What are we objectivists missing?


I have been following (with much amusement) various threads about cables and tweaks where some claim "game changing improvements" and other claim "no difference".  My take is that if you can hear a difference, there must be some difference.  If a device or cable or whatever measures exactly the same it should sound exactly the same.  So what are your opinions on what those differences might be and what are we NOT measuring that would define those differences?

jtucker

Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh admired Hitler.

So did my concentration camp survivor father.

Objectively, Hitler took a country devastated after WWI and one of the worst states suffering from depression and brought it to a point where it almost took over the world. No such thing as “pure evil”. Or pure anything.

Thanks for these remarks...

Not less worst than Hitler are those who control money who financed his views nevermind his ideas about expelling jews and alleged "inferior" poeple and stole them of their right at first before deciding it is better to kill them...The bankers and corporations  without with there will never be no Hitler, no chemical to kills, etc....

No one is pure evil...You are right.. 

But a systenm can be pure evil .... Some political and economical system are born from pure evil... For exemple the mechanic of enslavement by debts... It is pure evil and pure economical catastrophy....We are free to participate to these systems or not....

 

It seems to escape people that in acoustic and psycho-acoustic, separating perceptive subjectivity and material objective conditions and measure make no sense at all...

It seems to escape some people that we dont listen to the gear, but to the gear/house/room/ speakers relation... Acoustic material dispositions and concepts being the first and last with psycho-acoustic factors to consider...Not the electronic design...

Incredibly some seems to not understand that and prefer to be charcterized by their obsession with their beloved gear branded name or against it, with a measuring tool and a blind test...

Many dont seems to understand that the only way to learn to listen is studying music and/or acoustic...

Picking 10 amplifiers or 100, and comparing them is ridiculous if someone pretend to know audio because of that...

it is more important to know how to embed the gear mechanically, acoustically and electrically than buying many amplifiers or upgrading......

The relation between subjectivity and objectivity is anyway ALWAYS an ongoing dynamical LEARNING  correlative process...

 

 

@erik_squires ...I experience that same (wrote 'sane' 1st, but applicable..*L*) with my omnis' if I'm in a 'surround' situation....HTF is expected, and I like to play with it as I'm able....

It would seem as if that could have a handle one could grip with ongoing digital advances....but the 'trad crowd' will freak over that.... ;)

@djones51

I think the word "impartial" does better work than "objective."

I like what you said here:

Let’s say you’re a restaurant critic. There may be certain foods that you subjectively dislike—ones that are just not to your taste. But when critiquing dishes, you must leave your subjective tastes aside and be objective about what you eat—making objective judgments about things like how it’s cooked and seasoned and how the ingredients work together. Even if you’re served a dish that you subjectively don’t like, it’s your job to objectively assess its quality.

One of the niggling things about scientific experimentation, is that it always involves a selection of which data to pay attention to and how to weight that data. Those aspects of scientific procedure are not written in the "book of nature." Such selection and weighting come back to the purpose of the experiment — what one wants to accomplish. And that's a valuational question. 

One of the great things about science is the corroboration process. No one can get away with the partiality we decry around here because there is a procedure to describe the experiment's objectives, control variables, etc. In other words, to make sure that everyone has aligned what counts as "the" data, valid results, and relevant facts.

Other than these ways of operating, there is nothing more we can do to check our results because we don't have an extra-human access to reality. But this has gotten us to the moon, etc., so there's not much to worry about.

One last point, pertinent to another post. Because listening is about the reception of meaningful sound, the idea that we have machine to measure what we hear misses the point.

Someone could know (and hear) all the words in a poem and yet be quite unskilled in interpreting what it could mean. That's one reason this debate is somewhat wooly and wild -- the "meaning" factor is unaddressed by measurement science.

We hear bass but we listen Beethoven...

But with the help of physical acoustic and psycho-acoustic principles we can learn how to "listen" to acoustic concept in a "musical" way and not only in an acoustical way: timbre, imaging, LEV/ASW ratio, dynamic..

And we can learn how to "hear" Beethoven too in the right acoustic conditions and not only listen to him...

 

We can distinguish music and sound but we cannot separate them in speech and in music..

The meaning level is not over the physical here but permeate it...

 

My audio room is my brain and my brain is all along my audio room.. . A chord is internal and an external event like a Klein bottle through my 2 ears...