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objective vs. subjective rabbit hole

There are many on this site who advocate, reasonably enough, for pleasing one’s own taste, while there are others who emphasize various aspects of judgment that aspire to be "objective." This dialectic plays out in many ways, but perhaps the most obvious is the difference between appeals to subjective preference, which usually stress the importance of listening, vs. those who insist on measurements, by means of which a supposedly "objective" standard could, at least in principle, serve as arbiter between subjective opinions.

It seems to me, after several years of lurking on and contributing to this forum, that this is an essential crux. Do you fall on the side of the inviolability of subjective preference, or do you insist on objective facts in making your audio choices? Or is there some middle ground here that I’m failing to see?

Let me explain why this seems to me a crux here. Subjective preferences are, finally, incontestable. If I prefer blue, and you prefer green, no one can say either of us is "right." This attitude is generous, humane, democratic—and pointless in the context of the evaluation of purchase alternatives. I can’t have a pain in your tooth, and I can’t hear music the way you do (nor, probably, do I share your taste). Since this forum exists, I presume, as a source of advice from knowledgable and experienced "audiophiles" that less "sophisticated" participants can supposedly benefit from, there must be some kind of "objective" (or at least intersubjective) standard to which informed opinions aspire. But what could possibly serve better as such an "objective standard" than measurements—which, and for good reasons, are widely derided as beside the point by the majority of contributors to this forum?

To put the question succinctly: How can you hope to persuade me of any particular claim to audiophilic excellence without appealing to some "objective" criteria that, because they claim to be "objective," are more than just a subjective preference? What, in short, is the point of reading all these posts if not to come to some sort of conclusion about how to improve one’s system?

128x128snilf
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artemus_5's avatar
artemus_5
1,992 posts
 

I'm reminded of the rich man & Lazarus story

Lazarus, the beggar died and went to Paradise. Rich man ends up in Hades and crying out to Abraham

‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, 28 for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

29 “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

30 “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

 

OTOH, you have hundreds of people who are  ear witnesses, yet you want a machine, built by a man to tell you the final "truth"? IOW you want the truth but only on YOUR terms. Nah. truth is truth, no matter who believes it. Truth does not line up to man's whims. Man needs to align with truth.

One of the biggest problem with the progressive mindset is that it has little or no understanding of human nature. The ramifications of that are tremendous

mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,196 posts
 

I had to Google about 10 minutes to form an appropriate response as there were some items I was unsure of.

I am glad to be less "deluded" than the crowd...if you must think for answering me... 😊

Which brings me back to how I should have started this thread and why I do not read your posts. Is there any point you are trying to make, because so far, you have not made one.

To give credit, you are attempting to relate experience to scientific principles even if, in my opinion, your attempts appear misguided. Far too many posts come across as a call to magic.

Thanks for your appreciation ...
But there is a paradox here: you answered some other posters which are easy to contradict or correct but for me you say "you dont have to read my post" ? and yet  i make you work net search to understand what i spoke about? 😁😊

Anyway.... My point is simple .... Evaluation of gear by some selected sets of measures make sense ONLY in some hearing theory context...
I put an article on my post who contrast the big difference between passive linear mesuring tools and active non linear tools like the hearing system...

Now for your argument here about bi-stability....

Do you know a characteristic of a system where stochastic resonance will work? It must be bistable. Your leap of faith in another thread wrt non-linearity in hearing and DAC operation, missed that the researchers in the papers you linked highlighted the non-linearities in the physical nature of the cochlear. It would appear the bistable element in hearing would be neurons that relates to stochastic resonance. That would mean they have an element of quantization, making them digital in some fashion, not analog. Digital has fundamental non-linearity due to quantization too. Do you have anything that reveals limits of quantization of human hearing? If not, I have to assume it would relate to minimum hearing thresholds.

The non linear nature of the hearing ability are not only in the physical structure of the cochlea but in the brain itself...Neurons are not the ultimate processing levels units at all.... Microtubules are...
And decisions dont imply necessarily only bi-stable structure but also resonant multi stable living rythmic multi processing parallel structures...
Rythm and resonance with and between multi stable parallel processing units are more fundamental than the old model of binary linear digital processing of neurons gates a bi-stable processing which anyway emerge from them at one level not the opposite ...

First read Penrose-Hameroff and also this guy Anirban Bandyopadhyay :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYX9c10ECAE

He want to create an artificial brain with time crystals technology...With "music" or hierarchical rythmic structures in parallel processing not bi-stable digital structure...

https://www.routledge.com/Nanobrain-The-Making-of-an-Artificial-Brain-from-a-Time-Crystal/Bandyopadhyay/p/book/9781439875490

 

 

 

And meditate this news:

https://news.mit.edu/2022/neurons-are-fickle-electric-fields-are-more-reliable-information-0401

«In a sense, once established, the (electrical) field imposes itself on the neurons like the conductor of an orchestra in which each neuron is a single musician, says Dimitris Pinotsis»

 

 

 

deludedaudiophile
493 posts
 

Stochastic resonance requires bi-stable (or multi-stable), essentially it requires an analog to quantization, pun intended.

mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,196 posts
 

Stochastic resonance requires bi-stable (or multi-stable), essentially it requires an analog to quantization, pun intended.

 

This is not an argument AGAINST anything i said from the beginning of this thread..

It is a common place fact...We need also to translate quantization into anolog way...So what?

My argument are that the hearing system is deeply non linear, brain included... Which make it able to do a very refine analysis of way more powerful resolution than science tought of possible before...

And brain hearing dont work like any tool we have...Because sound recognition is also based on some semantic evolutively acquired filters and not only pure physical constrainsts...These interpretative filters are distributed in the "music" of the electrical field itself directing the neurons...

My argument is there is no way we can replace listening experiments by our electronical tools numbers in audio ...

Psycho-acoustic is based on the CORRELATION between a subjective perceiver and an OBJECTIVE installation with a sets of measures...The important word here is not objective but correlation....And this correlation is two way yes, but the subjective element is the fundamental one...

It is precisely the object studies of psycho-acoustic to understand WHY "accurate" in an objective way differ from "accurate" in a subjective way for example studying the acquired semantic filtering biases of musician and their superioir ability to perceive sounds...

It is precisely becsause of the non linear structure of the hearing systemnot only of the cochlea that science study the way to analyse the signal/noise ratio on different scale and for different "semantic" aspects of the working brain...In some case noise become signals and more signals noise...

Then some few zealots in ASR claiming that a dac is reducible to some electrical measures whitout the need to listen to it to KNOW it is ridiculous...Like those who reject any  measures set a priori...

 

«

In a sense, once established, the field imposes itself on the neurons like the conductor of an orchestra in which each neuron is a single musician, says Dimitris Pinotsis, the study’s lead and corresponding author. Even if the musicians change, the conductor still coordinates whomever is in the chairs to produce the same result.

“This ensures that the brain can still function even if some neurons die,” says Pinotsis, an associate professor at University of London and a research affiliate in the Picower Institute. “The field ensures the same output of the ensemble of neurons is achieved even after individual parts change. The brain does not need individual neurons, just the conductor, the electric field, to be the same.”»

 

 

https://news.mit.edu/2022/neurons-are-fickle-electric-fields-are-more-reliable-information-0401

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