Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

I am not against "transparent" design...But mass market minimal design standards cannot be high end craftmanship...

But i cannot accept that some use these set of measures to disparage human hearings are passively subject of illusions, some will reduced all human hearing abilities as illusions of only subjective nature with no objective informative content useful for new design , not only to create "colorful" tubes amp but better gear in the larger sense by using human ears as a guide... This stance about linear measure of circuits with no need of the designer ears guiding rudder contradict basic psycho-acoustics... We analyse sound non linearly and we live in a time dependant dimension for this analysis and frequecies dont tell all the story... This means something for design theory...

I cannot repeat what Van Maanen taught , i am not competent and it will be too long..

There is materials physical and sensible invariants , information , behind sound experience not just abstract waves analysed for frequencies spectrum , and amplitude phase and duration and distortion, and not just subjective delusions, these physical invariants go deeper in hearing theory than just frequency based circuits analysis and told us something about human hyperacuity as Magnasco and Oppenheim called it... These materials invariant of qualitative information content are not measured by the tools Amir used, they exist for the ears who perceived them in his time dependant domain and extract from them in a non linear way much qualitative information ...

Thanks for your kind balanced answer...

Read this if you want to guess what these qualities perceived by human hearings are...I read the author thesis..,

Listening and hearing are not DECEPTIVE activity as claim those who want complete faith in their very limited set of measures as the ABSOLUTE METER for "musicality " in gear design...I dont go with ideology sorry... Not in audio not in any subject...I think alone with books and scientists not sellers ...Psycho-acoustic use measures to elucidate hearings very deep matter not to reduce it to mere subjective illusions for the benefit of some limited set of gear measures sold as TRUTH..

In a word there is a deep relation between sound perception and the production of sound by the body, negating this powerful informative feed back circle and claiming that a short set of linear measures can settle audio gear quality forever without any need to listenings , because it is merely delusions, this is not science, this is ideology, and had nothing to do with psycho-acoustic... Amir Measure are useful... Nobody oppose that.. But selling them as the last words with no need for qualitative listenings is going too much farther... Audiophiles are no more deluded than people of ASR with their toy tools.. And blind test do not replace listening training with acoustic and musician training or the trained ears of a designer ...

Classyfying all people in audiophiles subjectivists  all  in error  and ASR objectivist as living is truth , is marketing fetichism not psycho-acoustic... 

...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267327268_The_Body-Image_Theory_of_Sound_An_Ecological_Approach_to_Speech_and_Music

@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.

@mahgister Actually, I just read a bunch of van Mannen for fun. Luckily I have both a BSEE and MSEE in information theory and signal analysis, thus feel somewhat competent to comment a bit (though I prefer a much more reserved approach to science and engineering). A key point he mentions is that sinusoidal signal sweeps don't fully characterize the frequency response of, say, an amplifier, because of some theoretical requirements. Linearity is one of those requirements and there are all kinds of nonlinear things going on in real systems. Indeed, the effects of nonlinear transfer functions can be quite interesting and require very interesting mathematical tools. But, really, it's what we call distortion.

So, if an amplifier designer is trying to create a great amplifier, what should she do? She could test using sinusoids and try to reduce distortion and noise in her design or she could do....what...exactly? van Mannen has concerns about feedback topologies as well, but still, other than trading-off options, she still will want to test using the best tools she has in an effort to reduce noise and distortion.

Thanks for you interest...

For sure you know better than me to analyse what he want to do...

bUt human hearings is sensible to some harmonics positively and not to some others so much positively  for example...  The tonal perception is heavily influenced by harmonics , Van Maanen explain in his paper how the fact that human hearing is time dependant help him to design in a better set of trade-off his own circuits..

I read it because of these application from the Oppenheim and Magnasco experiments revealing after 60 years of investigation that human herings cannot be reduced to spectral analysis alone  nor to any linear Fourier inspired theory ... van Maanen used that in his design trade off and you are best equipped than me to understand HOW PRECISELY he did it...

i used his articles as contradiction of the claim by Amir that linear measures of gear are enough... Amplifier must stay in linear control but the direction toward a better sound is possible only if we understood the non linear way hearing perceive sounds..

Reducing noise and and controlling distortion not only reducing them is always a goal ...  But it is half of the task ... The other half of the  task is designing  circuits more susceptible to please and inform the human hearings who do not work as a Fourier engine at all... The Fourier engine must serve hearings not reduce hearings to its mere linear workings in a time independant way... Ears perceived real physical invariants in the real world and analyse them non linearly in a time dependant way, no fourier approach can explain it ..¯ Van Maanen is conscious of that and use it as inspiration for his  complex design... Why did he call his design "TIME COHERENCY " ? you know enough about electronics to connect the dots better than me here  ... 😊

One thing is sure Van Maanen nor Magnasco and Oppenheim will mock people trusting their hearing acquired biases and training as deluded... They are in science first  not first  in marketing of gear or marketing of tools...

Thanks very much for your interests ...

@mahgister Actually, I just read a bunch of van Mannen for fun. Luckily I have both a BSEE and MSEE in information theory and signal analysis, thus feel somewhat competent to comment a bit (though I prefer a much more reserved approach to science and engineering). A key point he mentions is that sinusoidal signal sweeps don’t fully characterize the frequency response of, say, an amplifier, because of some theoretical requirements. Linearity is one of those requirements and there are all kinds of nonlinear things going on in real systems. Indeed, the effects of nonlinear transfer functions can be quite interesting and require very interesting mathematical tools. But, really, it’s what we call distortion.

So, if an amplifier designer is trying to create a great amplifier, what should she do? She could test using sinusoids and try to reduce distortion and noise in her design or she could do....what...exactly? van Mannen has concerns about feedback topologies as well, but still, other than trading-off options, she still will want to test using the best tools she has in an effort to reduce noise and distortion.

Amir is a great messenger of science! Thank you very much Amir!

I forgot to say that you missed a point about Van Maanen...

A key point he mentions is that sinusoidal signal sweeps don’t fully characterize the frequency response of, say, an amplifier, because of some theoretical requirements.

He said as a physicist that a sinusoidal continuous signal dont act on the circuits of amplifier as a Sudden variable  dynamic burst of music , then as you said the frequency response of a circuit cannot be predicted adequately under this kind of linear continuous signals... He then designed his circuits in a way for them to be able to reacted and be more linearly predictable under REAL MUSICAL BURST...

Correct me if i am wrong... it is what i remember...