Do the best audio designers put their ears before the numbers.

@jl35

’there is a Nelson Pass interview on youtube, maybe with Steve Guttenberg, where he talks about the combination of measurements and listening...’


Yes, but I think everyone says that. They understand that the consumers want the assurance that the product has been listened to, at least once. What they don’t say is that they trust their ears more.



@teo_audio

’The ear is king for the vast number of high end audio designers.’

I seriously doubt that. How many of them can still hear flat up til 16kHz? I doubt whether I can.

How many of them can identify cables, amplifiers, digital sources etc whilst simply blindfolded, nevermind abx controlled?

You know the answer to that as well as I do, none. Not a single one of them.

You also know that testing equipment can. Every time. Obviously.

Would you like to test yourself against something like the Klippel analyser system?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.teufelaudio.com/the-klippel-analyser-system/amp/


It’s also worth bearing in mind when Edison conducted his live versus recorded tone tests a century ago the sighted audience could not tell the difference between a vocalist and a shellac recording!

https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2015/05/is-it-live-or-is-it-edison/


’The reason for this.. is we don’t know exactly how the ear works and thus we don’t know how to place what the ear hears across the engineering measurements as a form of comparison and weighting of each in the comparison.’

Or if everyone hears the same. No, we don’t, but that’s just another good reason to carefully examine all the data, isn’t it?

The goal is to create accuracy of playback. How it’s later interpreted is beyond the control of the designer and isn’t the issue here.


As far as I can see the only excuse for not replying upon the technology available is if you don’t have access to it.

Thankfully the software is gradually becoming more readily available and sometimes alternatives can be found.

The sheer cost of an anechoic chamber prohibits access and means many designers will test and measure their loudspeakers suspended outdoors.

It’s an act of humanity to present the consumer with the best chance to experience whatever was on the recording. The rest (setup, room, hearing etc) is under the control of the listener.

You’d want to, at the least, give them a fair chance, wouldn’t you?

Subjectively speaking, most of our hearing can’t be measured in a way that tells us how something will sound. So if we can’t measure our hearing to correlate with the numbers ( measurements) used by manufacturer’s of audio components, why are they so important? Assuming I’m right?

Actually we know quite a lot about how human hearing works, but a lot of it has only be discerned in the last 40 years or so. The spec sheets are based on tradition and are taking a while to catch up.

So if the designer is aware of research into human hearing perceptual rules its not that hard to take those rules into consideration when working on a specific circuit- and it is possible that such a circuit might not measure all that well (which usually means that harmonic distortion might be fairly high) based on what is considered 'good' by tradition.


Here is an example- the ear is relatively insensitive to lower ordered harmonic distortion (2nd, 3rd and 4th) but is keenly sensitive to the higher ordered harmonics. So if an amplifier has fairly high 2nd harmonic, but is very low in the higher orders, it will sound smooth and easy going to the human ear. If the amp is low in the lower orders, and also low in the higher orders such that it might have only 0.01% of THD, its very likely that it will sound harsh, as that is the property that the ear assigns to higher ordered harmonics. You really have to get those harmonics much lower in order for them to be considered 'inaudible'- 0.001 **might** be acceptable if 'bright' and 'harsh' are the subjective experience that you are trying to avoid.  But it seems that you have to be even lower than that.

Now there is an old saw that if you have high THD you will also have high IMD (intermodulation distortion) and that is often true, but not always! The ear is sensitive to IMD and it is arguable that if getting low distortion is a goal, that keeping IMD down is really where you want to concentrate your efforts.


So this is sort of the tip of the iceberg about why I feel that the quote above is a false assumption.

High-fidelity is a concept born with electronical, tubes and solid state design long ago...

Audiophile acoustic was born with the Greek theaters... :)


These 2 concepts are linked, they must be distinguished but not separated in modern audio...

If i was an amplifier designer or dac designer, i will use sound and electronics measures technics first... I will listen at night at the end my own design to have a feed back tough.... :)

If i was an audiophile i will trust my ears over numbers....Because embeddings mechanically, electrically and acoustically an audio system does work with the 2 ears that will be living in the house....Not with an A.I. (for the moment tough).


If i was an audio seller, producer, designer, etc i will read numbers and i will listen with my ears de-waxed....

Sometimes people argue and look hard for some angles where their arguments can go on and on like the roots of a tree or the canopy system........

I cannot throw any stones tough, liking arguments myself....

But at the root this is simple.... I think..... :)

« The roots are not more simpler than the canopy.» - Groucho Marx