Why HiFi Gear Measurements Are Misleading (yes ASR talking to you…)
About 25 years ago I was inside a large room with an A-frame ceiling and large skylights, during the Perseid Meteor Shower that happens every August. This one time was like no other, for two reasons: 1) There were large, red, fragmenting streaks multiple times a minute with illuminated smoke trails, and 2) I could hear them.
Yes, each meteor produced a sizzling sound, like the sound of a frying pan.
Amazed, I Googled this phenomena and found that many people reported hearing this same sizzling sound associated with meteors streaking across the sky. In response, scientists and astrophysicists said it was all in our heads. That, it was totally impossible. Why? Because of the distance between the meteor and the observer. Physics does not allow sound to travel fast enough to hear the sound at the same time that the meteor streaks across the sky. Case closed.
ASR would have agreed with this sound reasoning based in elementary science.
Fast forward a few decades. The scientists were wrong. Turns out, the sound was caused by radiation emitted by the meteors, traveling at the speed of light, and interacting with metallic objects near the observer, even if the observer is indoors. Producing a sizzling sound. This was actually recorded audibly by researchers along with the recording of the radiation. You can look this up easily and listen to the recordings.
Takeaway - trust your senses! Science doesn’t always measure the right things, in the right ways, to fully explain what we are sensing. Therefore your sensory input comes first. You can try to figure out the science later.
I’m not trying to start an argument or make people upset. Just sharing an experience that reinforces my personal way of thinking. Others of course are free to trust the science over their senses. I know this bothers some but I really couldn’t be bothered by that. The folks at ASR are smart people too.
That statement in itself is subjective. I don't think ASR has any data on whether something is within or beyond our hearing threshold. The tests they produce cannot be used to say whether something sounds warm, bright, musical, thin, analytical, has a wide/narrow soundstage ... and so much more. At the end of the day, you just have to listen. |
Of course it isn’t a subjective claim. It’s an objective empirical claim. It’s either true or false, and testable.
Then you aren’t familiar with ASR. Amir often references studied threshholds for human hearing (including as I recall, tests he was part of producing in developing codecs).
1. Blind tests can determine if there is a detectable difference in any of those qualities between different gear. 2. I don’t mean this as an insult, but you seem to be projecting your own ignorance of what is known about the correlation of measurements and what we hear. We know plenty about what combination of harmonics create which timbres (how do you think synths have managed to mimic real instruments). Any good mixer understands which frequency changes will influence most of the qualities you mention:
I use EQ all the time to alter warmth, body, brightness, thinness, etc. So if you know enough about frequency response, you can predict to a certain degree how various deviations from neutral will sound (and Amir provides among the best measurements you can get, including for speakers). You CAN predict what you won’t hear via many measurements. And when it comes to complex outputs like speakers, it may be difficult to totally predict how you will hear something from the measurements, but that is different from the outright denial of the correlation of measurements to sonic character that you seem to be arguing.
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@prof Amir measures to many pieces of audio gear to really do a good job, and when a mistake comes to light he corrects it, on what page 10 when he could easily put it in the OP. |
