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In Reply to: Re: Which part is the shaky research and logic? posted by tlyyra on April 21, 2007 at 11:42:57:
"You shouldn't get arrogant about your own musical preferences; they are just that, nothing more, even though culturally largely (pre)determined."RG
The music for the test was chosen for testing audibility of high frequencies because it had an UNUSUAL amount of high frequency energy.That could bias the test.
Obviously with louder/more high frequencies, it's more likely the high frequencies would be audible.
As a result, the test results may not correlate to doing the same test using ANY other types of music without an unusual amount of high frequency energy.
My statement was about the music selections used and their potential correlation to any other music without so much high frequency content.
The test music is also unlikely to be in the collections of people visiting this web site, or is likely to be a very small percentage of the music collection.
YOUR decision to call me "arrogant" could only be based on your misunderstanding of the science involved. To choose music with an unusual amount of high frequency energy for a test of high frequency audibility cleary biases a test.
Follow Ups:
For whatever it's worth, there's quite a bit of extreme-HF energy involved in just about any standard orchestra's playing conventional Western music:http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm
If the point is to measure HF content, you find material that has that HF content (and is not too distracting to the test subjects), simple as that.
Have no intention to insult anyone here, and will simply trust that neither do you, behind the letter of your posts.
... unless you sit four feet directly in front of the trumpet player (you'd get hearing damage if you did) ... so the data have no correlation with what a real person would hear at his seat in an auditorium listening to a real orchestra ... even if he sat in the front row.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
I don't know who you are arguing with.Just to repeat: no one here thinks this line of questioning is directly applicabile to audio engineering in some unproblematic way that has immediate consequences for consumer designs. No one thinks we should all run to the store to buy a supertweeter all of a sudden. And none of this has anything to do with hearing, either, for the n'th time.
The issues are hypothetical and that's where their interest lies. David A. has summarized this intelligently below. For me (and I'm assuming you are interested in my perspective since you seem to believe you are somehow arguing against my take on this), it is the what-if type of questioning that gives the fascinating angle on all this. If moderate LF content enhances listening pleasure, and extreme LF content can induce neuropsychological effects on "listeners" (inaudible subsonic vibration resulting in anxiety reactions in test subjects, etc.), could we then ask whehterhypersonic HF content, too, might have some comparable but maybe qualitatively different effect on the experience of sound perception.
What sort of an effect might that be? What prompted me to think about all this in the first place (in the context of hi-rez audio) was the uniformly positive response that some new speaker designs utilizing "supertweeters" have been met with in listening tests; a response moreover that seems to steer away from the banal "liquid midrange" and "smooth highs" discourse in describing the listener reactions. The auditing experience is usually summarized with the rather simple bottom line as being "very, very nice" in some hard-to-pin-down kind of a way (the point being about noteworty presence of subjective listening pleasure). What if in some way it's about the HF content that these models can reproduce?
Whether this hypothetical effect has anything to do with IM distortion is another matter. If it does, what would happen if through design solutions this distortion could be eliminated? Would the effect then be equally or even more pronounced? Or is it precisely IM distortion that causes this response in the subjects in the first place - in which case we could maybe conclude that here we have yet another possibility for euphonic solutions in sound reproduction devices? Or is the whole IM distorion issue something that exists apart of the engineering matrix, as some general property of soundwave behavior in the atmosphere? (In which case it would be interesting to consider why we have the perceptive capability for it somehow built into the design of our anthropological apparatus.)
The more directly consequential questions for someone thinking of a speaker upgrade lie obviously elsewhere, most immediately in things like the accuracy of frequency response within the audible range, lack of coloration & distortion, and good interaction with the environment in which the system is set up. Without these you will have no satisfying sonic experiences whatsoever.
It's important however to remain open to questions and have some fun in the process even if the issues seem purely speculative at present. Who knows, maybe tomorrow they are a feature you can choose for your system setup, too. Obstinacy combined with a single-issue mindset is never a good thing to have, and we all know we have enough of ideology and dogmatism in this field already (for the record, I'm not claiming these are what you stand for). Why not be open-minded and exploratory? The research problem in the study was intriguing, pregnant with implications, and it certainly merits further consideration.
But enough of this already.
I have no idea why you are debating me over mkuller's post saying that supertweeters get good reviews from their owners and also claiming a Japanese study could explain why.I responded that most people defend their purchase decisions -- it's human nature -- so that doesn't mean much.
I also added the study was biased and NEVER even tried to prove the listeners could hear a difference between the music with, and music without, frequencies over 22kHz.
The study leaders were too eager to accept subjective "preferences" (non-science) without testing to see if the listeners could hear any difference under blind conditions (real science).
The study has very little connection with the audibility of adding supertweeters.
I rest my case.
Please let mkuller defend himself in the future.
Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
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