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In Reply to: RE: Bi-Wire Made a considerable improvement posted by JBen on February 20, 2012 at 10:44:21
You know, I haven't seen this mentioned much -- perhaps I'm the only one who's so clueless -- but half the time, when the sound changes, I don't know whether it's better or not! Imaging in particular I find problematic, because no matter what you do with two channel stereo, it's never right. Sometimes it's obvious that there's a problem, like when I listen with my speakers in front of the mantle and the sound bunches up. But often it seems to me that it's a choice between doing something wrong, and doing something different that's also wrong. And then there are all the variables. I *think* my Emotiva has very subtle grain in the highs, but is it really coming from the Emotiva? Because I'm using a different signal source.
How often are we really systematic? Even those guys on Hydrogen Audio are less systematic than they'd like to believe, I saw one thread in which they were condemning someone for claiming that he heard a difference between DAC's without ABXing them. So he asked if they had tried to ABX DAC's, and they said, no, there's no need, because you can't hear the difference between DAC's!
Critics do this too, they'll try a speaker with six different amps until they find one that they like, and then you're left wondering whether they're reviewing the speaker or the amp.
The best I can say is that over time, I've just discovered things that happen to work, sometimes by trial and error, sometimes by reading about them. Out of the tangle, threads start to emerge. In some cases it's been thirty years from the time I discovered something empirically and the time I learned why it worked.
Follow Ups:
Clearly, your are the only one so clueless, Josh. The rest of us have normal well-balanced hearing and are totally aware of how things should sound. Yeah, right! : - ))
Shortly after I got my MMGs, I figured that some things may not really "be" at points where they projected from. This was not just on the front stage. Depending on the recording, these little MMGs even displayed true surround from stereo sourcing. My doubts were more aggravating because of the TV being in the middle (which turned out to be a blessing in this room but I did not know it yet).
So, I started checking with 3 pairs of cans, at times. This helped a lot but did not answer all questions. Headphones cannot reproduce spatial clues on some material. More so, if it has unorthodox mixing, miking and/or special effects. Luckily, cross-checking my test music material in other systems eventually led to clarity about what I heard at home.
I was lucky in being able to decide on a core set of test music from the early beginning, which I still use. I did not plan on being systematic but discovered that I was so. And patient also; much more than I ever thought I was. The decision to select a core of music segments made all the difference. I was forced to judge changes based on what happened to these pieces (about 50 segments).
Which is why I know that the proponents of extremist ABXing often have it wrong.
If Josh knows how a segment of music has sounded both, in the same situation, as well as in various situations along time, I'll bet on him to best guage changes anywhere. The more at ease he is, the better he will be at it while listening (do hide that little bag of cannabis from him, please :)
His judgement as to what may be different is being helped by his much richer memory of details contained in that segment of music. As long as no external factors unduly impact his recollection of detail, he will know if something changed. He will know WHAT changed, often without the benefit of replay.
Whether "he likes the change or not" will not impact his judgment too much because his view is more objective: he can "see" the change . For now, he has a far better item to hold, a more defined: "what changed". He can decide if he likes it or not later.
The ABXers pretend that people make blind judgments while in unnatural listening settings, often with unknown material, and/or with the implied pressure of someone elses expectation. Give us a break, folks! The brain easily gets thrown off balance when it comes to this kind of change detection scheme. For lack of a better evaluation reference, we default to the basic instincts. It is THEN that too much undefined "likes/dislikes" influence can easily throw things off.
On the critics & reviewers, it is understandable as long as we know their limitations. Hopefully, if they keep a solid core of reference music, at the very least they have a key variable well in check. Still, some things do get stretched to the limits of believability, don't they?
My last experience with cannabis found me slumped in the hall after the party, convinced that I was about to die but terrified that if I went to the emergency room, they'd know I'd been smoking pot.
Pretty cool, actually, I was tripping the morning after, but the experience was so miserable overall that I said "never again." Some things are best left to the young, like drugs, food, sex, gun battles, and anything else that's fun. I am rarified now and beyond such petty concerns, my days spent in contemplation of the most magnificent artworks, and the deepest secrets of creation, also painting the kitchen and looking at porn.
I do have my own reference cuts, othing fancy, it just sort of happened because I'd change something and it seemed natural to listen to something familiar to see what had changed. Some of it unprocessed two-mic orchestral stuff, because it has a wide range of sounds and two mic because who knows what the guy behind the console has done with the multimiked stuff? But also piano, the instrument with which I'm most famliar, and some stuff I'm just used to, and some favorite recordings because I want to hear how they'll sound.
ABXing -- after years of potless contemplation, I've concluded that some things can only be heard on a *first* listen, others can only be heard with long-term listening, and others are best suited to short term switching, such as differences in frequency response. I think ABXing is a very coarse tool that's suited perhaps for simple psychoacoustic experiments (can you hear two clicks etc.) but doesn't work every well when listening to complex material like music. I think it is possible to overcome many, though not all, of these problems with very careful methodology, e.g., long-term prelistening, but I don't think most do that.
I think I trust some reviewers, not others. If they hear the same things I do independently, that gives me faith both in their perceptions and my own, simply because we heard the same thing. Usually, I find that that's the case, but some reviewers say things that I just can't believe. Like those TAS guys who were claiming that two bit-identical files sound different. Hello? Or else they contradict one another, like when the Absolute Sound reviewer praised the analog output of the Squeezebox Touch and the Stereophile reviewer condemned it.
But it's funny, when all is said and done, if I walk into a room and listen to acoustical music on ten different speakers, I'll know immediately which sound real to me. It's not an analytical judgment, it's not a comparison between speakers, it's just whether it sounds more like real music. It's intuitive and holistic. A lot easier than identifying this or that aspect of the sound. Maybe it's that analyzing this stuff analytically requires more skill. It's the difference between saying "Mmm, this is good" and being able to identify and quantify all the ingredients the way a friend of mine can -- he could have been a chef, because he can recreate any dish he's eaten.
By and large, the thing with reviews -- useful as they can still be -- is that the universe of variability is so huge! There are far too many possible permutations, even before each individual enters the formula. For example, like you said earlier, a reviewer could start checking which, from among several amps at hand, will do best with another piece of hardware for evaluation. We can't fault them for that but have to keep it in mind. Most of them are not out to fool anyone. It is just the nature of things that no absolute frame of reference can be attained.
Luckily, thanks to modern communications, there often are a multitude of sources to cross-reference things. All we need to know is what WE want, [not always easy] along with some determination to find it in people's descriptions.
The samples I chose early on are mostly at the beginning of a piece. Usually, not further than the first 2 minutes. Several, just a few seconds into the piece. All are both in the PC and in compiled CDs. It allows me to scan for the impact of changes very quickly.
Most are pieces that I truly like and never get tired of hearing. Several were also challenges to my MMGs at first. When the MMGs started delivering on most of these, I added more pieces to add further challenges to their capability.
For example, very early on I had no hopes that the MMGs would really do ANY serious bass. That's what everyone said at the time. "Get a good subwoofer and that's that." So, I did not add bass-challenging pieces to the testing group; I saw no point. Then, about 3 months after the first group of test pieces was defined, I had to start revising. The darn MMGs seemed to want to do more than I was led to believe. Today, they can fool people into thinking the subwoofer is on...including myself.
The collection grew a little more. Initially, it was about 30 segments. Now it is closer to 50. Some 4 CDs worth. With the PC, I can go through all of it in under 30 minutes if I need to. The salient benefit is how the repetition gets things embedded in our minds. Both, sound character and image positionings. The positionings, perceptual as they still are, are about the most easy to convey to people with similar hearing. You just point to a location and the other person will know. They do likewise, and you know. No ABXing needed.
I think the critics sometimes get into a circular situation in which they use one component to compensate for the flaws of another -- sometimes a colored component. For example, one amp manufacturer was complaining in a manufacturer's response that the reviewer had used a speaker with deficient bass, then said their amp was bass shy, when the amp was accurate, and the other amp had a high output impedance and was compensating for the bass deficiency in the speaker by underdamping the woofer.
There's nothing wrong with mixing and matching, of course, but there is a danger that it will slant a review. How often have we seen a reviewer say that a speaker does something annoying until he finds a component that tames it? Sometimes those are flaws in the speaker, e.g., cone breakup modes that haven't been properly suppressed by the crossover. Or even if there's nothing wrong with the speaker, how often are people who are complaining that their ribbon tweeters are too bright told they should get a tube pre? Nothing wrong with a tube pre, but I'd think the right way to handle that problem is by using a tweeter resistor or adding some HF damping to the room.
There aren't that many fundamentals below 50 Hz, are there? MMG's don't sound like Tympanis, though. :-)
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