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Originally Posted by
arnyk 
Fact is Amir I just told you about something that virtually every power amp you ever worked on did, and you dismissed it out of hand.
Well, putting aside the fact that it is very doubtful that you have worked on the class of amplifiers we are talking about, and have no ideas of the design of either amplifier in question, you were off topic. The topic was simple: Amir's company carries an amplifier which has 22 dB worse spec than another brand and therefore let's not listen to him showing us AES published research on dynamic range of music. That is the topic and nothing more.
I repeatedly said we should not go there. Meanwhile John Dowson, chief designer at a major company and longtime member of this forum post that Aaudiosavant's read of the specification for said amp was incorrect. Aaudiosavant then confirms that he learned something by:
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Originally Posted by
audiophilesavant
Thanks for the spin-free factual information.
That should have been it and him saying he was mistaken. But no, he asks me what was wrong with what he said and that Mark Levinson probably got lucky that the stereophile measurements of the unit were 8 dB better. No acknowledgement that the amp specs he looked at were stated very differently.
So I point out how he omitted key qualifications from the two manufacturers which clearly showed the test conditions were radically different. And that difference can be explained by how these values are stated based on what John Dawson, John Atkinson and I view the specs and data in hand.
You then jump up and down with a theory of power supply ripple getting into the output. You have no data whatsoever about either amp doing this and at what level. You have a hypothesis which is disputed by John Atkinson who has actually measured the device. He has data and you don't but apparently that doesn't mean anything. Bottom line is that you are throwing something at the wall to see if it sticks. That's cool. You are trying to defend brother Audiosavant. The whole camp must be defended or else, there is a crack in the armor. I get it. But it doesn't mean I don't see past it and try to focus us on the main issue which is him putting down the reputation of a major brand of amplifiers. This is the fact. Everything else about you teaching us about amplifiers and such is debating tactic and an insulting one at that.
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That says it all - you may have fixed them but you never understood how they worked the way I do.
That would be a neat trick
. Fixing amplifiers without knowing how they work. How do you do that? Replace part by part until you get lucky and the thing works? Maybe that is how you fixed amp but not me. I grew up with electronics and analog design. That is what my hobby was. We discuss digital audio but that is the product my last two decades of digital design. For the prior 20 years what I loved and played with was analog. My degree is in Electrical Engineering. It is not an accident that I can take a systems view here whether we are talking about digital or analog.
But as I noted, the problem you have with anointing yourself god of audio is not just me but the three of us. I asked you to compare yourself to John Dawson. If you want to post again on who is bigger than the other, please include how you know more about amplifiers than he does in your next post.
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BTW Amir I also worked on a audio equipment repair bench when I was in school, and fixed a ton of equipment as well. But my experience goes way beyond that. I've been designing amps from scratch since I was in middle school. I designed and built power amps and preamps when tubes were all that we had. I also designed and built SS equipment, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat if there was a need.
Well, clearly there is no need for your services
. Come back when your audio decisions make or break a company. Then we know whether you made the right calls or not. You talk about double blind tests all the time. The type of tests that I participated in resulted in the specifications for the blu-ray disc to be different. They have resulted in technology getting adoption in billions of devices. It was not some audio club work where if you got it wrong, no harm would come from it. I am confident you have never built a 600 watt class AB amplifier that had to be manufactured and become successful in the market but maybe you surprise us with showing its schematic so that we can critique it.
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The big difference between you and I Amir appears to be one of observation and critical thinking. Remember, I invented ABX for audio which was different and improved as compared to how it was being done until that time under the same name, I did the first consumer and pro audio ABX tests, and I reported the first ABX results.
And you deserve credit for that. You deserve none for taking that as a bat to shoot down technical research as you have been doing in this thread in an attempt to dumb down the performance of audio in every thread you step in. I know a lot about double blind testing and objective evaluation of audio yet I don't let that literally blind me to more knowledge. When I had this debate about dynamic range in the other thread, I put forward the Bob Stuart paper. You called that marketing material and said the thing you value is AES publications. I point out that the paper was an AES publication. Did you back off? No. You continue to then put down the AES research just the same. Here is how it went down:
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Originally Posted by
arnyk Interestingly enough this paper is neither an AES conference paper or a JAES article." At least I can't find it published that way. It appears to be a rewrite of a 1988 (24 year old!) article in the now-long-departed Audio magazine. It's a corporate white paper that has no standing as an industry standard or recommendation.
This paper is arguably part of the support for SACD and DVD-A which are now known to be failed technical initiatives that failed to make it in the mainstream consumer marketplace.
The paper in question is full of unsupported assertions.
How knowledgeable are you if you don't know some of the most famous work in this area published at AES including the Journal? I quoted Fielder research to you there and here. As with this thread, you went after him personally saying he is a failure as an engineer because he was responsible for such things as HDCD and SACD. Is this how we debate science? We take someone who worked for Dolby who provided the licensing for a competing format called DVD-A and put SACD's failure at his feet? And what about relevance? Why would his research be wrong even if he did work on SACD? You either know how to shoot holes in that or you don't and clearly you don't. So you go after him personally.
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Amir, you appear to many of us to continue to be in denial about what the nearly 40 years of doing proper subjective tests has taught many of us. You appeaer to be still in denial about the need for even the basics like level matching!
No. I know everything you know about your camp because I am in it. I look at audio objectively. In this entire thread not a single subjective argument was used. Everything was about reviewing the research in front of us. Research which has been published at AES. You keep spinning this as arguing with my views. But your arguments are with top researchers in this field.
You are up in arms because their research invalidates your 40 year campaign to dumb down audio performance. You can't let that happen. Looking right is more important to you than the truth about audio being presented. You demonstrate this lack of objectivity in thread after thread, post after post by getting personal. You could have done a million ABX tests but if you are biased and spiteful in how you look at the science, you provide little value in these discussions.
Worse yet, you keep complimenting yourself when you run out of answers. You say dynamic range of music is 70 dB based on noise floors you have measured. I show how you ignored psychoacoustics by using a single number instead of looking at spectrum. How bad is it to be caught in denial about how we hear noise? Pretty bad. Your answer? You are the only one who knows this field.
When we test audio codecs, we know how they work so we use test material that show their weakness. Without such tracks, we would be putting our head in the sand thinking they are all perfect. So please don't keep saying how many tests you have run. If they are done with ignoring the science as basic as our auditory threshold, masking and other psychoacoustics, then they are of little value. They might impress casual posters but not people who are in the industry and are not blind to the science, pun intended
.
To wit, I am confident you had never seen the research papers I have presented here. Else, you would have had to acknowledge that you are taking a contrarian position to research in this area. You don't even have an AES membership to read these papers. That is not a sign of someone who still wants to learn. You think you have figured it all out. Good for you. But it is not good for me or researchers who still present papers at these conferences and do this for a living.
No doubt you are going to come back with guns blazing. But I am not the first objectivist you have turned sour toward your views and style of arguing. As I noted, there are others:
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Originally Posted by
terry j well, in that case let me thank you [amirm] for your contributions. I KNOW I could not have kept my patience as you have, let alone maintained a sense of humour!
It's funny how hard *we* can go to maintain our rightness, and how quickly that line is crossed where we no longer wish to learn (despite our objections to the contrary) where we fight tooth and nail...usually because we know our position is so tenuous that the slightest 'loss' means the whole game is over.
FFS, Amir has sat here page after page and SHOWN how, and under what possible conditions jitter may be audible.
Hey, if it were a cable debate, and we showed with maths and sims that there could not possibly be a difference, well that would have proved it no?
So why the **** in an 'argument' where the shoe is on the other foot does it suddenly become irrelevant what the science says??
My take on what the fear might be is the worry of what might happen if we concede a point of argument. The 'other side' will drive a frickin lorry thru the door if we do.
I mean, there only has to be ONE person who hears a power cord (for sake of illustration) in what seems to be a proper test and the whole frickin lot of the rest of them will claim it as proof that they too can hear it.
No they can't, 'one in a million' means just that. But we KNOW every single one of them thinks they can hear it, using that person as proof, and even less urge to test the truth properly. After all it has been shown.
So, we had better clamp down HARD on the one ever coming out, if only to keep the lid on the rest.
So, move on to something far less controversial than PCs, but as long as it falls into audiofool territory we had better clamp down on that too. It is just safer that way, keep each and every genie in the bottle.
So the need to put amir in his place, and keep the lid hammered on tight. Because the ramifications of this little argument go waaaay past it's tiny borders.
""Oh, but amir has not given any evidence of audibilty"" (apart from the science you mean? The science that would be perfectly acceptable in a different argument, that the one we are talking about???).
Be totally honest here. If he told you that he had found, to his satisfaction, that turning the front panel on and off on his thingamabob had an audible difference, would you accept that?
What then his findings of jitter?
We know you would not accept his results, the genie is too terrifying to contemplate.
So don't come back at me with 'amir has yet to show audibility' ok? It is a definitional thing you know. Some things, by definition, are inaudible.
Bit like cancer, it cannot be cured hence any cure of cancer is untrue (why we are always then exhorted to donate to cancer research is beyond me).
All of you could be right, it may be completely inaudible.
But you sure as hell have not shown it by your arguments. Unless 'nanah nanah nah' counts as an argument.
You keep worshiping my ex-architect JJ as agreeing with your views. With apology to John for quoting him, this is what he has to say about you:
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Originally Posted by
stereoeditor
You remind me of a conversation I once had with JJ when your name came up. He shook his head and pondered aloud on the fact that an unreasonable advocate for a reasonable position is the worst of all worlds, or words to that effect.
I apologize for being blunt but I can't think of anyone giving objectivity in audio a worse name than you. Whether it is the substance or style, you take us places that you should not go as this post of yours shows. You take what could be a proper and constructive discussion and turn into an unprofessional, insulting and grating conversation. Nothing in audio is worth this kind of treatment where the people in your camp distance themselves from you. It is a hobby for heaven's sake.
