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In Reply to: RE: I don't think so posted by Presto on November 11, 2012 at 22:19:39
"Anyways - back to snake oil.I've always maintained that someone who pays to have their imagination sold back to them is insane. I pick on Geoff Kait alot because of his teleportation tweaks, for example. I believe that you can't use psychic energy to make stereos sound better. But you CAN use PSYCHOLOGICAL tricks to do it. Geoff Kait is no more guilty of snake oil than a company that sells an amp for $50K when $30K of it is all "jewelry" and fancy bling finishing."
That's the same ridiculous argument Naysayers have been using for years - that expensive cables, tube amps, tiny bowl resonators, Mpingo Discs, Shakti Stone, Intelligent Chip, are either mass hysteria, hypnosis, ritualism, a psychological trick, placebo effect or expectation bias. A lot of the "imaginative arguments" put forth by Uber Skeptics are eerily similar to knee jerk arguments against UFOs and crop circles. Swamp gas, weather balloons, secret technology, faked photos, Government conspiracy. HA!!
Next stop - Zen and the Art of Debunkery.
Geoff Kait
Edits: 11/12/12 11/12/12Follow Ups:
My stereo just sounded worse. The bass became bloated and the soundstage collapsed entirely.
Cut it out GK. I know what you're doing...
Take my picture out of your microwave at once or I'm getting out my voodoo doll collection. In fact, I got my wife to sew a cute little rendition of your favorite amplifier and I am not above using it.
Cheers,
Presto
...and resting in relative peace, too!
Interesting to see that it can awaken from time to time, only to see the same tired arguments play out with no resolution whatsoever. :)
.
... clueless deaf guy, who listens to his crappy stereo, and, frustrated that he can't hear things others talk about, expresses his feelings like this:
The babble about "soundstage" and "imaging" is just a lame attempt at fostering "mystery", "mystique", or some unproven conjecture that the human brain/ear combination can sense things that machinery cannot.
And it's totally understandable - what kind of "soundstage" or "imaging" can Crown amp and pre provide? I'm sure I would go suddenly deaf, too, if I had to listen to that at home.
...although not commonly used for hi-fi applications, can do soundstaging. Just not with speakers rammed up against the wall.
The different staging and imaging we get from different systems is indeed explained by science, the very science that is purported to have nothing to DO with this "illusion". Sure it's an illusion, as is a hologram or the famous "highway mirage" from heat or the effect of sound changing pitch with the doppler effect.
Soundstage is a function of the following system aspects:
a) Polar and power response of speakers
b) Speaker distances (to back wall, side wall, between speakers and to chair)
c) Speaker toe-in angle
d) Ceiling height
e) Absorbtion properties of wall, floor and roof materials
f) Phase response of speakers, crossover topology, driver polarities
g) which affect - impulse response of speakers, group delay, etc.
h) Chair type (high-back or low-back chair)*
*often overlooked, a chair which goes above ear level affects perceived sound stage versus an armchair or recliner where there is nothing above the shoulders. My theory here is the higher chair back results in reflections which can interfere with sound stage and "confuse" the ear, resulting in a more confused image. When sitting in an office chair with an HVAC unit or fan running, extend your hands outward then move them inward so your fingertips touch behind your head and your thumbs just touch the either side of your neck. Observe the pitch changes in the fan noise, then tell me a high-backed chair will not affect perception of sound in a hi-fi room! ;)
All of these factors will mean that pretty much every stereo in existence could "image" slightly differently.
I feel terribly sorry for someone who does not get a perceived depth of soundstage, the wonder of a black background, the illusion of intrument placement, or that "you're there" sensation on orchestral or live recordings. Or to have speakers, regardless of size , vanish and become mere pieces of furniture and sounds eminate from everywhere else. Or to have recordings with phase-related effects result in sounds beyond the boundary of the side-walls or even above or behind you. Yes, some systems (mine for example) will result in not just speakers vanishing but the damned walls disappearing too. Like you and your chair and system are hovering in an empty space over the grand canyon.
WE COULD MEASURE this stuff and perhaps find corollary between measurements and perception, but nobody does. Polar response of an individual speaker is not useful - we need to observe the constructive and destructive interference created by 100's of iterations of placement and room boundaries/conditions to somehow explain the variations in image - even with the same two speakers.
We have the measuring capabilities. But we are not measuring or interpreting the right things to explain things like soundstage perception.
Those who miss the point of soundstage and iterative speaker placement tests are missing the whole point of stereophonics in my mind. Accurate and detailed sound is only half of it. The stereo image (and the more holographic it seems) is even better than the fidelity! (But would not be as good without the fidelity).
Cheers,
Presto
No soundstage... No shimmer. No glimmer. No sparkle. No palpability. No PRAT. No inner detail. No black background...
No nothing.
To heck with you guys. I'm going downstairs to measure my stereo. I have some nice tone CDs that I have not heard in a very long while.
Cheers,
Presto
Amp is 6.5 x 17...cables 8 ft... ok, that's enough.
Although, to be absolutely sure, you would need to measure the depth, too.
A neutral amplifier provides no depth. All depth is a product of the recording. Got it?
N/T
I thought I read in the Isolation Ward that if you breathe deeply while listening, the macrodynamic hugeness gets huger and the grainyness gets sifted out - but most importantly soundstage depth gets deeper. So there, it is proven...
Edits: 11/13/12
God, I am as transparent as my Crown amp!
Yes, but that all depends. See, if your Crown amp is old and hasn't aged properly in a humidity/temperature controlled living room, it could develop a nutty palette albeit with a smooth but oaky finish - presuming you haven't contaminated it with Lemon Pledge while dusting. So Kerr, transparency of a Crown amp is not necessarily guaranteed...
> transparency of a Crown amp is not necessarily guaranteed... <
Not even if I put a bottle of Windex underneath? I put a dictionary under it and got a marked improvement in definition!
drill holes in my eardrums with no anesthesia. :)
Sorry to hear that, but take heart. If you have holes in your eardrums, you can still become Peter Aczel, Jr! :)
Measure all those billions of 1's and 0's and make sure they are all correct. You can do this with a microscope if you like, but it will surely take longer than 79 minutes. :-)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I've looked at pits using a regular microscope that belongs to E. Brad Meyer. This was back in the 1980's so I don't recall the details. It was clear that one could decode the information this way, but it would be more than tedious. (I have done this kind of decoding of 1's and 0's on communications lines while debugging hardware, and it's tedious to do a few dozen bytes.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/sound-editor/glitch-removal/
One had better make sure they have those EAC settings just right... ;)
It would be a b1tch to have to check 1000 or more titles for glitches...
Cheers,
Presto
"It would be a b1tch to have to check 1000 or more titles for glitches..."
Exactly. I rip CDs so they can be sold as downloads. Before I upload them I have to check them to make sure the rip was OK. I use EAC and dBpoweramp to do this and if I get a secure rip then I am good to go. If the rip fails then I demand another copy of the CD from the source. Generally, I can't use Accurate Rip as these CDs aren't in the database, so I am relying on the error detection capability of my optical drive and the software. In this regard I have much more faith in dBpoweramp, because it is easier to set up. But EAC can be OK if one has set it up correctly and has verified this by testing with known bad CDs.
Listening is not an adequate test for quality. It is very easy to miss errors that someone else might hear (or that one might hear oneself on another day). Typical undetected or incorrectly corrected errors will be a tick, often audible but occasionally quite quiet. Interpolated errors (where a bad sample is guessed at by interpolation) can be harder to hear, if not impossible depending on the music. Usually they are hard to hear if one just listens to the error stream (bad music minus known good music), e.g. a one sample tick that is -40 dBfs.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
...I check extracted files with a wave editor for "glitches"...
Saves time and heartache! ;)
Cheers,
Presto
I once used a metalurgy lab's scanning electron microscope to examine the pits on a Red Book CD. I was hoping to confirm that there actually are 1s and 0s in the pits. But what I found was there wasn't anything at all in the pits, just a lot of empty space. What a ripoff!!
Thank goodness, right?
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, pass the straitjacket.
Then again, I've spent enough time here over the years to have lowered my expectations accordingly.
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