Isolation Ward From ebony pucks to magic foil, mystical and controversial tweaks.

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RE: Believing in belief.

Posted by caspian@peak.org (A) on September 7, 2009 at 14:03:29

In Reply to: RE: Believing in belief. posted by rick_m on September 7, 2009 at 12:22:57:

Hiya Rick:

I'm strongly in the physics and engineering camp myself. Gotta be, as a DIY speaker hobbyist who relies a lot on measurement and mathematical modeling.

"Even beyond the engineering/belief divide there is one with respect to ritual. For instance the very things that you trot out that form part of your love of records, the ritualistic cleaning, kissing etc, are the very things that cause me to feel frustration, disdain, and loathing of the medium."

Heh heh. I bet you're not one of those 'philes that goes in for demagnetizing your CDs, painting the edges green, or putting rubber rings or mats on them, then. I think people who do that are actually trying to recover some of the lost ritual of prepping a record. And I actually only play records once in a while -- CDs have made me as lazy as everybody else -- BECAUSE of the nuisance factor. But when I do play them, I sure pay attention and enjoy them.

"I'd suggest that most audiophiles are largely clueless concerning how to go about measuring phenomena with unknown causes. Few have the knowledge, experience, test equipment or inclination to do so and often find it easy to ascribe that which they can't measure or understand to 'belief'. If there is one common denominator amongst those that believe that most tweaks are mystical (i.e. belief based) it's that they haven't really tried to measure, understand, or isolate their effects."

As a generalization, that's probably correct. But those of us in the "objectivist" camp tend to focus on tweaks that DO make a measurable and quantifiable difference. Things like speaker placement, acoustic room treatment, damping of unwanted resonances, keeping RFI and EMI out of the signal path, etc. This is about empirical evidence, not belief. But even here, some ritualistic elements may come in. If you've just spent a couple of hours humping a pair of big heavy speakers around the room, until you found the position where the soundstage snaps into focus JUST RIGHT, you're gonna sit down and really ENJOY listening to those speakers, more so than if somebody else did all the setup work for you, because your attention has become more focused. Same story when you've been fooling with bass traps all afternoon and finally hear that 80Hz boom go away, or you just put ferrite beads on all your cables, and really can hear less background hum/hiss with your ear right up to the speaker.

So I don't think we're on different "sides" at all. I'm basically a meterhead, but kinda interested in the more shadowy realms of psychoacoustics as well, and curious what others mignt think on the topic.

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