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The invention of measurements and perception

This is going to be pretty airy-fairy. Sorry.

Let’s talk about how measurements get invented, and how this limits us.

One of the great works of engineering, science, and data is finding signals in the noise. What matters? Why? How much?

My background is in computer science, and a little in electrical engineering. So the question of what to measure to make systems (audio and computer) "better" is always on my mind.

What’s often missing in measurements is "pleasure" or "satisfaction."

I believe in math. I believe in statistics, but I also understand the limitations. That is, we can measure an attribute, like "interrupts per second" or "inflamatory markers" or Total Harmonic Distortion plus noise (THD+N)

However, measuring them, and understanding outcome and desirability are VERY different. Those companies who can do this excel at creating business value. For instance, like it or not, Bose and Harman excel (in their own ways) at finding this out. What some one will pay for, vs. how low a distortion figure is measured is VERY different.

What is my point?

Specs are good, I like specs, I like measurements, and they keep makers from cheating (more or less) but there must be a link between measurements and listener preferences before we can attribute desirability, listener preference, or economic viability.

What is that link? That link is you. That link is you listening in a chair, free of ideas like price, reviews or buzz. That link is you listening for no one but yourself and buying what you want to listen to the most.

E
erik_squires
erik_squires OP
16,133 posts
 
I taught statistics and experimental psychology...

This is a field in which measures are constantly evolving and being added to. I'm afraid that in audio our measures are decades old and have not been updated, just cheaper to collect.

What I mean is, we can do better, but the will and effort isn't universally taken very far.

I'll give you an example. I once replaced tweeter caps in a Focal speaker. The sound was really good, but for the first 48 hours I was having weird surround sound effects. I thought I could hear things happening behind me and to the right.

Eventually the problem went away. Could I express this as a measure of standard measures like uF, ESR or something else? Probably not. But with some effort and time and money I might have been able to come up with a time / phase based explanation for the effects I was hearing.

I didn't have any of it.

My point is, we perceive something, then we find a way to measure it, then we use that measurement to tell us something. That doesn't mean all perception has been measured.

Best,
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geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
erik_squires
My point is, we perceive something, then we find a way to measure it, then we use that measurement to tell us something. That doesn’t mean all perception has been measured.

>>>>PWB Electronics (The Belts) in UK spent thirty years or so developing audiophile products that do exactly that - change your perception of sound (hearing) but cannot be measured. Some of my products operate via mind-matter interaction and information fields, changing the way you hear sound. I’ve been involved in this sort of thing, things that go bump in the night, for twenty years. The sound you want is in the room the whole time, you just can’t hear it properly. Things are much worse than people realize.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
@erik_squires, since you are a teacher of experimental psychology and you do not see that background too much I thought I would ask you, by any chance are you familiar with the now defunct group PEAR 🍐 Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research? Also, how about Rupert Shekdrake, author of Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home? 🐩
edstrelow
37 posts
 
"Foundations of Measurement" in 3 volumes, Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky. Academic Press.

You might know the last author as a Nobel Laureate."

This I believe refers to Amos Tversky who did not win a Nobel Prize.

edstrelow
37 posts
 
I am more struck by the absence of  basic measurements of physics in this field.  One problem that I have been working on is the extent of vibration especially in headphone cases and speaker enclosures.  I have never seen one measurement reported as to how much there is, even though there is more than a passing interest in reducing this problem.  Grado have a proprietary plastic they use with their phones to reduce vibrations, Sennheiser uses a polymer (probably sorbothane or something related) in some of its high end phones, we use spike under speakers and sorbothane footers and yet I have never seen a single measurement showing how much such things actually reduce vibration, let alone the more difficult measurement of whether people hear the effects.  

It is not enough to merely wave around some theoretical explanation of a phenomenon, that is only speculation.  You need evidence as to how these things actually work and as many here note that usually translates to measuring something. 
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