Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?


It’s easy to make snide remarks like “yes- I do the opposite of what he says.”  And in some respects I agree, but if you do that, this is just going to be taken down. So I’m asking a serious question. Has ASR actually changed your opinion on anything?  For me, I would say 2 things. I am a conservatory-trained musician and I do trust my ears. But ASR has reminded me to double check my opinions on a piece of gear to make sure I’m not imagining improvements. Not to get into double blind testing, but just to keep in mind that the brain can be fooled and make doubly sure that I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing. The second is power conditioning. I went from an expensive box back to my wiremold and I really don’t think I can hear a difference. I think that now that I understand the engineering behind AC use in an audio component, I am not convinced that power conditioning affects the component output. I think. 
So please resist the urge to pile on. I think this could be a worthwhile discussion if that’s possible anymore. I hope it is. 

chayro
The DIVISION between "Technophile" and "golden ears", or between objectivists and subjectivists is TOTALLY irrational as a dividing fact instead of a distinction and based on a misunderstanding of what psycho-acoustic science is...
 
By the way there exist no science in the singular form... There exist sciences with a common method , but this common method cannot be confused and conflated with KNOWLEDGE...Why ? Because VALUES ( good and bad, truth and false , just and unjust, etc ) are freely DECIDED and freely DEBATED by human free individuals who express then their free choices for themselves and their societies...Science is a slave not a master...
 
Then scientifically speaking the association of a "quality" with an objective set of conditions is the basis of psycho-acoustic science... Then when technophiles or objectivists negate the existence of the VALUED quality and ask for a proof for his existence, they completely go in REVERSE on the road of science... Science dont negate the existence of qualities to begin with but begin and end with them as values... For example timbre subjective perception and evaluation is not a "color" added in an illusory manner to physical objective sound it is INTRINSIC to sound perception and existence ... It is why technophilia and technology dont define science and it is why science dont reduce itself to technology...Science uses measures but is not defined by measures...Technology must eliminate some phenomena from some other one to work in some paramatrezed location, its power come from the reduction of knowledge to a specific "location" or "application", science becoming knowledge encompass and transcend technology...
 
Once this is said, psycho-acoustic is a science studying human hearings, and we dont know so much about human hearings and the relation between sounds and the perception of qualities as we dont know much about the relation between consciousness and the brain...
The only people who will contradict this are not scientists but technophile, materialist ideologue, transhumanists... They dont need to think, they "know" and they "do"...But it is better to think first as any philosopher will say ...
 
Where this distinction between objectivist and subjectivist come from in audio and why there is now a complete DIVISION ?
 
it come not from science but from the efforts by technology and audio market , divided about the GEAR marketing PUBLICITY complementary strategies: is our piece of gear the best well measured by technology, or is this piece of gear the best loved one by all listeners ?
 
Psycho-acoustic science studying this relation between qualitative human perceptions and objective conditions of observation and analysis, DISCOVERED recently, in a slow process of discovery spanning more than 60 years that the LINEAR relation between the frequencies domain and the time domain is not obey by the human ears... The human ears work non linearly and extract an accurate amount of information which cannot be obtain by linear means , the Gabor limit between frequencies and duration...
 
The physicists confirming this known knowledge for a long time now in a rigorous experiments of measures on human subjects called it : human hyperacuity...
 
 
 
«The Fourier uncertainty principle states that a time-frequency tradeoff exists for sound signals, so that the shorter the duration of a sound, the larger the spread of different types of frequencies is required to represent the sound. Conversely, sounds with tight clusters of frequencies must have longer durations. The uncertainty principle limits the precision of the simultaneous measurement of the duration and frequency of a sound.»
 
«The researchers think that this superior human listening ability is partly due to the spiral structure and nonlinearities in the cochlea. Previously, scientists have proven that linear systems cannot exceed the time-frequency uncertainty limit. Although most nonlinear systems do not perform any better, any system that exceeds the uncertainty limit must be nonlinear. For this reason, the nonlinearities in the cochlea are likely integral to the precision of human auditory processing. Since researchers have known for a long time about the cochlea’s nonlinearities, the current results are not quite as surprising as they would otherwise be.

"It is and it is not [surprising]," Magnasco told Phys.org. "We were surprised, yet we expected this to happen. The thing is, mathematically the possibility existed all along. There’s a theorem that asserts uncertainty is only obeyed by linear operators (like the linear operators of quantum mechanics). Now there’s five decades of careful documentation of just how nastily nonlinear the cochlea is, but it is not evident how any of the cochlea’s nonlinearities contributes to enhancing time-frequency acuity. We now know our results imply that some of those nonlinearities have the purpose of sharpening acuity beyond the naïve linear limits.

«

New sound models

The results have implications for how we understand the way that the brain processes sound, a question that has interested scientists for a long time. In the early 1970s, scientists found hints that human hearing could violate the uncertainty principle, but the scientific understanding and technical capabilities were not advanced enough to enable a thorough investigation. As a result, most of today’s sound analysis models are based on old theories that may now be revisited in order to capture the precision of human hearing.

"In seminars, I like demonstrating how much information is conveyed in sound by playing the sound from the scene in Casablanca where Ilsa pleads, "Play it once, Sam," Sam feigns ignorance, Ilsa insists," Magnasco said. "You can recognize the text being spoken, but you can also recognize the volume of the utterance, the emotional stance of both speakers, the identity of the speakers including the speaker’s accent (Ingrid’s faint Swedish, though her character is Norwegian, which I am told Norwegians can distinguish; Sam’s AAVE [African American Vernacular English]), the distance to the speaker (Ilsa whispers but she’s closer, Sam loudly feigns ignorance but he’s in the back), the position of the speaker (in your house you know when someone’s calling you from another room, in which room they are!), the orientation of the speaker (looking at you or away from you), an impression of the room (large, small, carpeted).

"The issue is that many fields, both basic and commercial, in sound analysis try to reconstruct only one of these, and for that they may use crude models of early hearing that transmit enough information for their purposes. But the problem is that when your analysis is a pipeline, whatever information is lost on a given stage can never be recovered later. So if you try to do very fancy analysis of, let’s say, vocal inflections of a lyric soprano, you just cannot do it with cruder models."

By ruling out many of the simpler models of auditory processing, the new results may help guide researchers to identify the true mechanism that underlies human auditory hyperacuity. Understanding this mechanism could have wide-ranging applications in areas such as speech recognition; sound analysis and processing; and radar, sonar, and radio astronomy.

"You could use fancier methods in radar or sonar to try to analyze details beyond uncertainty, since you control the pinging waveform; in fact, bats do," Magnasco said.

Building on the current results, the researchers are now investigating how human hearing is more finely tuned toward natural sounds, and also studying the temporal factor in hearing.

"Such increases in performance cannot occur in general without some assumptions," Magnasco said. "For instance, if you’re testing accuracy vs. resolution, you need to assume all signals are well separated. We have indications that the hearing system is highly attuned to the sounds you actually hear in nature, as opposed to abstract time-series; this comes under the rubric of ’ecological theories of perception’ in which you try to understand the space of natural objects being analyzed in an ecologically relevant setting, and has been hugely successful in vision. Many sounds in nature are produced by an abrupt transfer of energy followed by slow, damped decay, and hence have broken time-reversal symmetry. We just tested that subjects do much better in discriminating timing and frequency in the forward version than in the time-reversed version (manuscript submitted). Therefore the nervous system uses specific information on the physics of sound production to extract information from the sensory stream.

"We are also studying with these same methods the notion of simultaneity of sounds. If we’re listening to a flute-piano piece, we will have a distinct perception if the flute ’arrives late’ into a phrase and lags the piano, even though flute and piano produce extended sounds, much longer than the accuracy with which we perceive their alignment. In general, for many sounds we have a clear idea of one single ’time’ associated to the sound, many times, in our minds, having to do with what action we would take to generate the sound ourselves (strike, blow, etc)."

 

What does it means for audio ?

 

It means that objectivists pretending that human sound perceived qualities may be only illusions, "good" or pleasant" as subjective qualities being subjective experience are then considered "inexistant impressions... The business to please human ears is for them a fraud... All there is to say about "qualities" is reducible after many blind test ELIMINATED all false pretenses to a mere set of LINEAR measures.... And these linear measures are established as the only standard for creating a good audio design even if any electronic circuits subjected to music bursts into it , instead of sine waves, can produce non predictable audible results...As Van Maanen argue in this article :

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

then if Van Maanen is right audio design must be investigated and conducted under the guidance of human ears... It is a craft ... Not a mass producted activity only...

But the crux of the matter is through the discoveries of the fundamental non linear working of the human ears/brain hyperacuity, that this hyperacuity was developed by EVOLUTION history for survival reason related to the urgency to recognise speech and natural sounds, and also music, because music and speech are born TOGETHER...

This means that the "qualities" negated by the objectivists not only exist but are the ONLY OBJECTIVE BASIS for the understanding of human hearings...Then the efforts to reduce audio science to "technological linear measures "of the gear reflect complete ignorance of psycho-acoustic science, instead favorizing the direction of mass standardized design productions instead of qualitative experience andhigher qualitative design, because anyway the highest qualitative audio production CANNOT BE REDUCED to mass market engineering productions , nevermind the level of measures excellence used, they are at the end the results of creative artful CRAFTMANSHIP then they are way costlier ..

All of what is perceived is not measurable... A rainbow exist but need a neurophysiological subject to exist... Qualities being perceived by humans comes from a field of studies in psycho-acoustic and neurology taken very seriously here and which science never negate them a priori as in the technophile objectivist world motivated by mass market regulations of the PRODUCTS and by also regulation of the human being himself...(Transhumanism is here to stay for now )

We will rule say some objectivists what you will hear and what you will not hear because the "qualities" dont exist anyway... Sound is the domain of subjective "illusions" they claim .... Saying so they are FORGETFULL of the way evolution created our BIASED EARS/BRAIN system because it is biased by and for the survival dimension not as a passive tool; our brain is not a passive tool, it is a participant in the creation of sounds with meanings and for yesterday favorizing our survival, and today manifesting also as what we call our "pleasure" , and which are also qualitative IRREDUCIBLE values ... Then contrary to any industrial tools we used which are ultimately linear and time independant, our ears/brain work non linearly in a dependant time domain for our survival and for our pleasure ...

 

At the end my opinion :

 

Did Amir information is useful ? Yes it is... Falsyfying gear market specs is useful information...

Did Amir theory about gear design and human hearing is the last word in audio ?

Absolutely not... Audiophiles can go on listening and write their faillible opinions.... Science dont negate human experience but study it.... Why science goes on with this study till today ? It is because TECHNOLOGY is far from understanding human hearing not only hyperacuity but cameleonic power as in echolocalization , the brain, and the qualitative perceived world... Goethe is no less important than Newton...By the way it takes real sound source resonating in the world with their intinsic materials qualities to produce sounds for the ears/brain...

The physics of sound waves is not enough... Why ? Because most sounds we perceive we produce them by speech acts or by musical craft, then sound is not only waves in the air, it is a sound source with a qualitative perceptible inside we PROBE as dolphin or bat probe an object...Then in psycho-acoustic science the perception and emission of sounds are related IN A NON LINEAR WAY  , which means that sound qualities cannot be evaluated as is evaluated industrial material audio design...in the same way audio engineering craftmanship is an ART based on psycho-acoustics not reducible as said the designer and physicist Hans van Maanen to the Fourier domain...

 

It means that objectivists pretending that human sound perceived qualities may be only  illusions,   "good" or pleasant" as subjective qualities  being subjective experience are then considered "inexistant impressions... The business to please human ears is for them a fraud... All there is to say about "qualities" is reducible after many  blind test ELIMINATED all  false pretenses to a mere set of LINEAR measures.... And these linear measures are established  as the only standard for creating a good audio design even if any electronic circuits subjected to music bursts into it ,  instead of sine waves, can produce non predictable audible  results...As Van Maanen argue in this article

It would seem that Amir is in fact a perfect example of the type of hobbyist that you describe here. A pure objectivist, who simply will not trust his ears regardless of what they are telling him, relying instead on what his vaunted measurements are showing. 

I guess i hit a nerve when I posted above that I believe he is not that much into music, but a techie first. @amir_asr , it is ok to be this way, I did not say there is anything wrong in this. 

Let's leave it at this, so that we both are not tempted to throw out ad hominem's, you enjoy a different aspect of this hobby than i do, but it's all good. IOW, we agree to disagree.

I want to publicly thank @mahgister for serving as the defacto and perhaps accidental Audiogon gatekeeper.

 

While I have neither the patience nor the time to read his rather lengthy posts, @mahgister is single handedly grinding Amir into submission. Each forum has a reason to exist, people choose the one they like that's where they tend to visit. Since I'm a vacuum tube guy, I don't need to visit ASR but certainly wish them no ill will.

I want to publicly thank @mahgister for serving as the defacto and perhaps accidental Audiogon gatekeeper.

 

As a new user, I was looking for a mute or block button to eliminate what I cannot interpret as anything but spam, with the same thing repeated over and over,  that 5-10 minutes of Google would inform is much ado about nothing:  https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,99371.0.html   If I can quickly figure out a few repeated points are much ado about nothing, I consider pages and pages of it spam.  I regret now falling down the rabbit hole when I just wanted to buy some stuff.