Why HiFi Gear Measurements Are Misleading (yes ASR talking to you…)

@amir_asr

mp3s are not great. Sure, you could fool someone in to thinking that 2 files are the same on a smartphone over bluetooth, but upon further inspection; in a more resolving system, you could tell the original .wav file and .mp3 file apart easily, no matter what the kbps was, even 320 kbps.

For example there is a feedback loop from the brain to the hearing system to seek out information in a noisy environment. This is the so called "cocktail party effect"

This effect does not exist in a quiet listening environment. You go to visit an audio shop. Walk up the stairs and they’ve got a listening room. No one else there but you and the sales guy.

You’re at home - in your office listening to headphones and/or speakers. The room is at probably 30 dB, perhaps even less. My office for example can be a bit lower than that. The music playing on speakers and headphones will overpower the environment in this case for 2 reasons -

First, the level is louder and...

Midrange frequencies that are louder or within the same octaves effectively cancel out other midrange frequencies. Bass and treble would also soften the resolve of background noise.

I’ve found a bunch of posts on other forums where people are refuting your measurements with their own. I will share them later today....just been busy.

This effect does not exist in a quiet listening environment. You go to visit an audio shop. Walk up the stairs and they’ve got a listening room. No one else there but you and the sales guy.

Yes this "effect" does happen in quiet room. The ability to pick out relevant details in a noisy environment is just one outcome of how the brain adapts. Our hearing including our ability to extract details, hear artifacts, etc. is not static. It is task dependent. At a lay level, it is called selective attention. At a neural level, our brain rapidly adapts neural weighting to the tasks on hand, which means if you are looking for discrepancies in how you think something should sound, you are far more likely to hear them as opposed to them just being "background" information.

The process whereby you adapt to a new piece of equipment is also related. Initially it is new, so you are looking for artifacts, differences, changes. If there are really changes, you are more likely to find them, because your brain has rewired to actively look for them. It will also find things that were always there that you never noticed. Over time, you/your brain settles, and you are back to listening to the music.

mp3s are not great. Sure, you could fool someone in to thinking that 2 files are the same on a smartphone over bluetooth, but upon further inspection; in a more resolving system, you could tell the original .wav file and .mp3 file apart easily, no matter what the kbps was, even 320 kbps.

How confident are you that if presented with only an MP3 file, 320kbps, that you could accurately state that it is MP3?

@nyev ,

You started out with a post asserting that, and I hope I am paraphrasing correctly, that you believe we can have two things that measure identical, or close enough, but hear a difference. First, is that truly what you are asserting? 

I think measurements can provide us with significantly more information about how we will interpret how something sounds than many audiophiles give them credit to do. I think first this belief from audiophiles comes from general lack of understanding of how to interpret measurements or how to apply them. There is a lot of data in a Klippel report for a speaker. It takes some level of training, not extensive, but at least some, and definitely some experience, to read all that data and come up with a fairly good understanding of how that speaker will be perceived by most people, even more so when their room is considered.  Where this data is highly beneficial is where you have the data for the speaker you are currently using, the one you are considering, and know what you like/dislike about your current speaker.  This allows an interpretation of the measurements within a framework of the listener's preferred target sound.

I do think the most contentious thing that ASR does is make the claim for many products that the product is transparent, and not only that it is transparent, but because it is transparent, it will sound the same as this much more expensive product. I would say that question could be easily resolved with a blind format listening test, but I am now quite certain that even if that showed them to be the same, that far too many would not accept the results. I am a bit shocked by the views on blind format listening I have read here.  So I will ask you, what do you thin is an adequate and acceptable way to prove that two products sound the same?

See, all explainable.

I don't think you explained anything.  Tube always has inferior freq. response to SS amp and higher distortion but most people will favor tubes due to its more musical nature.  Of course if a bad tube amp very high distortion you can tell, but most tube amps nowaday are pretty good.

FET amp with its being a square I vs. V curve sounds more tube like but its weakness is that it is less transparent vs. Bipolar and not as dynamic.

Here is the thing.  The freq. response curve and distortion will only tell you so much.  How can measurement tell you if it is a FET amp or Bipolar amp?  But a quick listening will tell you the difference between a FET vs. Bipolar.  FET amp has gotten much better now, but in the old day it was very "hazy" vs. Bipolar.  A lot of amp now uses FET as an input stage and Bipolar at the output stage.  Just like using tube as input stage then SS as the output.

Also if you look at a speaker freq. response and distortion, it is an order of magnitude (or even higher)  higher than anything audio chain (amp, preamp), so  measurement would tell you that it will dominate anything in the upstream components, it is not.  You can hear the difference with different amp or preamp.

Tube always has inferior freq. response to SS amp and higher distortion but most people will favor tubes due to its more musical nature. 

On what do you base this claim?

I myself like my tube amps, but so what?  The vast majority of audiophiles use solid state amplification and are very happy with it.  (And that includes many who have compared with tube amps, or who had previously owned tube amps).

The "haze" that you keep speaking of remains completely anecdotal so it doesn't really address Amir's points about how to reliably make such determinations.