Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

@yowser John Wick?! More like John D...

He has managed to alienate me, when I was a pretty big fan before. Plus I am still on ASR and will just continue to post while subverting the norm. He thinks he is the second coming of Jesus for audio and loves the smell of his own farts.

@amir_asr Is great at deflecting. Thats about it.

@mahgister sounds like my experience.

I am not in this cult , i think when i read... I dont read only Hans Van Maanen by the way...And anyway all his work is founded on psycho-acoustic, among other thing funmdamental, the psycho-acoustic fact behind Oppenheim and Magnasco experiments you NEVER EXPLAINED NOR COMMENTED HERE EVEN AFTER I SUGGESTED IT 5 TIMES....

You could not because this will demoslish your pretense to capture the audible qualities through measurements... And you could no more bash audiophiles for their ignorance which is an half truth, because they ignore acoustic most of them but at least they trust their ears even if they go in the wrong direction ( upgrading with the wrong purchases) by lack of information...Anyway even your "disciples" trust their ears at some point... Your analysis of gear dont cause any unanimous acceptation for sure...

It is more easy for you with dac, less easy for amplifier, and way less confortable with speakers/room... More you go near the human hearings the more difficult it is to impose your analysis tools... At the end even yourself know and you said it that hearing must be used...

Now for the tasteful pleasure of Hilde45 my post will stop here...😊

I let Van Maanen spoke :

«The discussion on the perceived quality of audio systems often lacks
objective criteria. This is partly due to the subjective experience of the
ill-defined property "quality", covering many aspects, partly to the lack
of understanding of all the properties that influence the perceived
quality. The latter is not synonymous with the technical quality of a
system to begin with.
Disregarding non-linear distortions, the frequency response between 20 Hz
and 20 kHz of a system is very often taken as a major parameter determining
the quality of a sound reproduction system. The basic idea behind this is
the Fourier analysis of sounds, in which any sound wave, no matter how
complicated, can be decomposed into an infinite series of sine and cosine
waves of different frequencies, starting at zero and "ending" at infinity.
The, never mentioned, assumption is that the frequency components above the
hearing limit, usually taken at 20 kHz, do not influence the perceived
sound in any way.
Although this seems a reasonable assumption at first, it is not as
straightforward as one would think. Two aspects play an important role: the
first is that Fourier analysis only holds for linear systems and if there
is one transducer which is non-linear, it is the human ear. In non-linear
systems frequencies not present in the original signal can be generated
and/or other frequencies can acquire more power than in the original sig-
nal. This can easily be demonstrated using a 3 kHz sine wave with 5 periods
on and 5 periods off. Although Fourier analysis tells that 300 Hz is only a
weak component in this signal, it is the strongest one hears. As 300 Hz
corresponds to the envelope of the signal it is not surprising using the
non-linear properties of our ears. It can be concluded that frequencies
above the hearing limit can indeed generate signals that are below the
hearing limit which could thus influence the perceived sound and the
quality experienced.
The second aspect is that the limitation of the bandwidth of an audio
reproduction system has consequences in the time domain, which we will
discuss in the next section. The relation between the spectral response and
the temporal behaviour will be discussed, followed by some examples and
discussion on the perceived quality.»

http://www.breem.nl/Artikelen/vMaanen/temporal-decay.pdf

Curious what @amir_asr would say about this. Considering he is in his mid 60s, he clearly has compromised hearing an maybe that's why he doesnt do listening tests.

Do others think that audiophiles are wasting money on any higher end gear because of hearing loss with age?

And clearly Amir doesn’t need money. He lives in a $3million house!

Hans Van Maanen is a working physicist in fluid dynamics and a top published expert and designer in Audio with his own "temporal coherence" brand name speakers and amplifiers...

Who must we trust?

Someone who work with basic psycho-acoustic and design his audio components from it or Amir debunking "audiophiles" ?

As i already said, thanks to Amir for information debunking market specs of gear...But the bucks stop here... His bashing of audiophiles is not based on psycho-acoustic facts but on techno babble ideology ... Debunking is perhaps a field work because someone verify specs numbers thats all; but it is NOT SCIENCE NOR DESIGNING in audio it is only some technological tools choices applied for some NARROW goal ...

And bashing audiophiles is ridiculous enterprise... Why? Because there is too much difference between audiophiles themselves, and putting them in the same trash bin is RIDICULOUS... And bashing human hearing because of alleged limits in Hertz and Decibels is a common place argument ignoring the non linear nature and the time dependant dimension where the ears really work beating Fourier uncertainty principle; then bashing those who use their ears without even knowing psycho-acoustic basic facts it is ignorance and/or some  marketing propaganda for some goal of his own ...

Now look at the article for the context about these remarks by Van Maanen ...

«Feedback seems like a miracle cure for all shortcomings of audio equipment. Yet, in the ‘high-end’ audio community, many critics on feedback can be found. It is beyond discussion that the specifications of many semiconductor amplifiers are far superior to those of loudspeakers and vacuum tube amplifiers, yet this correlates not well with the perceived quality of the equipment. How come? And why is it possible to hear differences between amplifiers with distortions two orders of magnitude lower than the loudspeakers one needs to listen to these amplifiers? Are certain phenomena overlooked and, if so, what can we learn to improve the perceived quality of equipment? This paper analyses some pitfalls and parasitic
effects of feedback and gives directions for improvement of the perceived quality. This was confirmed by designing amplifiers, derived from this analysis, using unconventional lines in which listening by music experts was regarded as more important than measurement results. It showed that parasitic effects occur in amplifiers with global feedback, which are often disregarded, because these do not show up with the usual derivation of the equations for systems with feedback. These parasitic effects lead to the introduction of artefacts, which are
specific for systems with feedback. This is surprising, as the common idea is that feedback only suppresses undesired phenomena, but is an unambiguous result from the analysis, presented in this paper, which also shows that the commonly used equations for feedback are flawed. On top of this, several (underlying) assumptions about the properties of the amplifier are also incorrect.
Suppression of these parasitic effects requires linearization of the individual amplification stages as much as possible and by designing the amplifier in such a way that other properties are as close to the assumptions as possible, in combination with a constant, but moderate, feedback factor over the entire audio range. The testing of equipment using continuous sinewaves does often not reveal these parasitic effects as these only show up in the dynamic response of the amplifier to music-like signals. The simplistic approach that the sinewave response enables the prediction of the behaviour under all conditions ignores the conditions under which the Fourier theory may be applied and leads therefore to incorrect results and conclusions. Which is why there is a great need for well-defined dynamic test signals, but as long as these are not available, human hearing
remains for the time being the best piece of ‘measurement equipment’ which can be used...»

.............................

«The designer should realize that global feedback can only be applied to a limited extent and that the dynamic behaviour of the amplifier to music-like signals is (far) more important for the perceived quality than distortion figures, in line with the findings of refs. 3 and 4. These probably explain a part of the audible differences between amplifiers or other electronic audio equipment, which cannot be understood from the distortion figures and has given feedback a
bad name in certain high-end audio circles. Such artefacts are therefore hard, in many cases not at all, measurable using continuous sinewaves. As music is a textbook example of such a dynamic process, this is likely to be crucial for the determination of the perceived quality of an amplifier. So more complex test signals, which represent non-steady, multi-spectral conditions, as occur in music, are needed. As long as such test signals are not agreed on,
human hearing is still the best “measurement” instrument available.......<

...................................................................................................

It can be remarked that critical comments from high-end audio enthusiasts are often scornfully put aside by technology experts as “non-scientific” small talk from freaks who do not understand the theory. The author strongly disagrees with this view as too often critical remarks from people with “golden ears” did make sense, albeit that it was initially absolutely nunclear what the technical or scientific background was. Such remarks did help the development team to further improve the equipment, even though it would have been very hard to show the effect of the individual steps in a scientific way. But the progress over the years is beyond discussion...»

https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/images/docs/FeedbackFlaws.pdf

As a guitarist myself, I think the fact that most professional guitarists run their instrument through a rack or pedalboard tuner tells you all you need to know about our so-called golden ears. Those of us with experience can tell that something is "off" fairly easily, but getting it to be "not off" by ear takes a little more fiddling and is subject to the bias of the strings surrounding them. So, scientific approaches like ASR's can get you in the ballpark a lot more efficiently than guessing.