What's your candidate for the biggest bunch of audio baloney ever written or perpetrated? - Page 3

I could waste everybody's time with another deconstruction of that article Amir, but thanks for adding a cite of it to this thread, which is one of more forthcoming of your very many contributions to AVS! ;-)
Edited by arnyk - 8/9/12 at 3:29am

At least Levinson has moved on to high sensitivity, pro driver type loudspeakers (albeit stratospheric mega-buck, no doubt). I believe he set up and designs for a Swiss based mfr producing systems, including a big, dynamic 3 way, w/18", 12", and a compression HF. Of course they offer the matching cables and associated electronics.

He's a fascinatingly weird dude,...thin line, you know. From arc welders, to the art of getting a woman off....yep, ain't no ordinary.

---

wrt mega-buck high end systems, and the entire audio jewelry idea........The way I see it, if Levinson's going to bilk these guys for their money, they may as well be able to rock out realistically.

Link: http://www.avsforum.com/t/1326576/usb-vs-hdmi-for-2ch-audio-to-receiver

Now there's an oxymoron.

--Ethan

I really don't know if it's a baloney or a mis-concept (read: misunderstanding), but here's a couple of "things" I've read on different threads here on AVSForums:

1. "Human ears are defficient": For Heaven's sake, there is no other pair of "microphones" on this green planet of God that can match up to the perfectness of our human ears. Anything done in electronics to compensate for loudness issues is a result of decades of research started by Fletcher and Munson in the 30's at Bell Labs and for example resulted in Audyssey's Dynamic EQ implementation.

2. "I can localize bass down to 40 Hz": No you can't, your head with ears on the left and right is not wide enough compared to wavelenghts...what you believe as localization is a distortion (read: THD) of your sub producing harmonics that may reach frequencies that make sub localizable. Localizing bass or localizing sub are two different animals.

3. "We all hear differently": a killer one for me. All 7 billion of us on Earth have the same ear mechanism, hearing or perceiving what we here is a totally different premise. Hearing mechanism is the same, perception is what we need to consider when making such statements, but that will lead us to psyhoacoustics, a very sophisticated field of science many are researching for the better understanding of "what's going on".

I know many will debate with what I said above, but always open to discussions.
Edited by mogorf - 8/9/12 at 1:51pm

With earwax or no earwax?

Just for the record, our ears are anything but perfect.

Do you have such a problem? Why not clean you ear canals and then come back to the discussion?
Edited by mogorf - 8/10/12 at 3:03am

Care to expand on your statement? Anything you've experienced in you life so far that makes you think so?

Eh? What's that you say?

What I say is what other ears would you like to have? And most important, how would YOU solve it?

You are not making any sense.

Calling human ears perfect is just laughable. Ever heard of masking?

Also: Fletcher and Munson.

How does masking explain that human ears are deficient? What problems does masking cause for you? Care to share a real life example you have experienced and wished masking was not there?
Edited by mogorf - 8/10/12 at 4:51am

Masking explains how certain measurable deficiencies go unheard. Due to masking, there can be for example a ton of second order distortiion whose effects are completely missed by everybody's ears. However the same amount of nonlinearity of say the fifth order can be easily be heard because the spurious sounds that it generates are at frequencies that are at frequencies that are far further away from the original tone.



The above shows how a pure tone masks nearby tones. For example lets say that the peaks of the curves above are all at 1 KHz. Each curve represents the amplitude of tones that will be masked by the 1 KHz tone of a certain amplitude. As you can see a tone just above or just below 1 KHz will be masked more than a tone that is further away in either direction;

For example, a second order nonlinearity adds a spurious tone at 2 KHz to the original pure tone at 1 KHz. However, the 1 KHz tone masks the 2 KHz tone very strongly. For another example, a fifth order nonlinearity adds a spurious tone at 5 KHz to the original pure tone at 1 KHz. Since the distortion created by the fifth order nonlinearity is further away from the original 1 KHz tone it is less likely to be masked,

Masking gives everybody problems hearing distortion and noise that is measurable but that turns out to either be not audible or less audible.

I'll do the opposite. I'll give you a real world example of how masking allows us to enjoy some music that on paper is so distorted it should be unlistenable. One word: MP3. Many MP3 files have say 90% or more of the information in their music removed to save space and transmission time. One might think that doing his would result in a horrible sound, but because the removal of information is done in accordance with the rules of masking, we don't notice it all that much.

""Certain animals have more sensitive hearing than humans which enables them to hear sounds too faint to be detected by humans."

You are helping his cause, not yours . You just told him how the ear is superior to a microphone because it ignores certain distortion/noise!
Or the fact that if you are in a concert hall and replace your ears with a mic, you don't capture anything close to the experience you are getting there!

True, but that's not about his ears. Ask any concertgoer with partial hearing loss.

Those creatures are called wives. Just mutter something under your breath like SOB while you're outside and see what happens.

Ain't it the truth:-)

Exactly, and both types of distortion would be measured precisely using a good microphone and measuring software or hardware. Further, with measuring equipment you'll get identical results every time. If you play music containing distortion that's barely audible and assess the distortion amount by ear, each playing will sound slightly different. There's nothing wrong with listening! But for assessing raw fidelity nothing beats test equipment.

--Ethan

This is incredible, an absolute must read! I need to harness the "forward facing light energy"! Damn, I cannot believe that my physics professors overlooked telling me about this!

This pile of malarkey is definitely in the running for the biggest line of BS in audio!

At 69 I do keep them cleaned out so I can enjoy my gear!

I think you guys are completely misinterpreting my original post on another audio baloney I listed earlier. I was neither talking about distortion, nor about 2nd order or even 5th order non-linearity causing masking. These are specs of amplifiers that have nothing to do with our human ears. In real life there is no harmonic distortion! BTW, a typical modern AVR/AVP will have no more THD than 0.08% or so which is practically negligible. So it's not our ears that are deficient, it's audio systems that are not built to the proper "spec" in case there is severe THD experienced. But that is the past, amplifiers are not that bad now-a-days.The baloney of "Human ears are deficient" has not been proved by anyone, therefore I wish we could come to consensus on this topic and with agreement we can move on ruling out this particular baloney! Agree?

The assertion I originally challenged was not, "human ears are deficient." What I challenged was your reference to the "perfectness" of our ears. All of our examples were meant to demonstrate some of the imperfections of ears. You haven't rebutted a single one of those examples.

Interestingly, the people who are arguing with you now probably agree with the bulk of your original post. But you must understand that "our ears are better than any measurement device" is a trope of the audiophool class. You've inadvertantly made some strange bedfellows.

Forget measurement devices, please. Cavemen several hundred thousand years ago didn't have such gear, but they survived with their existing ears among many other "features" they had, hence we are here debating on the "Innernet", aren't we? Understanding human hearing has come a long way with measurement devices, but none of them have ever stated such baloney as being "deficient". That's my point, nothing more nothing less!!
Edited by mogorf - 8/10/12 at 3:47pm

A true scientist may indeed investigate just about anything, but once he does, his conclusions are accurate and reliable.

Everything from The Upgrade Company.