had written a review, complete with
measurements made with MLSSA. As soon as I saw the graphs, I realized
that they were "lying," thus invalidating that section of the review.There had been a system set-up error that resulted in the MLSSA input
board measuring crosstalk from its output section rather than the signal
output by the speaker. The person performing the measurement had not
comprehended from the measurement that he had done something wrong,
that he had not measured what he thought he was measured. In other words,
he had not detected that his measurement was lying to him.He had to repeat the measurements before the speaker review could be
published.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Edits: 06/25/15 06/25/15
.
To suppose that you do solely by listening unreal.
Too funny! Sorry, I don't share your meter reader mentality. I listen to music for enjoyment. What do you do?
Enough relevant information for what?
Don't know about you, but I purchase speakers for listening to music. What is your goal?
Lying requires and intellectual being who intends to say something false or misleading.
You'll have to take up that lost cause with the individual who made that observation - John Atkinson.
This has been fun to read...I am a big image guy and I walk around "IN" my soundstage...never did that with poodle burial coffins...
"I don't share your meter reader mentality. I listen to music for enjoyment. What do you do?"
Boom...drop the mic...
I like my room dividers and really do not care how they measure...they constantly surprise me and show me the emotional spine of the music...
but hey, that's why they make Ford's and Chevy's...
Thanks
Mark
How do you decide whether to try out or audition specific speakers?
One of the tools I use is speaker performance measurements.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Hey Pat..
My speakers before the 3.7i's were 1.6's (were tweaked out with an outboard passive x-over) and I had those for 13 years. I had a pair of Infinity's for 6 years before that...
I am a guy that does not rotate allot of gear...all of those were auditioned at the dealers...any piece that I replace has to be a drastic improvement...also I am very cheap...
I have been to a few Audio shows, but don't have great expectations when I listen there. Just looking for potential then investigate more if something interests me....
I have never hidden that I am not too tech savvy on AA Forums...Hence why I like you tech guys...I have learned allot from the inmates here, which I thought this whole internet thing was about...
MY biggest test when auditioning is do my Audiophile ears lapse and I find myself being pulled into the Music....Listening verses enjoying...
I do understand where you are coming from and that works for you...which is great. But there are a million ways to get things done...hence the Ford's and Chevy's comment...
thanks
Mark
There are hundreds of speakers with pretensions to be high fidelity available in the world. E-state cannot listen to them all. Somehow, anyone who wants to audition speakers must find some manageable way of picking out the speakers he wants to audition. Some speakers are just eliminated due to circumstances beyond his control, some by conscious decisions. E-stat knows this but is just playing with me by picking a sentence out of context and applying it do a different context.
I don't change my equipment very often, either. I have tried to get equipment as good as needed. Going from memory, I got my preamp about 1993, my subwoofer in the late 90's, my speakers about 2005, and my CDP a few years ago and a receiver a few years ago to use as a tuner and spare amp, if needed.
My history with speakers is that I got Kef 104s in 1976, Quad ESL-63s in 1993, and Paradigm Signature S2s in 2005. While trying to choose main speakers, I got PSB Stratus Minis in 2004 with the intention of putting them in the family room, where they work wonderfully well for movies.
I use 12 gauge speaker cables I got in the 1980s, interconnects as needed, nothing expensive, as they should make no audible difference. When reviewers show they can hear differences with controlled DBTs, I will start to believe them.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
E-state cannot listen to them all.
First of all, I don't have to. No one is going to review nor measure every speaker available. Is this news to you?
You prefer reading graphs presenting limited information. I prefer listening to or having others listen to speakers. That is where we disagree.
E-Stat,
Here lies the ultimate problem with your approach. Full sets of measurements are facts. It's the subjective, poetic nonsense you keep spewing that is fiction, do you believe by asking the same questions over and over the facts will go away ?
What you like subjectively is yours , it's audio and eventually all choices will be subjective at decision time , what's ironically flying over your head is the ability to narrow down what works for you by using objective measurements . Morricab for example has determined amplifiers with low to no NFB hits his sweet spot , you have determined monkey coffins don't work for you and prefer panels , there are scientific reason why and that's what's In discussion ...
Regards
Full sets of measurements are facts.
Maybe but are those facts useful information and can you interpret them? If the answer is no to either one then objective facts might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics to you. In fact that is what they are to 99% of even the people who generate those "facts" nevermind the average audiophile.
It is exactly the inability to understand those "facts" as you put it that steered us down the wrong road of hifi reproduction for so long.
Subjective can be made to have a strong degree of objectivity and reproducibility if done correctly. It is done in other fields where human senses are the detector of the quality of a thing.
Take wine, I can perform a full chemical analysis on a 5 buck bottle and also on a 100 buck bottle and present you with those "facts" and they will be true and objective. I can give you the concentrations of retinoids, tannin, sugars, acids etc. but will this give you any concept as to which one will taste better? Maybe if something is WAY out of balance you can guess it might be sour or bitter etc. but nothing in the way of texture, complexity, fruitiness most likely. Hifi measurements are like me giving you a chemical analysis of a wine and asking you to tell me how it will taste and which one will you like to drink the most based on my analytical report.
Now, you can be clever about it and measure the wine and then do taste testing to establish drinker preferences and then correlate that with what you found in your lab report...in fact this is what a lot of companies do to optimize the taste of their products to consumer demand. Hifi doesn't bother with this because the engineers who design the stuff are obsessed with what their meters read and think that people should like better what measures better. They look at this backwards. Humans are the detectors...finding out what they like best and then tailoring the gear to meet that demand is the right way. Correlation to human perception and then designed to meet those demands is the right way.
| Maybe if something is WAY out of balance you can guess it might be sour or bitter etc. but nothing in the way of texture, complexity, fruitiness most likely. Hifi measurements are like me giving you a chemical analysis of a wine and asking you to tell me how it will taste and which one will you like to drink the most based on my analytical report.
So sure are you padawan?
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/229011001_Wine_vinification_prediction_using_data_mining_tools
With a sufficiently large data set of reasonably calibrated measurements and human perceptual judgement, I bet that one could make a model which predicts judgments much better than chance averaged over judges, and when enhanced further with existing wines that a particular judge does and does not like (collaborative filtering) improve the prediction further.
(and there are hundreds of papers on predicting wine ratings and prices from various forms of inputs, chemical or agricultural or climatic)
It's pretty simple Cab, if I give you a fruity wine with an XYZ composition and you tell me it's the best , the objective measurement identifies what composition suits your subjective palete. it's the same for audio , the measurements don't tell me what you will subjectively like , it identifies it .....
Regards ...
to answer my question! You continue to prove me correct that you don't have the slightest idea as to speaker tests that show imaging or coherency abilities. Maybe you cannot sense either and don't understand the question.
Apparently, simplistic facts are all you require. Not me.
"First of all, I don't have to. No one is going to review nor measure every speaker available. Is this news to you?"
Of course it is not news to me. I maintained that for years, and it is nice to see you finally admit it. But it does show that no matter what some audiophiles say, they do not select speakers by listening alone. In fact, as you now admit, you have some method of deciding which speakers among the myriads available that you will actually audition, which means you have selected out, rejected, many other speakers without listening to them.
"You prefer reading graphs presenting limited information. I prefer listening to or having others listen to speakers. That is where we disagree."
No matter how you decide what speakers, out of the many available, you will actually listen to, you are going to decide based on limited information. Reports by others of their listening experience, s still provides limited information. I find such reports of some use in making an audition list and in some cases they indicate things I want to listen for, to see if what they say is true. So I by no means reject using recommendations by others as to what speakers are worth trying out, especially if more than one reviewer likes them.
However, in addition, I like wherever possible to see a good set of measured results. But checking out reviewers opinions is another use of measurements. If a reviewer often recommends speaker with measurements so bad that I know I will not like them, then I tend to ignore that reviewer. On the other hand, if I find a reviewer consistently recommends speakers I figure I will like, hen I would tend to try to listen to those speakers.
Measurements are also useful in assessing just how good a speaker is compared to others on the market which may be quite difficult for me to audition. I can be sure that my speakers are among the very best monitor speakers available.
Of course, there might be some other speakers which I would prefer if I ever did listen to them, which does not mean it is necessarily objectively better. But that is true no matter how you buy speakers. Someone just mght come up with a speaker you would like better. We cannot listen to everything.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
!
The Mind has No Firewall~ U.S. Army War College.
Yet another baseless comment. I've never said that every speaker available has been reviewed or tested. Are you on medication?
We already get the fact that you employ and trust simplistic tests for your evalution process. Do you forget what you have written (time and time again)?
The last time I did was in 1972 following a Hirsch-Houck test of the AR Integrated amp. Measures great. Unfortunately, it sounded poor. I learned my lesson then.
E-stat
"We already get the fact that you employ and trust simplistic tests for your evalution process. Do you forget what you have written (time and time again)?"
Really? Are you saying that listening to speakers at length with a variety of program materials chosen to show differences in speakers simplistic? Because that's how I audition speakers.
"Yet another baseless comment. I've never said that every speaker available has been reviewed or tested. Are you on medication?"
When someone says he/she selects speakers based on listening alone (the audiophile mantra), that implies he/she has checked out every speaker. This is obviously contrary to fact. Give up the audiophile mantra. You can only listen to a relatively small number of speakers out of a much larger number of speakers. How did you screen out the vast majority of speakers which you have never heard? Hint: it wasn't by listening to them.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Are you saying that listening to speakers at length with a variety of program materials chosen to show differences in speakers simplistic?You completely miss what I've said. No surprise there. Your devotion to numbers and graphs is the topic of all my observations.
When someone says he/she selects speakers based on listening alone (the audiophile mantra), that implies he/she has checked out every speaker.
So, Sherlock - when you base your trust on simplistic numbers and graphs, you must be guilty of the same thing! Too funny!
You can only listen to a relatively small number of speakers out of a much larger number of speakers.
You can only view the graphs for a relatively small number of speakers out of a much larger number of speakers.
The only difference in our culling the wheat from the chaff is trusting incomplete numbers vs listener reviews. That concept evidently continues to fly wayyyyy over your head.
You like to look at numbers. I like to hear what experienced listeners observe.
Why is that so difficult for you to understand?
Edits: 06/26/15
E-Stat
"So, Sherlock - when you base your trust on simplistic numbers and graphs, you must be guilty of the same thing! Too funny!"Not only false but utter nonsense. The results of speaker measurements are a tool I like to use when available. They are not the only tool for compiling an audition list.
"You can only view the graphs for a relatively small number of speakers out of a much larger number of speakers."
Of course. When have I ever said otherwise? Measurements results are one tool that I can use when available.
"The only difference in our culling the wheat from the chaff is trusting incomplete numbers vs listener reviews."
Actually, I use both listener reviews and measurements in compiling an audition list, a concept which you seem to refuse to understand. In any case, it is only possible to survey a small proportion of the speakers available.
When I have compiled my audition list, from that point on I rely on my own listening.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Edits: 06/26/15
yeah, i get them from my MMGs which i alternate with spendor S3/5s .....AND my 1975 Fried model RIIs that i just hooked up again after about 15 years setting in my other room. they sound just as good now as when they were new. with a sub, they are wonderful.
i never once relied on measurements for speaker selection. i guess thats why i have told myself that i can detect the differences in wire.
...regards...tr
No, I don't but I appreciate Stereophile's speaker measurements to the extent that it reveals the real sensitivity of a loudspeaker ( often very different to the manufacturers spec )and a very noticeable rising top end likely to be heard in any setup etc.
If you live outside a major urban area hearing high end components becomes a major road trip and the chances of hearing it in your own system slim.
So you read the audiophile press, try to interpret some measurements when possible and often learn the hard way which is exactly what those of more modest means don't need.
Like everything else in a consumers life ,those with higher incomes have more choices . Your story just illustrates that.
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: