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In Reply to: RE: Herb Reichert: Our Man At Stereophile posted by Joe Roberts on January 13, 2016 at 06:19:40
Things are'nt as bad as you say, they're actually much worse. And just one curse would be fairly strait forward to deal with.
Objectivism/Subjectivism:
Both sides are playing with fixed dice, marked cards, and are using junk science and magical thinking. Take the sound of wires (or lack thereof). One side says there can be no audible effects at audio frequencies, so they won't spend the 10 minutes it would take to try it, but they don't mind spending countless hours over several years on one of these forums insisting different wires can't be audible! In many cases I can't blame them because if they actually try it and find no difference, then they're open for claims that their equipment is not up to the task.
Sidebar: The only way to test for audible differences in any audio equipment is to use the same piece of music played at exactly the same levels.EXACTLY THE SAME LEVELS!
And the other side claims drastic differences between wires, but when you reduce it to a double blind test where unfamiliar equipment is used, and unfamiliar music is randomly switched between other unfamiliar music, the results would be the same as if the person is guessing. However the person has to guess! The choices are typically A. or B and there's never a C choice which would mean: I dunno, I can't tell on this one!
If there are audio differences, then just what is the threshold level? Neither side seems to really want to look into this very deeply. You can learn more about how your rig sounds by playing some music for average people who are music lovers, but are luckily ignorant of the jargon surrounding Stereophile and TAS. You won't hear about the "soundstage" or PRAT, but you may hear things like "good stereo effect", and "good bass". The average reader of these magazines typically already knows how it's supposed to sound if you have horns and tubes, however if they're listening to expensive recommended component list stuff, they can listen to very narrow things, and also listen around other stuff which would seem like glaring faults, like a narrow one-seat-sweet spot where half of the music disappears if you move just one seat one way or the other! Show me a symphony orchestra where that happens!
I already know how audio nerds talked about sound pre-TAS. My dad had a hi-fi club in the early/mid 60's when it was just High Fidelity and Stereo Review, and Audio was rather obscure. There were spirited discussions then, to say the least, but back then horns, direct radiator boxes, and electrostats all were reccognized for their relative strengths and weaknesses, as also were tubes and solid state amps too. Most of the anti-horn prejudice seemed to appear about the time solid state amps began to dominate the market, and the Watt/horsepower wars took off with transistors the winner with tricked up lower THD. Would anybody still be listening to say a Crown DC300 through K-horns? Relatively cheap transistor Watts and high temperature voice coils should have made horns obsolete decades ago, but here we are talking about horns still.
The opposite of "veiled" could mean "revealing" I guess, which usually means that the speakers are revealing a peak in the treble for "detail" ala Holt's observations. The speaker could become so transparent that the sound could disappear completely, and you'd have only the memory of the performance I suppose. I've heard that some people prefer just looking at the sheet music, and if you could read it in braille, then that would be the ultimate I guess. One of the "golden ears" in my dad's hi-fi club was a blind piano tuner who read braille, but I don't recall if he could read music. He had Quad electrostats.
Paul
Follow Ups:
> Neither side seems to really want to look into this very deeply.
I'd agree with that. It is a minefield where only fools such as myself care to tread.
It is difficult to open up a dialogue when everybody thinks they are 100% correct and nobody really wants to address the deeper implications of their naively-held positions.
Not just difficult...hopeless...painful, even.
In my understanding of the game of audio evaluation, received knowledge in the human sciences greatly favors the naive subjectivist over the naive objectivist.
The main reason is that subjectivists are "testing" as part of real life, in natural use contexts, whereas objectivists reject the real world and set up artificial controlled situations that they think helps them rise above the messy contingencies of day to day living.
Only these test situations are, in fact, not adequately controlled and there is no rising above the realm of culturally-conditioned, contingent interpretation and human variability. These are the elemental conditions of human life. And that holds for the testers as well as the listening subjects. Curtains and AB boxes can't change that.
Electronics is a science, music listening is not.
So how can we KNOW what sounds different, what sounds better?
If the goal is to arrive at some form of indisputable knowledge that will convince all skeptics and hold for all listeners in all situations, then we will never fully know.
If we are trying to understand what works for us as individuals with tastes, biases, musical preferences, different kinds of systems, variable physiological and psychological makeups, and so on, we can get there by using the tools in our typical audio lives and decide over time. Don't expect to convince anybody else.
Hence, I think that theory favors the naive subjectivist, not that I agree with them half of the time. But that is precisely the point...why should we all agree? How could we all agree?
Theory in no way supports the crude scientistic assumptions and methods of the so-called objectivists, although they believe they have a massive corpus of scientific theory behind them. In practice, however, it is typically junk science with lab coats and hand waving and it is borderline-evil, dehumanizing, human science.
I can empathize a little bit with the objectivists. They believe they are on the righteous path, but very few seem to have any actual training in the subtleties of human research and they probably learned everything they know about audio evaluation from magazines and forums, which creates a self-perpetuating bubble.
Beyond that, I think that the cultural power of the "unity of the sciences" program which sought to bring all human experience under the canopy of positive science remains strong among those who haven't the educational background to see this wildly misguided and discredited paradigm for what it is/was. After all, many of us "old guys" learned this way of thinking in school because it took a long time to shake out of the system, and seems to still persist in a few remote niche subfields such as Acoustics.
But who among us is going to run out and take high level courses on philosophy of science and social science and seminars on social aesthetics and anthropological linguistics to figure out how we might truly _know_ if a piece of wire sounds different?
Yes, it is as though nobody really wants to dig deeper, and it can get very deep indeed.
The preponderance of the dialogue on this topic follows the same old well worn paths, with participants talking past each other and spouting the same old rote jive.
That said, I applaud any contributions that derail the commuter train and get us thinking in new and deeper ways about our relationship with musical sound and the toys that make it happen. Universal agreement should not be the goal, but a more reflective and nuanced relationship with our important life-enhancing pursuit of musical sound can't hurt.
A good audio writer to me is somebody who encourages an original thought or two once in a while while laying his/her heart bare. Herb can do that. I like Michael Lavorgna's contributions because I can sometimes see my struggles with computer audio reflected in his reports. Smart, perceptive guy. And Art Dudley dragging in various vintage gear is always a hoot. All of these writers are very sincere and open with their thoughts, and share their own versions of "I'm just visiting this planet and trying to make sense of it." That's what I'm trying to do myself, for myself. Learn.
Proper audio evaluation requires us to dig deeply, most of all into ourselves, but also continually examine and hone our evaluation systems.
When the language, assumptions, methods, questions and answers become frozen and over-formalized, so do we.
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Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic
I really don't see any rigorous social science methodology making any inroads over at TAS. Herb and Art's presence at Stereophile seems to be making progress though. The late 60's and early 70's were a time when alternate ways of thinking about things proliferated, for better or worse. Stereophile and TAS were a different way of thinking about audio to counter balance what was going on at Stereo Review (which absorbed High Fidelity) where how stuff sounded was'nt mentioned much. Marshall McLuhan (remember him?) referenced a physics book from the 50's which was prefaced with a chinese parable where a man was trying to give some practical advice to a peasant on an easier way for drawing water from his well with a lever system. The peasant replied that he was not unaware of such devices, but that he would be ashamed to use them because people who use machines to do their work become machine like in their thinking. McLuhan was interested in why a physicist would be interested in a parable like this. Moving to the present time, physicist Lawrence Krauss participated in a debate on the english Institute for Art and Ideas site where he presented his conclusion that science had no need for philosophy and could proceed without it. He was roasted pretty good by the brit philosophers who countered that it was certainly important how one thinks about problems. If one is attracted to absolute concepts, it's easy to see how an absolute sound would develop from this.
Holt's 1994 "Space..." article saw the looming threat of home theater where obsessing about the soundstage would become irrelevant with multi channel sound. Also that Holt seemed shocked that hedonism was going on in his establishment. The whole thing was largely ignored in '94, but the sharper speaker manufacturers have seemed to notice what it takes to get a rave review in Stereophile.
Paul
When I say TAS, I am talking about the 1980s when they came up with many of the terms and perspectives that were later fossilized into the review speak we know today. The writers were outdoing each other fleshing out the metaphors. It was really wild stuff. I felt left out of some of the esoteric film and lens references some of these reviewers used because I didn't even have a camera. It was very 80s upwardly mobile, yuppie scum stuff, to use a then-current jibe. The scent of Mateus, damp Italian sculpted sweaters, and cocaine hung heavily in the air...
By the late 80s, I was out of grad school and virtually unemployable with a couple anthro degrees, so I got a job in a high end store. There I got to play with much of the gear under review and I could judge the reviewing on that basis, in addition to critiquing their evaluation systems on intellectual grounds.
My general impression was that these guys were nuts. They were totally lost in their own language and losing track of the scheme. The cleverness of the review seemed to overtake the job of evaluating the gear. Tediously described micro analyses of a single violin note on some dreadful Editor's Choice Shaded Dog stretched on for paragraphs of wine and Leica references. In the end, one had little idea of what the device under test actually sounded like and I found it very difficult to recognize the review in the actual equipment.
To read the magazines, one would think this marvelous high-end gear was one jaw-droppingly fantastic engineering and aesthetic accomplishment after another. In reality it was somewhat less, much less. I built my first DIY amp at the counter in the store in the store during slow periods, which were frequent. It was a 6L6 PP amp from the old Acrosound catalog built with surplus parts from the hamfest. Turned out sounding better than anything in the store....and I wasn't the only one to think so. And I was just a ham radio lovin' anthropologist, not a high-end auteur/designer.
History demonstrates where I went with that realization.
Although many of these 80s writers were intelligent and capable folks, some went down the rabbit hole of language and metaphor and got lost in the tunnels.
I have done some reviewing and I think it is a difficult enterprise, especially if avoiding intensive navel-gazing and creating a useful, meaningful piece with general readability, entertainment value, and larger relevance are the goals. Many of the "top" reviewers have been formulaic as hell, almost to the point where one could cut and paste in new equipment names and fax it in the to the editor for the next issue. Reviewing machines.
I am not arguing that reviewers need advanced training in philosophy of science and social sciences. The ones who need that are staunch naive objectivist firebrands harshing the mellow for the chill subjectivists on the forums, cause they are way off base in both theory and practice.
What reviewing needs are inquisitive and curious people who are able to bracket out any assumed expertise they might have and share the saga of discovery and making sense of the market and the technology, while describing gear in ways that will attract those listeners who would be drawn to the unit question for sonic or other reasons.
I feel that a good review/er literary persona is humble, sincere, and simple-minded in a good way, like a kid in a toy store.
I have known Art and Herb for decades and when I read their columns, I often get the impulse that they are playing humble and innocent in some ways for the sake of the article, but the reality is that that is how they are. They really are amazed by the gear. These guys are still learning, even though they have many many years of experience and they approach writing with a natural sincerity that does not hide this childlike affect.
My experience in academics has taught me that the really smart profs are the ones who will listen to anybody and anything because they might learn something new, while the ones who are staunch dogmatic know-it-alls are often insecure poseur frauds.
For me, the aesthetics of musical sound is a deep and mysterious thing. It sure keeps me humble, more the older I get and the more I hear.
What occasionally gets me out of my shell to rage like a lunatic on forums is people trying to steal that mystery with bonehead junk science, because mystery and magic totally belong in there.
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Free your mind and your ass will follow -- Parliament/Funkadelic
Joe, I really enjoy reading your posts. It is too bad that Sound Practices is no more - it was your publication that turned me on to audio, then to horns, and then lead me to a meeting with Dr. Bruce Edgar. And now I actually roll my own, he-he... BTW, your magazine proved a good investment, too, because I eventually sold the entire subscription for more than I paid for.
Stereophile actually began in 1962 by JGH, and The Absolute Sound began in 1973 by Harry Pearson, but I have to admit that I was only dimly aware of them until the late 80's when a friend (who posed the question that inspired this post) decided he needed to upgrade his Advent/Sherwood rig (when his toddler daughter poked holes in the surrounds), and he started lending me the rags. I had a gift subscription to Stereophile from my daughter in the late 80's, which she neglected to pay for, but I stuck it out, but I never felt comfortable there. I let the sub lapse, but the turning point came for me with a later loaned issue where there was a heated discussion of the merits of the Tice Clock. I wanted to keep my place by tearing out the pages I had already read! But the rag was a loaner which I felt compelled to return. I had a subscription to Stereo Review from the late 70's into early 90's, and several times I was going to switch to Audio, but they would have a good issue once and a while and I kept on. During that time there was one mention in an edditorial about the efficiency of the Klipsch Horn, but except for a review of the EV Sentry and another JBL direct radiator horn hybrid, you'd have hardly known that horn speakers (or tube amps) for the home existed. This is except for an ad in the back of the mag where a collector was seeking tube amps and theater horn speakers. This was apparently Walt Bender of Audiomart who actually was making a living buying this stuff and sending it to Japan at the time. There were occasional humorous mentions of how the crazy Japanese were spending crazy money for 1930's Western Electric tube amps with a mere 8 Watts! You once said that you started Sound Practices in the early 90's "...to shake up the high end".., and this did so as a case of dynamite would shake up an out house over due for a move.
Now back in the early 60's a neighbor of ours on the west side of Chicago put together a very spectacular EV based horn system in his basement. This was a rig that could actually image in the early 60's! You could actually localize accurately the various instruments of the orchestra at a time when most people had mono "boom" consoles. At one point a subwoofer with an EV 30W showed up, and it could go down to the 16 Hz C1 of a pipe organ! This was a rig that was easily one of the best rigs I've ever heard, and it was in the early 60's!
Jumping forward to the late 70's, my dad had built a few back loaded bass horns in the 60's which he sold to a few guys in his club, and we had one at home then too, but one of them had never been assembled and existed as a bunch of plywood pieces in the garage, which my brother and I were warned never to touch. My dad offered to give me this pair, a BLH for a 12" driver, and I accepted with the intention of putting together a portable sound system for a band I was kind of in at the time. We put them together, but I promptly lost interest in being a sound man. Ry Cooder once said that bands were like mental institutions. I mean, if there's a room full of people and one of them is a neurotic musician, then I want to be that neurotic musician! Anyway my dad had to move at one point in '79 -80 and announced that he was going to drop the horns off at my place. During a point of inactivity during that cold winter I decided to put one of the horns together to hear what it sounded like: we modified the BLH for an EV 15B; I had EV 1823/8HD's mids; and a couple of Motorola pieizo tweeters. I hooked one of them up to my HK 330 on the left side with one of my Alted Model 9's on the right (a 12" 3 way) and I could barely hear the Altec! I checked the wiring and amp and found nothing wrong, and it took awhile for it to sink in what was happening. I had thought the horn would be louder, but only because they could handle a lot more power. I could'nt believe that one of them could actually drown out one of the Altecs which I though were quite loud and sounded pretty good too! Very soon the other horn was completed, and they became the main listening system when they crowded the Altecs out, and the Altecs became the monitors in the 4 track recording studio in the adjoining dining room. The horns just had that big sound that I remembered from my dad's hi-fi club from the 60's.
Moving forward again to the late 90's early 00's, I attended a meeting of the Chicago Horn Club and heard Tom Brennan's Altec Voice of the Theater A5 rig. It sounded a bit rough at the time, a good rock'n roll rig, but my rig sounded better with well recorded stuff. However it kept evolving, and with some tube amps on the Altec mids it became one of the best rigs I've ever heard. The imaging was adequate, but everything you put on it sounded good! My rig only sounded good with well recorded stuff at the time, and this just had to go, and I had to do a re-thnk of the whole thing. I wanna hear what I wanna hear now! I don't care if it's well recorded or not! Herb had mentioned this in SP as a warning sign, that if you're tending to listen only to well recorded stuff, then you're on the wrong track (with a likely tilt towards the treble ala Holt). The most astounding thing was that Tom's rig had the sound at the movies in someones' house! It finally dawned on me what I had been looking for all along was the sound of those Altecs VOT's I had grown up listening to, but never saw, behind the movie screens all those years. Sorry to go back to a visual analogy again, but back in the 70's I was working on a scientific discipline which would combine cosmology and metaphysics. I called it cosmetics, and I got no respect at all.
Well at this point there's no going back. Contra to John Atkinson, I'm suspicious of any speaker having claims of very high performance which is not horn loaded.
Paul
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