objective vs. subjective rabbit hole

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»

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

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

More food for thoughts here:

Intro to the article

"A Critique of the Critical Cochlea: Hopf—a Bifurcation—Is Better Than None"

A. J. Hudspeth, Frank Jülicher,² and Pascal Martin³

«The sense of hearing achieves its striking sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and dynamic range through an active process mediated by the inner ear’s mechanoreceptive hair cells. Although the active process renders hearing highly nonlinear and produces a wealth of complex behaviors, these various characteristics may be understood as consequences of a simple phenomenon: the Hopf bifurcation. Any critical oscillator operating near this dynamic instability manifests the properties demonstrated for hearing: amplification with a specific form of compressive nonlinearity and frequency tuning whose sharpness depends on the degree of amplification. Critical oscillation also explains spontaneous otoacoustic emissions as well as the spectrum and level dependence of the ear’s distortion products. Although this has not been realized, several valuable theories of cochlear function have achieved their success by incorporating critical oscillators.

The technical specifications of the human ear are remarkable. We can hear sounds that evoke mechanical vibrations of magnitudes comparable to those produced by thermal noise (de Vries 1948; Sivian and White 1933). Hearing is so sharply tuned to specific frequencies that trained musicians can distinguish tones differing in frequency by only 0.1% (Spiegel and Watson 1984). Finally, our ears can process sounds over a range of amplitudes encompassing six orders of magnitude, which corresponds to a trillionfold range in stimulus power (Knudsen 1923).

These striking characteristics of our hearing emerge because the ear is not a passive sensory receptor, but possesses an active process that augments audition in three ways (reviewed in Hudspeth 2008; Manley 2000, 2001). First, amplification renders hearing several hundred times as sensitive as would be expected for a passive system. The active process next exhibits tuning that sharpens our frequency discrimination. Finally, a compressive nonlinearity ensures that inputs spanning an enormous range of sound-pressure levels are systematically encoded by a modest range of mechanical vibrations and in turn of receptor potentials and nerve-fiber firing rates. The active process additionally exhibits the striking epiphenomenon of spontaneous otoacoustic emission, the production of sound by an ear in the absence of external stimulation. Although considerable attention has been devoted to these properties in mammalian and especially human hearing, the four defining features of the active process are equally characteristic of nonmammalian tetrapods (reviewed in Manley 2001).»

conclusion of the article :
«Despite the power of critical oscillation to explain many cochlear phenomena, the idea has provoked some skepticism in the decade since its introduction. The principal objections seem to stem from consideration of engineering principles. The design of electrical circuits customarily emphasizes linearity: for the reproduction of music and other sounds, as well as in the amplification, transmission, and storage of time sequences in general, every effort is made to minimize distortions arising from nonlinearity of the apparatus. Although the proposal of critical oscillation inevitably introduces nonlinearity into our understanding of the ear’s operation, that choice is thrust on us: mammalian hearing is highly nonlinear, so much so that attention has been directed specifically to the sense’s essential nonlinearity.

A second common goal of engineering is stability: whenever possible, it is desirable that apparatus be immune from spontaneous oscillation and other instabilities. The ear’s behavior offers us little choice but to accept the presence of oscillators within the cochlea, given that spontaneous otoacoustic emissions are ubiquitous. Even though these oscillators operate individually at the brink of instability, however, the mammalian cochlea as a whole is generally stable and reliable. Evolution plays by rules different from those of the best engineers: the least sliver of selective advantage trumps the esthetic and practical considerations of circuit design. The evidence discussed throughout this review suggests that the positive qualities of a critical oscillator–including amplification, frequency tuning, and compressive nonlinearity–have led to the selection of an active process operating at a Hopf bifurcation.»

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944685/

Overemphasis under the characters  in the text is mine... 😁😊

I applauded the day one of the forums I frequent -- Audiostyle.com -- created an "ObjectiveFi" section for objective zealots. 

I have no problem with electrical engineering and physics discussions.  I have no problem with discussions about why capacitor “A” might be objectively better than “C”.  What I do have a problem with are measurement zealots – i.e., component “C” must be better than “G” because its noise measurements are better, or it contains "X", or it doesn’t contain "A" etc.       

This forum among all the others I began frequenting decades ago, formerly had very few postings about snake oil, double blind testing, confirmational bias etc., as if those terms and the term buyer beware, weren’t already known and understood.  And if the premise of caveat emptor wasn’t learned in one’s teens before discretionary income was sufficient to buy a CD, let alone the type of hardware being discussed in this forum, using an audio forum for that sort of post and education is too little, too late! 

Thus, the goal of far too many objectivist posters, seems to be the need to save equipment buyers from themselves. The purpose of their posts is to cite how correct they are, because their measurements say they are.  Perhaps they want to quantify their choice or purchase.  They seem to get the adrenalin rush of an activist naysayer and debunker, by deriding equipment manufacturers and owners, based on the measurements that seem to prove how bad their equipment is, or how bad their buying decisions are.  Great, if that’s the objectivist’s thing, buy a Topping DAC and have fun listening to its measurements.  

My experience in my audio room is strictly a subjective, emotional one.  Equipment measurements have been available forever, from when Hi-Fi was basically a DIY hobby.  While I may have glanced at measurements, especially at input and output values, I have never chosen a product based upon anything but listening to it!  Duh, that’s what I do with it. 

I don’t give a damn how a component measures.  I make equipment buying decisions solely for my enjoyment not someone else’s!  So, I could care less whether the item I choose is floating in snake oil, its distortion measurements suck, cables can’t make a difference, or someone’s measurements prove that I can’t be hearing what I am.  I buy equipment based on my sonic preferences; more importantly however, I almost exclusively come here to read posts from others regarding their personal sonic preferences and experiences.

There is no audio heaven road map, no reliable equipment choosing matrix based on objective measurements, nor should there be.  If that day comes, we will all be listening to the same hardware.