What part of sound is not measurable? - Page 11

LMAO! Unbelievably funny Chu............as usual. Outstanding.

Very, very well said, Arny.

Thank god Ms. Spears takes it seriously!

Stop it, you're killing me.

Hence the phrase "vote with your wallet."

As long as it's education devoid of bias (especially where Monster's involved). On this forum that's tricky, and for those that aren't used to the AVS MO, it might be hard to extricate the two.


Agreed.

Try as I might I cannot find an argument against this... A part of me strongly supports the idea of making it very costly to be a fool. Were more of life like that we may have to suffer fewer fools.

economic Darwinism

There will never be a shortage of fools according to scientific principles - nature abhors a vacuum therebye ensuring a steady supply of fools.

Do quantum vacuum fluctuations create fool-antifool pairs?

Yes. It's the basis of our modern political system.

Unlike matter/antimatter, unfortunately they don't annililate each other. Thus... the thread still exists.

First of all, I'd like to say that it is extremely difficult and often misleading to make comparisons between different speakers without the use of speaker mover to control positional effects. The positional effects can easily swamp out any true audible differences between the speakers, particularly if the measured differences among them are very small. I used to find that positional effects alone could change the preference rating of a loudspeaker by 20%. That is why Harman spent considerable money on a multichannel and in-wall speaker mover -- so the positional biases are removed from the test.

Secondly, you cannot correlate what you hear to what you measure unless you have comprehensive on and off-axis data like the kind we advocate. You could be hearing brightness in a loudspeaker that has a dip at 2-4kHz on-axis because of its off-axis response. The upper-treble brightness you are hearing could also be due to the 2-4 kHz dip since the dip could produce a release in upward masking - emphasizing the frequency range above the dip. In our listener training exercises, listeners commonly mistake dips as peaks located higher in frequency.

Comprehensive anechoic loudspeaker measurements combined with the right set of in-room measurements can usually explain what you are hearing.

Cheers
Sean

Another way of looking at my proposition is that the musician is listening to himself through the reproduction mechanism. Let us assume a musician of the highest musicianship and highest integrity (a.k.a. he's a snob). He records a cut and while his performance is still fresh in his head he listens to the recording of himself which has been processed through the reproduction chain all the way through the speakers to his ears. I have intentionally frequency shifted up two notes worth. When I ask" is this what you played" he will say no. the question "is this the same as what you played?" is pretty loaded. relative to me when he listens to the playback he is listening for elements beyond my capacity. If it is his intention to communicate those elements and they are somehow "lost" and he is of the highest integrity he will say no. If he doesn't have the greatest in confidence in his memory he will want to re-record the passage on the assumption the loss of transmission was from his head to his trumpet.
when I was in highschool I went to a jazz festival and the headliner was Bill Watrous. there was a buzzing in the speakers and he kept glaring at the sound technicians to fix it. The reasons why he was angry about it only be speculated. Why would he care about the fidelity of the amplification?

My question was deliberately open to interpretation because I didn't want to bias what information content the listener was trying to detect. It is Yes or No answered because a binary response relative to me is in very similiar units. The question is simple enough so that all potential consumers can undergo the same testing procedure and understand the question as the musician. So when a consumer undergoes the evaluation and answers Yes and the musician answers yes, the units of the final transmission are the same. anything lost in the consumer is not the fault of the reproduction chain but lost from the consumer. However, the transmission from musician to consumer relative to me is 100%.
Where the psychoanalyst comes into play is that the test procedure has to have very carefully devised questions. Answering the questions the musican will be thinking of self to self, self to consumer to self, self to technician to self..etc. The consumer too has to understand the questions to result in the same units as the musician otherwise the test is inherently flawed.
(An interesting consequence of this is that relative to me I cannot create a 100% transmission mechanism from an english musician to a japanese consumer, but relative to an english/japanese translator the transmission mechanism can be 100%)

Where the Neural network scientist comes into play is that their expertise is in creating weighted values based on binary input. They also can create optimized search algorithms. If I'm really looking to quantize the importance of phase relative to magnitude (relative to the consumer, relative to me) then a fuzzy logic algorithm can do it.
Another consequence is that to ensure 100% transmission from musician to consumer (relative to me), at the conclusion of the tests they must both answer Yes to all of the questions and flow through the same test algorithm path. The inherent data of interest to the engineer are the weights required to force the question path to the same conclusion. Those are the minimum requirements of 100% fidelity from musican to consumer relative to the engineer.

The test procedure was not to see what musicans like to hear. It was intended to test what the creating artist wanted to communicate to others. I'ld put money that when it comes to recordings of themselves your friends would be more decerning about the quality of the recording.
How else can you explain how ordinary people desire $$ cameras and HD video cameras when there is no financial gain from the equipment?

I've spent some time on both sides of the sound board. For 80%, probably 90%, of the musicians I know you would loose that bet.

If you told them the recording was for 1. a student,2. a peer, 3. a mentor, 4. a recording company do you think that would affect their concern for fidelity?

And when I lost that bet in terms of fidelity are we talking AM, FM or CD?

Don't think it would matter.


Things that would matter would be things like background noise ( eg. outside noises, not equipment noise floors) and maybe room reverb. Other than that, well they'd ask for CD quality, but.... I've seen musicians home systems include mismatched left and right stereo pairs, boom boxes (or slightly better), speakers everywhere but none of them any good (the louder the better rock and roll type guys), you name it.

that's actually the crux of my logic. the relative information from one observer to the next.
I love photography. The photos which I take and post to family is of inferior technical quality to those I post in photography forums. An email I might send to my peer vs my boss is different. Not just the literal content but the tone, which is another information layer riding parallel to the literal content.



Firstly I need it to be clear that the level of fidelity that a musician requires has to be their own material and when the comparison is done it is very preferabley fresh in their mind.
So if this were the playback mechanism of the musician, playing the musicians music, what I interpret is that his mismatched setup meets minimum thresholds to ensure 100% communication transmission back to himself. If I were to replay the recording on a more $ system then the extra quality I hear has nothing to do with his intended communication. It's padding another couple of decimal places when 2 was good enough. And I distinguish this as icing over the cake that I am free to mold and shape as I see fit. In my model this is already outside the realm of fidelity.
And in consideration of the musicians transmission to me it implies that I should be putting more effort into soundproofing the room rather than flattening room reponse.

(Why a musician might want the recording quiet? Just pulling this even deeper from outta my ass but that's how he hears the music in his head even before his lips hit the mouthpiece and that's what he wants to communicate)

I nominate this for best post of the week.

--Ethan

The "topic" of the thread is great.

I agree somwhat. This is what the AVS forum should be about. Many links, perhaps a few "experts". Tough to separate the wheat from the chaff though IMO.

I feel sad for those that take some info and want to digest that as "gospel" and run and hide from practical experience/application or personal preference. Period.

I enjoy my system and many others I've auditioned over the years. Personally... I've never been overly critical to actually measure anything. And... that makes my wife happy too.

That is strawman argument. Period.

Not an argument at all... an observation.
The strawman has a brain.

Wow, I think I misjudged you. That's a surprising statement coming from you, but welcome!

Measurements are interesting to a point, but to assume they can replace experienced stimulus is a little "off".

We just don't listen using the same parameters used when measuring.

Oh, they're on here, trust me. You know who they are.


You don't "own" threads, and certainly don't care if something I say isn't "scientific". That requirement is in your head, and frankly your ego problems won't affect my decision to post one way or the other.