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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: Answering Steve's Q posted by Jon Risch on February 19, 2003 at 17:37:18:
Jon:When you get to the point of discussing loss of frequency response information in the time domain you are well beyond my technical competency, so there are points of your discussion I will have to leave to others to address.
In general, it seems to me you raise a number of interesting points that bear further discussion. Since much of what you are discussing is technical in nature, the following comments are simply observations of a layman.
Now we use this recording to measure two different audio components, they measure different, we measure two of the same make and model, they measure different.
What does this gain us? Do we know any more about which one will sound better? More accurate?
This relates to the issue of correlation, and it is my impression that most people agree that we have a long way to go in this area.
SO the real question should be: what aspect do we measure for, and HOW do we correlate that with what we hear?
That seems to me to be a very legitimate question, and one that I would guess is not close to being answered given the current state of our knowledge or lack thereof of correlation.
With respect to JND studies, I will not pretend to have anything other than an extremely superficial knowledge of how far we have come in this area. However, I sense that you may be suggesting that JND studies involve single or simple tones and therefore are not relevant to music. If this is what you are suggesting, I’m wondering how you arrive at that conclusion. Music is made up of individual tones. If tones at a certain loudness level cannot be detected by human hearing, then it would seem that electronic differences between components or cables that don’t produce audible effects above the threshold levels of hearing are simply irrelevant as far as audio is concerned.
Yet, while audio cables are still controversial, I think that most experienced audiophiles and music lovers would say that amps and CDP's DO sound different, and so, how is it that we can hear the differences between them, despite our less than perfect speaker systems?.
I will pit my experience as a high end consumer against just about anyone and I will pit the hundreds of times I have compared compenents and cables and was quite certain I was hearing significant differences against just about anyone. But all of these occasions involved sighted auditions and there is no possible way I can state with great assurance that my experiences were based on actual audible differences – not in the face of the substantial body of knowledge showing how susceptible the brain can be to things like the placebo effect.
So even though, in theory, we might be able to VERY accurately capture the signal, or even analyze it in one particular dimension at a time, there is no overall framework of a suite of measurements with the proper weighting and interplay that can adequately define and rate a given audio component for these more complex issues of what we hear on a SOTA amp vs. an HT receiver in terms of imaging or soundstage.
Again, from what I know, you seem to be making a strong argument that we have a long way to go in the area of correlation.
However, having said all that, I did not see Steve’s question as suggesting in any way that we have a sound handle on correlation. Rather I saw the question as attempting to deal with claims by certain people that there are mysteries buried in quantum physics that are beyond the grasp of most mortal men and that if only sufficient dollars were available to acquire sensitive enough instruments these secrets could be further unraveled, perhaps even to the point that someday they could be revealed to mere mortals. His question, in my view, was merely an attempt to bring the discussion back to reality.
This may not actually answer Steve's Q, and I did not respond originally, because I felt the points I make above are so obvious, that if he was going to ask the silly Q in the first place, why bother trying to answer the "loaded" question. It seemed yet another rhetorical gambit with no real purpose.
In my view, the only thing silly about Steve’s question was the discussion that preceded it and some of the claims, innuendoes and attitudes that rendered it necessary for Steve to pose that question in order to bring the discussion back down to earth.
If anyone were curious enough to wade through the threads that I cited above, I think they would get a sense of what I’m talking about.
In the end, I don’t see anything you said in your post that is contradictory to what I have been saying in my posts above regarding comparisons between the sensitivity of ears and that of instruments. You have simply pointed out that the issue of correlation can get very complicated and that we have a long way to go. From what I know, I would suspect that you are quite correct about that.
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Follow Ups
- Re: Answering Steve's Q - Phil Tower 19:34:05 02/19/03 (0)
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