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In Reply to: RE: And... posted by fstein on November 14, 2015 at 09:21:18
>the measurements in Stereophile will not tell us if a piece of gear is
>a dud.
They _will_ tell readers when a component has been well-engineered or
not (see the linked article below). They also tell readers what a designer
feels important.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Follow Ups:
Simply put, "well-engineered" in audio terms will meet the requirements of reproduced sound, the most important aspect being how the ear perceives sound.
Of course if the ear is regarded as unimportant than we can see why this debate has been around for so long.
A lot of measurement instead seeks to define the device under test on paper, using tests that really don't seek to find out how well the equipment sounds to the human ear.
There exists a rather large gulf between the two ideas.
When there is a testing regime that will allow a person to tell how a product will sound just by looking at the test results then we will be working with reality (reality of course being the human ear). We engineering types have no problem applying the technology to go down that path, but for that to happen, the testing regime first has to recognize the importance of human hearing/perceptual rules.
As usual, you are right on the money.
And thankfully so or we'd all have been forced to listen to 'well engineered' Crown Amps all of these years! =:-0
If you are designing you are measuring, if ears only then one ends up with a product which only works in a specific situation , usually what it was "tuned " for ...
Simply doing a TF will tell alot ....
Go Rossi ......
Obviously I am involved with design. I use test equipment.
But the fact is some tests where a spec is considered "good" (low THD being the best example) usually works out to where the resulting circuit will sound inferior- due to brightness.
John Curl (one of the top designers worldwide) has commented about this see the link below.
It strikes me as odd how controversial the topic of distortion is- little has been solved in the last 40 years. Progress is glacial because so many scoff at the idea of understanding how the ear works.
Trust me on this- if we did not have ears none of this conversation would be going on.
No one is advocating "ears only" design. But what if your design criteria is to mimic the human ears own disotortion curves to effectively mask the distortion?
Vladimir Lamm claims to use a psychoacoustic model as guidance for his designs, so one assumes then that his amps measure the way his model says SHOULD sound the best to most listeners (obviously with humans nothing will give an R^2 of 1.000). Is this then poor design? Not IMO.
Now there's an interesting idea, a system that is designed for the components to work together as a whole rather than let a tyro wannabe systems engineer who has more money than knowledge throw this and that together like a tossed salad to see what comes out and has to keep "upgrading" by trading usually sideways again and again at a loss practically every time. Why didn't someone think of that?
nt
try it! you know you want to!
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