Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

Amir said...."I do too!  There is no question that is what he perceived.  It is just that we don't know if that depended on the actual output of said DACs or other extraneous factors.  Our brain is a wonderful thing when it comes to manufacturing facts.  To make sure that is not happening, we only trust listening tests where only the sound is involved, not the rest of your senses. "

I understand what you are saying but he said that he did not know brand or price and still found a difference, and that's good enough for me.  It seems like you doubted his conclusions due to it not being a perfect blind test.  People find that insulting.  Rightly so.  

I just think that we need to give more credit to the imperfect listening tests that we all do.   I have sat and A/B' d between sources like phono stages and DACs and knowing what they are had no influence on how they sounded.   I wasn't invested either way.  I truly wanted to know how they compared.  Sometimes even forgetting which I had on which input.  Sometimes I wanted the less expensive one to sound better for instance.  And it didn't.

I guess my point is that, yes, we are subject to subjectivity and measurements can keep us a little more sober about that, but generally speaking our ears do a pretty good job, how it sounds to us is all that matters and measurements will not tell us that.  All that can be heard cannot be measured. And what we hear is more important than any measurement.  

In fact measurements are just another way to be fooled.  One might argue that knowing a piece measures well causes more bias than if we knew nothing about the measurements.  So in fact the objectivists may be more subjective and biased and deluded than those that do not know a thing about the measurements.  They think, oh, well, that DAC measured great on ASR so it must sound good.  So it sounds good to them.  

"Honestly - the report so far has no helpful descriptions or details about how things really sounded at the show, with a lack of descriptive detail.  Also noting very limited praise for many systems we are familiar with, particularly with high cost systems. High cost systems can sound good too, yet there is limited reporting.  "

They can.  But I can only report what I heard based on music they played when I was there.  Many people enjoy seeing what was there, and what music was played there.  And a word or two about that experience.  That you find no value in that is fine.  Many of your fellow audiophiles disagree.

As I noted in those threads, at other shows manufacturers would pause and talk about the technology on display.  No company did that so I had nothing to share on that front.

Other than this, I am not a paid reporter as to sit there and take copious notes.  Many non-paid posters who cover every suite as I do just post pictures and nothing else. 

Also keep in mind that these show reports are meant to be timely.  Folks lose interest if you cover them weeks later.  To that end, I spent two entire day and night preparing and posting what you saw as the show was going on.  As it is, I was up until 2 or 3 am posting images, looking up songs, etc.

As to high end system, yes, they can be capable but if system is not optimized for the room -- and scant few were -- then the sound is not going to be that great.  Ditto if they play whatever they want instead of asking what the audience wants to hear.

All in all, a few rooms did stand out and one was Dutch and Dutch.  Stereophile reporter and local reporter Jason, agreed with the same and voted them as the best there was.  So turns out you don't need to spend that much money to get superb sound (although $15K is not cheap).

"I understand what you are saying but he said that he did not know brand or price and still found a difference, and that's good enough for me.  It seems like you doubted his conclusions due to it not being a perfect blind test.  People find that insulting.  Rightly so.  "

What do you mean "rightly so?"  If heaven forbid you get cancer and you go to your doctor and say you are taking megavitamins and it is curing your cancer, you think him telling you that is not evidence of it working, you consider than an insult?  I hope not.  He wants reliable data, not anecdotes.

You say the test was not a "perfect blind."  How do you know how blind it was?  Did he match levels?  Did he repeat it enough times to rule out chance?  A one-time AB test without level matching generates nothing useful.

And comments like this tells me the test was not blind at all: "I can tell you that the Topping I listened to sounded like crap with female voices. So do not tell me like some of your minions post, that all well measuring Dacs sound the same.""

His bias toward cheap/chinese products is showing from a mile away.  In addition to that, we know what he says is hugely improperable.  I have tested the Topping DAC and its distortion and noise is below threshold of hearing.  Against this landscape, he needs to provide far more than an anecdote. 

Again, he could be right but the only way to prove it against a mountain of evidence to the contrary is to at least make a half plan to do a blind test.  Don't do pretend blind tests.  They are of no value.  I cover all of this in a video I did after I got tired of industry people claiming that the tests they do are "blind:"

https://youtu.be/vRG8TaxGcbU

I used measurements today making cookies. 

"I just think that we need to give more credit to the imperfect listening tests that we all do.   I have sat and A/B' d between sources like phono stages and DACs and knowing what they are had no influence on how they sounded.   I wasn't invested either way.  I truly wanted to know how they compared.  Sometimes even forgetting which I had on which input.  Sometimes I wanted the less expensive one to sound better for instance.  And it didn't."

It doesn't matter if you are or are not invested in the outcome: you can still arrive at totally wrong conclusions.  All I have to do is make one product louder than the other and get you to say it sounds better even if you were primed to think it wouldn't.  And indeed, it can sound massively better with more detail, blacker backgrounds, etc.  Yet, if I match levels that difference instantly disappears.  

Our hearing is also bi-directional and highly elastic (variable) making such tests very difficult to do correctly in the manner you are going about it.  Here is a real example.

Jason Victor Serinus is one of the stereophile reviewers who lives close to our audiophile group.  He was kind enough to invite us to his home.  Once there, we broke into two groups, taking turns to listen to a new amplifier he had under review.  Group one went in and came out and without saying anything to us, we went and listened.  There, Jason played his own amplifier against the unit under review.  At the end, he asked which sounded better.  Majority voted one way.  I did not vote because I could not at all assess a difference in such a test.

We then adjourned and went back to where first group was. They immediately asked which amplifier we voted was better.  The group expressed that to amazement of group one as the had picked the exact opposite!  We are talking two groups of 10 to 15 audiophiles arriving at completely different conclusion after listening to the same comparison!

Clearly you can't have two versions of truth.  So what went wrong?  Jason said that the problem was the order.  He had played the amplifiers in reverse order for our group as opposed to the first.  This is a problem as we tend to scrutinize the sound of the second item in a comparison more as we pay more attention and hear more detail, etc.  We get around this in proper blind test by a) randomizing what is playing and b) repeating the test enough times to rule out faulty voting.

Really, if casual tests were good enough we would do them all the time in industry and research community.  But we don't because we know they generate completely wrong results.  They just do.  Until this is learned and really internalized, audiophiles will continue to make the wrong choices in their selection of audio gear.  And waste money on tons of stuff that does nothing for the sound.  The science of our perception and audio is conclusive here.

Having said all of this, what you do for yourself is fine. But please don't put it forward as the poster did with that "minion" comment as if you are on the side of right.  You are anything but.