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In Reply to: RE: Do you get goose bumps reading reviews and ads? posted by Mark Man on June 25, 2015 at 08:21:59
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.
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Follow Ups:
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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Edits: 06/26/15
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