Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

@mahgister I just noticed this thread from my weekly Audiogon roundup. I am actually familiar with Gibson and his ecological approach from grad work in cognitive science. I took a moment to check out some of the papers related to your unnecessarily long and murky posts here, as well.

I don’t think ecological perception critiques about spectral analysis are relevant to musical reproduction devices. They certainly are interesting in terms of explaining human listening experiences where expectations and environmental affordances certainly play a part in how the brain perceives the sounds emanating from a device. But if the goal is just to successfully reproduce audio with minimum noise and distortion, and with maximum fidelity to the original recording, I see nothing to suggest that following the guidance of sampling theory will not result in exactly the kinds of "transparent" or "uncolored" devices that are available today. Gibson then gets to critique how the human hears/understands the purity of the emerging sounds, and reconciles them with all the affordances of space, room, materials, mood, and much else.

There are edge cases where general psycho-acoustics can be influential, like using compression techniques that de-emphasize parts of the spectrum. We would prefer to de-emphasize only where the results have low impact on human listening, for instance. Phantom center images, Dolby Atmos, etc. certainly are another area where there are great research opportunities, too, for the ecological perception-focused researcher.

In any case, I have learned a great deal on ASR and recommend it highly. It provides an excellent counterpoint to vague assertions and hush-voiced listening reviews. Most interesting for me, however, is the internet culture role of how it is deconstructing the faith aspects of the audiophile subculture. We see that playing out here!

Psycho-acoustic science and basic facts DECONSTRUCT not only audiophile subjectivist focus on gear but also deconstruct and demolish objectivist techno babble...

But it seems that people cannot think out of binary opposition...

The basic facts about hearings cannot be reduced to mere "illusions" without any bearing on qualitative design, no more than measures in the large sense of the world can be dismissed by subjectivist...

Listenings is not an illusory experience which must be dismissed by blind test...It is an ability that must be trained in acoustic environment ...

Measures are revelatory and necessary for design and pleasure BUT THEY MUST BE interpreted in the rightfull hearing theory context..

By the way faith in some restricted set of measures interpreted in the Fourier context is only that : technological misplaced faith... But there is difference between technology driven by the right hearing theory and technology even negating hearing perceptive abilities asking to be trained and used in design itself... This is the Van Maanen main point...

Most interesting for me, however, is the internet culture role of how it is deconstructing the faith aspects of the audiophile subculture.

It is incredible that almost nobody from ASR can read the articles i put and understand them...Why ? Because the idea that qualities perceived by human hearings can help designing better audio will destruct the techno babble ideology of reducing any sound qualities perceived by a trained ears to some imagined ghosts...

I don't claim to be from anywhere, but I can tell you lump me in as I showed that two of your claims were flawed. Sometimes we are the only people that are right. Sometimes we are the one that is wrong. If you assume you are the former, then you will always be the latter.

@mahgister Well, I just skimmed that response a bit but, yes, it certainly is possible to build audio reproduction systems that have colored sound that some people might prefer (tube and vinyl aficionados rejoice!), but in reality these were always stopgaps towards perfect fidelity due to the limitations of the devices. But some folks prefer them, so be it.

But with the advent of better technologies and the theories that guide their use, we can build remarkably transparent systems for low cost these days, so the limitations of those other approaches become more obvious. There is some research that shows that hypersonic sounds (>20kHz) might cause some brain activity changes, but it's unclear whether that is definitive for providing perceptually-relevant high-frequency components that would enhance our temporal experience of music, etc.

If you want to know what people want from speakers, you just need to study them and come up with a crowd-sourced preference curve, for instance. And lo, we have one.

But in any case, I remain perplexed what you hope to gain by pushing this line? If you have a desire to research how to color sounds to enhance audio enjoyment, please do the work. I will be interested (if it's well-written and coherent). Nothing you mention has any bearing on testing whether audio devices are high quality from the standard of low noise and distortion. It is orthogonal to those goals.

@othercrazycanuck  So I understand your prior post, you say you did listen to gear before you bought it, presumably you liked what you heard, then you bought it. After some amount of time, you began to dislike what you bought, is this the case?

Seems like you may have also been swayed by the reviews and recommendations as well. You want us to believe that what you heard initially that pleased you, somehow changed after you took the piece home. This you attribute to your brain being fooled initially by..what?? 

I do know of many folk in this hobby, who actually are never satisfied with what they acquire to reproduce their music...they keep the piece for a short time, and then sell it on- always on the 'upgrade' trail. Not only is this a vey costly endeavor, but also I believe one that is sure to deliver long term dissatisfaction with the hobby. 

Personally, I buy gear that works for my ear, and IF something comes along in the future that is 'very significantly' better to my ears, I will entertain the upgrade, but I am not churning and burning gear...like many.