What part of sound is not measurable? - Page 10

Businesses have long realized that consumers tend to obsess and attribute too much weight to ultimately meaningless trivia surrounding the things they buy.

That's what the high-end audio business runs on.

Conversely, intelligent businesses choose not to be completely transparent on things they know are truly irrelevant, because they know that the majority will typically misinterpret the issue anyway.

It's silly to have to waste resources to defend against meaningless issues.

Given much of my experience with the high-end audio business one wonders if they can be considered intelligent businesses...

While there are some very good high-end companies out there I have seen far too many that fleece unsuspecting customers that are members of the more money than brains club. I do not consider this to be a good way to go about doing business although it might fit some people's definition of 'intelligent business'...

and prey, too.

One need only visit a high end audio exhibition to realize this.

There is a legitimate segment of the high end audio business that involves selling truely relevant high performance at a correspondingly high price.

Unfortunately for the suppliers, the price of just about everything electronic, when built to the highest reasonble standards, is now commoditized.

This leaves loudspeakers, room acoustics, and extreme conveniences such as whole-house audio, as ust about the only productive markets for a high end supplier.

want an example? It's fun to see reviews of 'high end ' loudspeakers in contrast to the measurements.

reviews

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue11/zudruid.htm
http://www.soundstage.com/revequip/zucable_druid.htm

measurements (not truly polar but incorporating off-axis response):

http://www.soundstagemagazine.com/me...zucable_druid/

Post #266 ?

Not to use too broad of a brush, but I applaud any company that takes full advantage (legally) of it's intended target market. If people want to spend money on looks, sound, name perception, or voodoo, fine. This is a free market, and since performance issues tend to be subjective form person to person, it's hard to disprove a lack of benefit for a given product.

Two very good points. I concur.

my attempt is actually to resolve "metaphysical connections" into something physical. When it is physical, it is modeled, and inherent with models is the ability to communicate that information to another person.

Information and communication (the transmission of information)are relative. Relative to the observer or as I call it the reciever. This definition is for all communication.
You take an AM transmission to 2 recievers. One reciever has a clear line of sign from the transmitting antenna..it gets a clear signal; proper transmission. The other reciever has to go through trees and water; it has a poor transmission. In this example the measured distance..the xyz coordinate of one reciever to the other is the differentiating factor which affects the communication. the corresponding measured distortions are objective only because you and I can commonly interpret the data...ie we have common knowledge and common understanding. If I were to parallel transmit that distortion information(measured data) to a nontechnical person it has no meaning and suddenly it is subjective. Here I have taken the same measured data and shown it can be subjective.

Example 2. Polar plots. Polar plots are extremely subjective...why?
I have faith that jj and mark and terry can openly discuss the interpretation of a common measured polar plot because they have:
common knowledge
common technical background
common experience (with how particularly shaped polar plots "sound").

where as I am lacking in all of those categories, relative to that company and relative to the information in the polar plot. They can describe it all they want but the units they would be talking in would be all fluffy and flowery compared to the real 1st hand experience of listening to a particular polar plot. A mathematical description of the experience is still fluffy and flowery. A technical description of the experience is still fluffy and flowery. The math behind it all is only accepted as "objective" because the units behind math are considered "objective" because you and I understand math on the same level..we have the same language..we have the same common experience.

Example 3. We have a scale and a weight. The scale is uncalibrated. The weight measured on the scale is 2 lbs. I say it is 2 lbs and you say it is not 2 lbs but probalby 2 lbs 1ounce. Relative to both of us the information transmitted from the scale is subjective. It is subjective because we do not agree on the validity of the scale. So somebody will say that there is a true value of the weight. That true value is only really true if everybody agrees upon it. Otherwise if you believed in its "truth" that value would only be valid to a higher being such as God or your highschool math teacher or the worlds smartest physicist. Now the "truth" is entirely based on your "faith".

The nature of information is that it is multilayered. It is a direct consequence of being relative to the observer. If all observers were the same then there would be no multilayeredness.
We are observing the same illustration of a blue ball. we both agree it is blue. we both agree it is a ball. Those are our common units.
I see a blue ball I played with in my childhood and lost to the neighbours dog. You see the beauty in the circle and the mathematical harmonys it represents.
The same illustration transmits the same information to us and the information we recieve is different from our uncommon experience.

Now if this seems silly it resolves into some consequences.
1. What we measure is useless unless it is corelated with common units. Units that can be agreed upon by nearly everyone.
2. Measuring to no end of precision without regard with to the common units is fool hardy. That's like designing for 8 decimal places when all you need is 2 significant digits.
3. Ultimate evaluation of any system must be performed at the highest end user level. Anything else will simply result in an "interpretation" of the real thing.

So how would I perform tests? I have a musician practice and I record the sound. After every few seconds the signal is transmited through the reproduction chain...compression, amplification, speakers, back to the musician. I ask him only one question.."is that what you played?" If he answers yes that means everything he wished to communicate, the tempo, the frequencies, the energy, the emotion was not lost. It ensures that the probability of the information he "wished" to transmit to me remains high.

I take an orchestra and record and mix as if I were to master an MP3. I would ask the conductor "is that what you performed". If I ask the orchestra then the relative communication to me is completely different.

The methodology of the line of questioning would require psychoanalysis expertise and how to process the data would require fuzzy logic expertise. Both are way beyond my capability.

Having played in an orchestra or two, a couple of bands and having many musician friends I have found over the years that many musicans are, with a few rare exception, indifferent to the reproduction chain. Many of them will happily listen to a boom box and report that it sounds fine to them. It's all about performance and reproductive accuracy means almost nothing.

That's my general impression too, scientest. They don't need an audiophile system in order to enjoy an outstanding performance or critique the passage.

Just as a note, that's insufficient, it's "a particular polar pattern in a particular acoustic situation".

In an anechoic chamber, a speaker that is flat in direct sound but has awful power characteristics can sound pretty good on axis.

Now put it in a live room.

***twitch***

Yep.

The elements of the performance that they are listening to are well, far above threshold of audibility, and they can hear what they need to hear, modulo ideas about particular instruments, without a good system.

Things like pace, rhythm, timing are characteristics that are well above threshold and can conveyed with 100-7kHz bandwidth and not the cleanest of signals.

The worst speaker in the world does not cause the violin player to sound like he or she has bad intonation, just maybe a bad violin, for instance.

I think there are two main reasons for this. First no reproduction system can perfectly reproduce what is heard - in part because what a musician hears is not the same as what the audience hears. Since no reproduction system is perfect might as well not spend lots of money on one - especially since they have the experience to be able to fill in the missing pieces.

'Specially if you're a deaf mofo like Neil Young or Pete Townshend

There's the slight matter of truth in advertising.

The fact that loudspeaker technology is still rather underdeveloped makes it tough to prosecute a speaker manufacturer on the grounds of false advertising.

If we can't prosecute cable manufacturers on those grounds, we're light years from going after people who sell to the home market for speakers.


The obvious problem is that our undereducated audiophile market doesn't know vodoo when they see it. They think that they are buying science, when it is really just vodoo in the box.


Hiding behind subjectivity used to be the essence of the market for medications. By changing that, economic benefits started to flow far more strongly to producers who sold products that actually worked as claimed. In the end, that fostered the past 8 or more decades of very beneficial progress in that field.

If you don't take audio seriously, it can easily become something that nobody should take seriously.

I've never seen a speaker manufacturer tell the audience what they're going to hear and how they're going to hear it, and present that as a guarantee. It's not only borderline impossible, but I think frankly that would hurt the marketing process, since it's my belief that most listeners want to glean their own results from their own listening sessions.


It's too much of a moving target and not important really.


I understand. Obviously medical and medicinal issues are far more important than how a speaker sounds, but I see your point.

Everything that CAN be heard CAN be measured. That doesn't mean that current measuring devices actually DO measure it. There are lots of reasons that is true. For example, most people don't need music reproduction beyond a certain level, so there is no point in measuring beyond a certain level. Developing the technology to measure everything is technologically within our means I think, but there just isn't the financial motivation like there would be for, say, nuclear weapons technology, or cancer research, or ......

Therefore, people have to rely on their ears rather than insufficient measurements. This of course opens a Pandora's Box of problems with psychology, biases, corruption due to profit motives and conflicts of interest, etc.

Not to mention the fact that different people have different ears with different amounts of wax in them and different degrees of high frequency hearing loss, etc. (You will probably not find 2 people with exactly 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz audible range.)

There probably isn't a perfect speaker for several reasons. The most obvious one is that room acoustics plays a big role in how the sound is reproduced, and the manufacturer can never predict that aspect of it. No 2 rooms are going to be exactly alike, so it's impossible to design to work perfectly in all cases.

Also different speakers have different properties that lead to different strengths and weaknesses. So far, no single technology can do all things optimally. Maybe this is like the search for the unified theory of physics :-) Maybe someday they will invent the perfect transducer.

That's true, but it really doesn't lead to any conclusions for audiophiles. The musicians there are certainly not believing they are hearing a live orchestra when listening. And that is basically what most audiophiles are trying to recreate - a live music "event" in their own home, where they get to choose the concert selections they listen to, and when. That is quite an awesome thing, when you think about it. It certainly explains why so many audiophiles go to extreme or even insane or illogical levels to achieve it.

That is quite true. What a violinist hears when he plays is quite different from what the audience hears. That is why goofy recordings with microphones placed in silly places (such as INSIDE the piano) do not sound "good". That is simply not what instruments sound like, as they were intended to be heard.

ISTR an anecdote about a famous conductor -- Eugene Ormandy I think -- whose home system was found to be rather badly out of EQ balance when it was checked by someone more technically inclined than him.

Few of the musicians I know are into audio per se -- and to the extent they are, it's usually focused on their home recording studios or getting the right sound from their instruments, not their 'stereos'.