Or, ’"How illiteracy, Jonestown, emotions, thought forms, ’Jesus Christ-Lust For Glory’, and Spartacus -- all met on the road, one day"
and created the Brian Jonestown Massacre ?
Amir and Blind Testing
Let me start by saying I like watching Amir from ASR, so please let’s not get harsh or the thread will be deleted. Many times, Amir has noted that when we’re inserting a new component in our system, our brains go into (to paraphrase) “analytical mode” and we start hearing imaginary improvements. He has reiterated this many times, saying that when he switched to an expensive cable he heard improvements, but when he switched back to the cheap one, he also heard improvements because the brain switches from “music enjoyment mode” to “analytical mode.” Following this logic, which I agree with, wouldn’t blind testing, or any A/B testing be compromised because our brains are always in analytical mode and therefore feeding us inaccurate data? Seems to me you need to relax for a few hours at least and listen to a variety of music before your brain can accurately assess whether something is an actual improvement. Perhaps A/B testing is a strawman argument, because the human brain is not a spectrum analyzer. We are too affected by our biases to come up with any valid data. Maybe.
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No such thing. The ever ambiguous they - drowned everyone who saw it. No witnesses.
I was just going through the history of digital audio and also looking at class D design. In both cases, human hearing comes down to largely being a drawing or writing down of a direction of the conclusion of both bits of work. Long histories of discussion about the math and the engineering ... charts, drawings, formulas..etc... then, finally...at the end.. an arrow pointing at an image of a human ear. That’s all she wrote. In digital audio, it is all math and engineering...where the human ear is barely mentioned. Other than being the final target of all the mathematical works. Same for Class D design. All math, and the ear as a nebulous target. Zero mention of the intricacies of the human ear or how humans are connected to said ear, or how any of the ears exist as being ’individually differentiated’ in qualities and capacities.. and are also self determined, as outcomes (and remain a variable in tuning, filtering and scope!) in said ear-brain combinations. The target was never really ever considered in either of the mathematical and engineering cases. Where the math and the engineering is good but the ear is a individual variable and is not all that well understood, to this day, regarding final aspects of capacity and quality or how it works, in the minutia. If that’s not a massive case of being bassackward, I don’t know what is. It’s a case of finalizing an answer for a question that is not fully defined enough for the answer (digital and class D) to be properly connected to the question. Where, ultimately, there is an ’not equals’ sign between them. It’s an OK fit, it’s an averaged fit ----not a perfected one. A scientist, a theoretician, would catch that. They are trained to. It's in their mental wiring. Their mental wheelhouse of capacities. It is simply good clear logic and analysis in the art of exploration. An engineer is not really properly taught such aspects as their work is primarily not of such a nature. That is the idea behind the concept and execution of the class or direction called ’engineering’. It’s about dogmatic text ( eg, theory taught as law) being applied to relatively fully understood and fleshed out concepts, for the purposes of building out the world in the physical sense. Things well enough understood to build physical objects. Engineering. In all seriousness, engineering came about as a class or grouping of people, in the context of education, where the group of people were not generally mentally capable of the aspects of science that requires an ease in abstract thinking and imagination. Not their wheelhouse. The human mind, being ensconced within an animal carrier that colors all it’s thoughts...at it’s limits of cognition..it goes to ground and attempts to reach out in forms of hard physicality, not abstract application of ideas and ideals. We’re talking about individual aspects of human intelligence and psychological reach and range, as it plays out between individuals. The renaissance men who created the concept of engineering as a class of endeavor, they took this aspect of human limits reverting to dogmatism, and turned it into something useful, for having large amounts of people who could build out the physical world. Thus, rote repeat and texts and teaching of a dogmatic bent/nature were born, into academia. And the world of engineering was born. Levels of academia tied to generalized levels of intellectual and mental capacities. That’s how it works. The problem is that the engineering type of mindset, which is a notably larger group of people than the abstract thinkers who created the enginnering group endeavor as a class of endeavor.., said engineering group wants to pick up those now (created for them) biblical texts of ’scientific law’ of what is really scientific theory, and promote it as unbreakable law. This is how we end up with a large number of people not well versed in science and exploratory works in to unknowns, who think they are, coming along and telling us that ears must obey the law of the land and we are all fooling ourselves. They are marching around wearing the entire field of science backward. Where academia purposely created this overall scenario - with this unintended but unsurprising outcome ...and we must ALL obey or have some sort of scientific papal bull issued against us, if we don’t. Right...... Academia recognizes this and you won’t find a single professor in any upper quality academic situation in the world who disagrees with my general analysis, here. You might find one or two but ~+99% or more would agree with my general analysis of this audio related situation. It’s when the dogmatic mind is free of academia and scientific rigor in execution and thinking-- it then reverts to type and we end up with this infection that poisons discussions of complexities in audio. |
Great post teo_audio thanks... Your post illustrate why i do what i do... My Helmholtz "mechanical equalizer" with one hundred adjusted tubes resonators and diffusers tuned by my ears, use my ears not a microphone, and not some testing frequency but a large bandwidth spectral set which is called an instrument timbre or voice to guide me in the process of acoustic optimization.. This mechanical equalization work to optimize the room /speakers ---> relation and this grid of Helmhotz resonators and diffusers modify the pressure zones distribution in the room being a permament WORKING part of my room... This mechanical equalizer is useful to fine tune the relation " from the room TO the speakers with my ears"...
But i can use also with it a useful tool to complement it : an electronical equalizer to fine tune the Speakers/room ---> relation this time... Why? Because with it i will fine tune the relation "from the speakers TO the room without my ears" using not instrument timbre for my ears, but a tested frequency for a microphone and using an integrated pink noise generator in the Sansui and an automatic equalization process.... Then the two process are complementary and add something the other CANNOT add ... But unbeknowst to most people electronical equalization is not enough ALONE for helping our specific ears to recreate all acoustic factors like listener envelopment for example... And mechanical equalization so wonderful it is, is not "accurate" nor perfect but is like our imperfect ears are imperfect ...But imperfection is not a defect here it is the SPECIFIC way our brain interpret sound experience FOR US Individually... We are all different ... My dream now is buying this:
Only a mechanical equalizer alone or only an electronical equalizer alone is not enough to OPTIMIZE a small Speakers/ room/ears complex relation... Acoustic is the sleeping princess all the pieces of gear are only the 7 working dwarves...Psycho-acoustic is the kissing Prince, and only him can awake the Princees...
The human ears is the gravific CENTER of acoustic...psycho-acoustic must rule over physical acoustic in music listening...then mechanical equalization and electronical equalization can be used at the same time to complement each other ... Correlation between subjective perception and objective measures is the WAY... Not one without the other.... Gear brand name fetichists and "subjective" tasting fetichist are like measuring tool fetichists , the two groups negate or undermine the CORRELATION at the center of acoustic and psycho-acoustic relation which is the only HEART of audio experience...
😁😊 😁😊 😁😊
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@teo_audio - You do know that Brian Jonestown Massacre is the name of a band, no? |
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