Articles You Feel Should be Shared

Here’s a great article published in SOS way back in 2011 recently posted by fellow member rauliruegas.

How the Ear Works by Emmanuel Deruty

Everything from Fletcher-Munson, Darwinist speech based EQs, high frequency hearing loss to the 140dB dynamic range of the human ear.

Grim reading in part, but incredibly useful when auditioning equipment.

"Not that I want to sound grumpy, but if you want to make a career out of sound engineering, mixing or mastering, stop smoking, get some exercise and turn that monitoring volume down. Otherwise, in 25 years from now, you're out of a job..."

https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/how-ear-works#para4

2 hugely inconvenient truths in high-end audio.

It’s plainly obvious that the industry does not care for sound quality or for the whims of audiophiles. Not now, not ever. Like others before me I too have sometimes found CD sound quality to be inferior to that on YouTube. Can’t even blame the so-called loudness wars for the industry’s blatant indifference.
They just don't care about recording fidelity.

A shocking state of affairs.

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/what-in-the-world-is-going-on


Secondly, whilst some audiophiles will debate the merits of different amplifiers, CD players, DACs, interconnect and loudspeaker cables, the evidence from controlled blind listening tests suggests that these differences are largely imagined.

There are innumerable examples of this but here’s just one by the enigmatic author Mario Cavolo, a self confessed audiophile and no stranger to the high-end.

https://youtu.be/cjbZSemcMvU

You find interesting articles. I used to be enamored with the bling for lack of a better word of high priced gear and always swore it sounded better. I started questioning this notion with the onset of crazy priced cables. Another thing was unbeknownst to her my wife made me question my notions as well when she would say I'm sorry I have no idea what you did but it sounds the same to me. It's hard get people to question long held beliefs and I'm not sure very many on this site will but I enjoy your thread, keep em coming. 

20 year old limited study on people's preference , Analog vs. Digital.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40319018

djones51,

Listener Preferences and Perception of Digital versus Analog Live Concert Recordings 

John M. Geringer and Patrick Dunnigan

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40319018


Excellent research article from 2000 of the kind that the audiophile press never seem to find time to even mention.
For that reason alone articles of this kind are worth more than decades unfocused conjecture.

As I was reading through I was becoming increasingly curious as to what the results would be. Which version of the live event would the students prefer?

There will always be inevitable questions regarding the methodology employed in recording but the results seem fairly conclusive enough to me.

Plenty more of interest here. Here's just one of many preliminary observations.


"In an often cited study, Kirk (1956)
demonstrated that despite differences in technical signal quality, listeners
preferred the sound systems they had listened to consistently. Kirk concluded
that learning played an important role in determining preference for sound
reproduction systems and that continued contact with a particular system produces shifts in perception towards that system."


What does this suggest about our preferences, and what they're based upon?