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

Anyway after my arguments unanswered... there is no discussion only bashing opposite sides...

Why people are so unable to think? because they trust gear, toys, anything but not what matter : concepts BEFORE experiments... Concepts AFTER experiments...

I like acoustic because we hear qualities and they inform us about the world and people...

Hearing is more deep than touch... Because with ears we touch inside things and at distance...

@rodman99999

 

Feynman was and will remain, my favorite lecturer (yeah: I’m that old).

And yet in the post I quoted I saw no inkling that you have taken one of Feynman’s most famous cautions to heart, when it comes to investigating reality:

FEYNMAN: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Do you understand what he was getting at there? I don’t see that you do, since the post I quoted admonished people:

"IF you’re interested in the possibility of improving your system’s presentation, have a shred of confidence in your capacity for perceiving reality and trust your own senses: actually TRY whatever whets your aural appetite, FOR YOURSELF. "

You were clearly, against Feynman’s advice, telling people to trust in themselves, to accurately understand what is going on. Not a hint of Feynman’s scientific caution that any method ought to control for the ways in which we are prone to error and misconception and bias.  Just "try it and trust yourself."

And of course the rest of what you’d written in that quote about science and everything else was one long strawman.

 

 

                 It isn't that the Denyin'tologists are ignorant.

               It's they're knowing* so much, that's WRONG.

                       *heart of the Dunning-Kruger Effect

And of course the rest of what you’d written in that quote about science and everything else was one long strawman.

                        facts/truth = strawman = GASLIGHTING

                      prof (snort of derision) should go into politics!

@amir_asr

Forget everything we have been discussing here. If you are not measuring your room and correcting for bass errors, you have a lousy audio system. Period. Measurements will absolutely show that the acoustic stuff you have thrown in there have little to no impact in this regard (don’t be fooled by the name "bass trap, " they do no bass trapping).

 

Ok, there I have to disagree. I think a statement like that is unhelpfully dogmatic.

You could make the point that measuring will help show bass response deviations from neutral, and that these can be corrected for if you want a neutral bass response.

But...one can also get a fairly smooth bass response by ear. Not as accurate as an instrument, but it is the ear, how we perceive the sound, that one can care about pleasing. Remember: there’s little point in caring about things you can’t hear. The point of addressing bass nodes is that you can hear them. Which means you can hear them without an instrument (even if not as precisely quantified).

So one can experiment with speaker/listening positions, with test signals or well known tracks, to hear when a bass node or dip may be intruding on the sound. If a bass error response is something you can’t notice, or it occurs so infrequently that it rarely infringes on your enjoyment of the sound, then big whoop.

I haven’t used measurements in my set up. Is there some bass node somewhere that would show up in measurements? No doubt. Does it regularly stand out in some deleterious way? Nope. I’ve heard many of my test tracks (which include bass torture tests for tightness/depth etc) on systems that have some correction for room response (e.g. numerous times with the Kii Audio 3 speakers) and the bass I hear at home is similarly smooth.  (I did at one point have subwoofers and room correction for the bass - it wasn't much smoother to my ears than what I'd achieved without the correction).

And declaring any system that wasn’t arrived at with measurements and room correction to be "lousy system" is a subjective opinion - nobody need take your subjective opinion as the basis for what they want in their own system, or in place of their own goals or judgement.

I suppose it’s quite possible if you listened to my system at some point you might hear a room interaction that could have been fixed, and then declare it "lousy" by those standards.

But by the standards I seek it’s wonderful, and by the standards of what my guests experience when listening - joy and astonishment, I’ve had people moved to tears - well, if that’s "lousy" I’ll take "lousy." ;-)

Cheers.