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

Magnasco and Oppenheim said this :

«The significant increase in timing acuity unaccompanied by a
drop in the total acuity for a pulse with considerably larger
variances in timing and frequency indicates that either the
precision of human time-frequency perception operates in a realm
distant from the true uncertainty bound, or such a bound does not
exist for the auditory system»...

«Such results add to the growing body of
evidence that human auditory processing is adapted for natural
sounds. Not only then is auditory processing inherently nonlinear,
these nonlinearities are seemingly used to improve perceptual acuity to sounds that correspond to the physics of natural sound
production.»... «Lastly, our
observations about time-reversal symmetry breaking and the
temporal precision of the auditory system suggest further research
into this ecologically-relevant domain.»

Reducing this as you did to a mere underestimating time and frequency relation in a linear model is FALSE...

 

By the way when we speak of measures in science, ESTIMATION of measures results must be BOUNDED in a set... This set SIZE is ascribed by the theory , here Fourier theory... Magnasco and Oppenheim state that the results of their experiments exceed more than 10 times the uncertainty limit of the Fourier principle... What this means ? The results of the experiment does not suggest a mere error of estimation INSIDE the bounded set PRESCRIBED by the linear Fourier theory... but the experiments suggested an information extracted by the ears/brain so high OUT OF the accepted set of possible values prescribed by the mathematical Fourier theory... The conclusion of the article is then we need an ecological based hearing theory and further experiments in this direction...

The qualities we hear are not MERE ILLUSIONS.. They correspond to LEARNED and taught by evolution real informative events related to sound sources and sound production in evolutive history...

 

Sorry for your complete miunderstanding.. ..

No discussion is possible without GOOD FAITH...

And Van Maanen is not a mere seller...Anybody reading his articles and biography cannot buy that... You are a seller ...

 

The test simply states that our prediction of simultaneous detection of frequency and its timing is too conservative.

Is this conclusion from one of Magnasco and Openheim sound as a mere underestimation about bound relations between frequencies and time ?

 

 

 

«Early last century a number of auditory phenomena,
such as residue pitch and missing fundamentals, started
to indicate that the traditional view of the hearing process
as a form of spectral analysis had to be revised.
In 1951,
Licklider [25] set the foundation for the temporal theories
of pitch perception, in which the detailed pattern of action
potentials in the auditory nerve is used [26,27], as opposed
to spectral or place theories, in which the overall amplitude
of the activity pattern is evaluated without detailed
access to phase information. The ground-breaking work
of Ronken [21] and Moore [22] found violations of
uncertainty-like products and argued for them to be evi-
dence in favor of temporal models. However, this line of
work was hampered fourfold, by lack of the formal
foundation in time-frequency distributions we have today,
by concentrating on frequency discrimination alone, by
technical difficulties in the generation of the stimuli,
and not the least by lack of understanding of cochlear
dynamics, since the active cochlear processes had not yet
been discovered. Perhaps because of these reasons this
ground-breaking work did not percolate into the commun-
ity at large, and as a result most sound analysis and
processing tools today continue to use models based on
spectral theories. We believe it is time to revisit this
issue.

We have conducted the first direct psychoacoustical test
of the Fourier uncertainty principle in human hearing, by
measuring simultaneous temporal and frequency discrimi-
nation. Our data indicate that human subjects often beat the
bound prescribed by the uncertainty theorem, by factors in
excess of 10. This is sometimes accomplished by an
increase in frequency acuity, but by and large it is temporal
acuity that is increased and largely responsible for these
gains. Our data further indicate subject acuity is just as
good for a notelike amplitude envelope as for the Gaussian,
even though theoretically the uncertainty product is
increased for such waveforms. Our study directly rules
out many of the simpler models of early auditory process-
ing, often used as input to the higher-order stages in models
of higher auditory function. Of the plethora of time-
frequency distributions and auditory processing models
that have been studied, only a few stand a chance of both
matching the performance of human subjects and be
plausibly implementable in the neural hardware of the
auditory
system
(e.g.,
Refs.
[6,7,12,27]),
with the reassignment method having the best comparative tempo-
ral acuity. Elucidation of which mechanism underlies our
subjects’ auditory hyperacuity is likely to have wide-
ranging applications, both in fields where matching human
performance is an issue, such as speech recognition, as
well as those more removed, such as radar, sonar, and radio »

 

 

 

is this experiment after of a long history of past experiments in the same direction looked like as Amir falsely claim as just a mere underestimation of some linear factors bounds in Fourier models between frequency and time  or more as a revolution in hearing theory out of Fourier models based theory ?

Only gullible unable to read people will go with Amir interpretation here...

Stunning, right?  Isn't trivial and simple to conclude that TotalDAC is poorly designed and can't rival this $80 dongle?

Yeah … stunning indeed. Whoever takes you seriously with your findings is in a stunning need for help 🤦‍♂️

 

@mahgister ,

I will be honest with you. I find your attitude appalling.  Your anger because Amir (and others) refuse to bend to your way of thinking, that you are not presenting in a coherent manner, is off-putting and if there was a mute button I would have long ago used it.  You are not trying to communicate or discuss, you are trying to impose.

So our hearing has non-linear processing. So what. No one appears to dispute that. It appears to be quite common where our senses are concerned. Seems pretty common in industry too.

You are screaming at Amir, but I have you provided a concrete example of how what he is doing is wrong or will lead to improper conclusions?  Not screaming at him this is wrong, but exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and very important, how wrong he is. Is he off by 5%? 10? 75%?   You are very confident what he is doing is wrong, so you should be able to confidently tell him, how inaccurate the work he is doing is.  To put it colloquially, put your money where your mouth is.

I went back and read those papers and some of the links I searched. Do you know what frequencies they were measuring and what times they were using? I assumed based on your dissertation that the times would be very small, and the frequencies high. The frequencies were small, 100's of Hz, and the times were large, many milliseconds. I don't know all the math, but if we are testing to 20KHz, I don't think timing of milliseconds is going to be an issue even if there are small technical problems.

I said I was done with this and I should be, but you are determined to dominate this thread.

 

Interesting thread. One guy producing actual data and others countering with words. Not a fair fight it would seem. The audiophiles may need to up their game, but at least it’s a home game here for them so that helps.  😉

Fwiw I use name brand speaker wires with batteries on them and gotta say it’s one tweak I never have heard a difference with. But it’s OK, In my defense, I bought them used for a reasonable price versus the competition. They work fine and sound good because my system ain’t bad otherwise so no need to measure…they get the job done. Glad I didn’t pay top dollar new though. I might have felt a little silly then.