Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

Paul Barton, of PSB, worked with Toole, Harmon and others back in the day of speaker testing. Check out Darko's interview with him. Worth a listen.

Lots of people like to name drop the audio greats and then go on to reengineer their methods of testing while hoping no one catches on or knows better on just how to do it, fancying themselves as being oh, so, scientific.

Paul pointed out that when doing the first round of speaker testing (1/2 hours worth), the tests were thrown out the window due to the fact that the people were listening to the room and not the speakers. Evaluations were all over the place. It's why one has a better chance on getting their ears around a speaker in the confines of their own listening room.

It tool at least half an hour for their hearing to settle down before they could go back in and when they did, the very same speakers in the very same room sounded completely different and there was more consensus on what sounded good to them. Their hearing had adjusted to the room and not the speakers. 

Our ears adapt to a changing environment enough so that with enough time, we can better understand what we hear. We do it automatically when the change isn't that great but we still do adjust. Some call it second nature.

What bugs me the most is that those who do the name dropping know damn well the facts I just stated if they have, indeed, looked into these speaker tests and conveniently left out those salient facts, relying on ignorance to carry the day.

All the best,
Nonoise

Yes my new opinion is he is a measurementophile not an audiophile.  We should’ve be talking about him in these forums.

@painter24 

"So you see, when I fallaciously sit down, kick back, throw some tunes on, I'm not really thinking graphs, charts, measurements, or how I can be saved from nasty audio manufacturers. "

First, thank you for that heartfelt story.  I am so sad to hear you about your blood disorder especially when found during that period.  I can't possibly put myself in your shoes and imagine what it must be like for yourself, and work conditions you had to deal with.

On the above quote, please allow me to say that we in the other camp absolutely do the same thing.  Despite our differences, we all share the love for music and what it brings to our lives.  None of us are thinking about graphs or anything when listening to wonderful music that moves us.

As audiophiles though, as opposed to just music lovers, we also have a second passion and that is chasing equipment that best optimizes that experience.  It is in that process that we differ.  When it comes to purchasing something new, we seek out objective and reliable data such as measurements, prior research, engineering knowledge, etc.  It is then that we look at said "graphs."  Graphs teach us about the incredible technology that is behind what we just turn on and listen.

We also sense betrayal when casual and incorrect subjective assessments get us to spend tons of money on things that absolutely do nothing for the sound of our system.  But serve to bias us enough to then go and tell others they are gifts to audiophiles in how they "remove veils, lower noise floor, blacker backgrounds, faster bass, etc."  You can't fault hundreds of thousands of your fellow audiophiles to see value in this.  And certainly not shame them by implying that they must think of graphs when enjoying music. 

On the other hand, you have many fellow subjectivist audiophiles who are constantly worrying whether the most innocent thing in your system is impacting the sound.  I know audiophiles who experimented with the cover and screw for their outlets and arrived at the conclusion that yet another veil was removed when those were upgraded.  Clearly they are not just sitting back with confidence we have on the objectivist side that none of this matters and our systems are performant.

So please, please, please, don't make stereotypes of us the way you are doing with the implication that we don't listen to music but just look at graphs.  This accusation is made all the time by subjectivists who don't like measurements.  It is untrue, and unkind to the Nth degree.

"As Dr. Floyd Toole said "Two ears and a brain respond very differently to a complex sound field  and are much more analytical, than an omni-directional mic and analyzer."  Is Dr. Toole wrong?"

He is absolutely right when it comes to acoustic measurements above transition frequencies of a few hundred hertz.  Each ear hears something different due to wavelength of audio becoming smaller relative to the size of our head and torso.  The brain then gets involved to adjudicate what the net summary is of the two differing signals from each ear.  I have spent weeks of my life literally across multiple forums explaining this including the last drawn out battle in a recent thread on ASR.  From my first post there:

"2. He is optimizing for his eyes, not ears. Two ears and a brain don't work like a single microphone and a graph as Dr. Toole would again say. The notion that reflections are "bad" is folklore as comprehensive peer reviewed has repeatedly shown. Yet, it has become one of the "internet rules" to chase them using measurements. Doing so will lead to a completely dead room when you are done. Ask any high-end acoustician what the #1 problem with DIY acoustic is and they tell you people creating dead rooms because of this mistake."

We are not discussing acoustic measurements here.  We are talking about everything leading up to and including speakers.  Dr. Toole has dedicated his life in correlating measurements of speakers to good sound.  The culminated in a major standard in the form of ANSR/CTA/CEA-2034 which I follow when posting measurements of speakers.

Alas, that correlation of measurements to speaker sound is about 70 to 80% predictive.  To wit, I have liked speakers that didn't measure that well, and disliked some that did.  It could be that my subjective assessments are wrong.  Or that we are hitting on less known (e.g. role of directivity in preference).

When you go upstream of the speaker though, you will see 100% agreement from Dr. Toole on measurements speaking the truth on whether something is performant or even functional.  You don't see anything in Dr. Toole's book about screwing around with cables, power conditioners, etc.  So I would not bring in his name in this context.

"Yes my new opinion is he is a measurementophile not an audiophile.  We should’ve be talking about him in these forums."

Well, I don't know what your old opinion was but the new one couldn't be more wrong.  As I have said here, listening tests are more valuable than measurements.  The hitch is, you have to do them in controlled manner with statistical rigor.  That is time consuming and frankly, not always fun to do.  So we resort to not only measurements but also science and engineering of audio.  Combine all of this and you get powerful evidence of whether something makes a difference to fidelity and if so, what that impact might be.

Go and do random test and all you generate is noise, not data.