Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

Rational approach in audio private installation is related to electrical mechanical and ESPECIALLY acoustic embeddings controls...

Amir methods of measures CAN ONLY VERIFY GEAR SPECS as publised by the company and infirm it or confirm it... THATS ALL...

Amir cannot choose the gear for your needs and for his QUALITIES...

And if as a guitarist you dont trust your ears... What can i say ?😁😊

Myself i learned how to use my ears in 2 years experiments... Are they telling me always the truth ? no... Am i satisfied with my 600 bucks system ? Yes... It sound better Speakers/room and headphone that everything i listened to... and i can identify his FLAWS...

Is it perfect  then ? Not at all...But most people trust price tags not their ears... It is the reason why a pair of Magnepan in a living room can sound worst than my speakers box in a dedicated room... I know because i verified it...

How will it cost me to make my actual headphone system  almost perfect ?

15,000 bucks....Not a dollars more...

I know WHERE i go and WHERE i came from...

Dont trust anyone.... TRAIN your ears in acoustic...And READ articles and books... Not  only ASR forum   and audiogon forums ...

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.

@mahgister 

Then there is a high cost to pay if we TRUST the Fourier linear tools and if we work ONLY in the time independant and frequency domain... The price is we loose contact with the basic of human hearings...

I don't know why you keep bringing up Fourier transform.  Most of my tests don't involve any kind of fourier analysis.  Take the dashboard I post earlier for that Carver amplifier:

See those THD+N and SINAD numbers?  They are computed *without FFT*.  The analyzer simply filters out the 1 kHz tone and what is left is noise+distortion.  It then simply reports that sum energy of unwanted signal as a ratio to the test signal.  No FFT is needed or used.

The problem with that one number, as bad as it is in this case, is that it is not diagnostic.  So the analyzer in addition to that shows the fourier transform on top right.  Now we see the problems.  We have tons and tons of power supply noise and hum which better not be good in any audiophile's mind. 

We then look to the right and see copious amount of third harmonic distortion -- not the beloved 2nd harmonic people think tubes output. Using psychacoustics, we can overlay a graph on both the noise and distortion and assess audibility, again based on listening test research. 

Fourier transforms then are an invaluable diagnostic tool to assess audibility because much of our knowledge of psychacoustics is in frequency domain, not time.  In time domain, we are relative quite deaf.  This is by design.  When you listen to someone in your home, their voice gets bounced around the room, gets delayed (timing changes) plus attenuated and then mixes with the direct sound creating a "phase soup."  So the notion that time matters is non-sequitur in most part.

But again, a lot of our measurements are independent of any kind of Fourier transform.  This measurement that I post again has nothing to do with that:

Output power is varied and THD+N extracted per above explanation.  It shows that this amplifier is a distortion factory, overlaying its own signature on *everything* you listen to.  It is against the very word "high fidelity." 

You also keep saying we only use sine waves.  We do not and I already explain to you that 32-tone, multitone signal is just that, 32 tones and if you listen to it, it sounds like organ playing.  Its waveform in time domain is quite complex looking as well.

My jitter test also uses dual squarewaves which by definition have infinite number of sinewaves:

It looks like a single sine wave but it is not.  Everything above other than the 12 kHz spike is unwanted noise and jitter by the way.  Using psychoacoustics though, you arrive at what I say above, "not an audible concern."  Without the FFT you could do that analysis.

So really I would not keep repeating that the problem with measurements is some random claim about Fourier transform.  Plenty of tests don't use them.  And when we do, the FFT tells us the very thing we want to know: "how audible is that noise and distortion?"  The only people who don't want to see such an FFT is because they are afraid of the story they tell.  

They want to claim their gear sounds great despite the flaws found in measurements?  That is cool.  Just show a controlled test of half a dozen audiophiles with levels matched and blinded.  Post that and we can talk.  Don't keep writing essays.  Essays don't make music.  If ears are all that matters, then let's do an ear's only test.  Until then, all the rest of what you are quoting is hoped to confuse the regular reader who doesn't understand the topic, hoping to get you to forego proper proofs, that is, with ears only, equipment sounds better.

IME, every time a guitar is run through a pedal, there is loss of SQ. For this reason, i have had a few of my pedals modded so that the signal on by pass is as pure as possible, and yet the sound still suffers vs. no pedal at all. Maybe it is the a'phile in me, but i also carefully pick the cables that I use on my guitar set up as well, one would be surprised at the difference in sound to be had there as well!! Could we measure these differences and come to a proper conclusion as to which are the one's that suck tone, I doubt it. 

@amir_asr There is another variable that I do question when it comes to measuring gear, and it is this...is this measuring gear not somehow calibrated to someone’s hearing and expectation of what sounds to them...correct? If we believe ( and I have no idea if you do) that all appreciation of SQ is subjective; IOW one person’s appreciation of the sound of a stand up bass is another’s definition of a cello, then we have to come to the conclusion that what sounds great to one, is not necessarily the case to another.

A further reason I have no interest in WBF, is because the site turned into a horn speaker lover’s fest, and to me horn speakers are hopelessly colored and generally annoying to listen to. ( and I have listened to numerous models). To others, this design is the ultimate in SQ. Music, at least IMO, is something that appeals to a variety of tastes; RAP for instance has its fervent followers, and its haters. Everyone has their preferences, and so how do measurements account for this??

Amir methods of measures CAN ONLY VERIFY GEAR SPECS as publised by the company and infirm it or confirm it... THATS ALL...

Specs? What specs. Some of you gone so blind on asking for proof points that manufacturers feel like they shouldn’t give you anything. Have you seen the type of measurements I have been posting on any gear you bought? You have not.

So no, I wish I was just verifying things. Instead, I am having to do the work that the company should have done when designing said gear. Because if they had, they would have seen the many awful sins that they could have fixed which have nothing but negative impact on fidelity of equipment.

And you are helping them in this regard by constantly saying measurements are not important, etc. Don’t let them off the hook. We have a speaker salesman here who doesn’t even post measurements for speakers! How bad can we get? Do you really think you learn nothing from frequency response of a speaker? That it can’t tell you how good or bad it is at faithfully producing a neutral sound that is true to the recording? Check this example of the Klipsch RP600M speaker:

Look at that massive dip at 2 kHz. You don’t think this measurement is massively important to know about? If we had held up every speaker company to post measurements like this, I am pretty sure they would not have marketed this speaker. As it is, it took measurements like mine to get them to fix this in version 2 (I have not confirmed).

So no, I am not just verifying specs. I am giving you a picture of how well engineered and correct the design and execution of an audio product is. I shouldn’t have to but you all as consumer, and laxed press, have allowed it to get this bad.

I am doing my part to reverse this trend. Some companies have woken up and are starting to do the right thing by posting measurements like I do. These are the companies you want to reward: the ones that don’t hide behind essays as a way to avoid giving you information you need to know how some equipment can perform.