Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

Nothing transformed my audio system and ideas more than that processor.  My jaw fell on the floor in the way it seemingly removed the walls from my listening room!

What kind of subjective audio-foolery statement is that?

Alas, the story did not end well.  After spending $10K on the processor, I spent another $5K to upgrade it. 

The snake in snakeoil bit you in the butt.  Wonder what kind of reception the above statements would receive over at ASR?

Only slow thinkwer will interpret Feynman Quote

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

as if an individual could fool himself everytime he trust himself and then must put his trust externally ...

The best way to fool himself for an individual and miss the Nobel prize is believing all that is taught everywhere ... Perhaps to Kuhn and Popper you must add Feyerabend for philosophy of science course...

Doubting is not self doubting first and using blind test as childish thinking from  Amir indicate, it is doubting what is taught and experimenting with it to LEARN IT OR TO REFUTE IT by experience and trust in ourself ... We cannot do that all the time  for sure , trust in others must be there as trust in ourself, but interpreting this quote out of context as never believing in our own ears and eyes is a more damaging attitude than trusting our ability to train ourself and trust ourself first not others even when we learn...

Tesla opposed his teachers at university who taught him that his electric motor idea was impossible... he did not trusted them but himself and created it after by solving all problems...

individuality and creativity is the root of science and philosophy NOT SELF DOUBT...Science is not the market arena of a circus...Barnum is not a genius in philosophy of science...And if a sucker is born everyday on earth, a genius is born everyday on earth too...

Loosing confidence in ourself and trusting others is the Key road to technocratic totalitarism, scientism, and any deep delusion created by the techno babbling people ...The death of thinking.,.

quote means something in a context :

when Feynmann created his solutions ad hoc to particules paths integrals...In spite of others advices ...

Then this quote means this : for being able to not fool himself a man must LEARN when it is right to trust himself and not others and vice versa when it is right to trust others not ouself...Not knowing that  TIMING MOMENT explain why we are the easiest person to fool...

The quote is not a quote of a marketers as Amir or from a car or audio seller,or from Barnum saying a suckers is born everyday, A favorite quote of official "debunkers" sheeps objectivist crowds, it is from a scientist doubting himself and others BECAUSE he look for truth FOR HIMSELF first ...

Feynman for sure never recommend obedience to authorities as Amir or alleged authorities ask for , instead of trust in yourself...Thats is certain...

Prof you miss Feyerabend teachings in the philosophy of science course... 😊

@texbychoice Didn’t even really catch that. Good eye. It’s a very subjective statement and one that isn’t even backed by Amir’s precious data. How the heck do you buy a processor and then spend that much money only to brick it? I’ve never heard of a product or company being so crappy. He must really not be hurting if he just doesn’t care about a $15,000 loss. Time to ask for more donations. 
 

@amir_asr so room treatments do nothing? All of the producers and sound engineers who record with them to create less issues and surrounding booths with it so the vocals are clean don’t know what they are doing?? You can hear the difference. It’s night a day. You literally use a tool that mimics an anechoic chamber. You really have your head up your rear end. 

Small room acoustic is not great Hall acoustic, or even studio recording acoustic.. These three are three completely different acoustic environtment for the goal we want to achieve...

These are completely different acoustical field of experience...You are wrong here, because you confuse small room acoustic and studio acoustic and great Hall acoustic ... Sorry .. Same physical acoustical Laws but completely different applications...Do you need a blind test to catch the deep difference in contextual applications ?

if i did not have adressed my small room by balance control of first reflection and diffusion and absorption, if i had not used a grid of Helmholtz resonators but only your DSP my room soundfield instead of being my greatest sound experience, so imperfect it was ,would have been horrible...

I am sure of two things just inspecting your room in a photo...Your sound potential clarity and transparency will be better than mine BECAUSE OF SUPERIOR COMPONENTS DESIGN at way higher cost , especially the speakers compared to mine...but your soundfield is probably not filling the room in a balanced way with for example in the opera recording of Kurt Weill TEST IT WITH HIS :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR33bL5aNTk&t=1196s

here the soundfield in my small room all along the album go from beside my ears as with headphone to all around me IN THE ROOM , behind and in front of the speakers, at different times , and distributed all around at some times, it is relative to each album moments...My SPEAKERS DISAPEARED TOTALLY...  This recording is TOP recording for sure by a genius ... I know you dont listen classical but we must begin someday... 😊In my room the soundfield of my 600 bucks system will beat yours  if i look at the atrocious way you treat your room acoustic ...And your speakers are better than mine with better frequencies responses.. bUt a soundfield is not created ONLY by frequencies responses, it is created by interaction with the room and the specific EARS of the owner... We dont have the same ears filters and structure and training history ,did you know that ? 😊

i am not an acoustician , i just experimented 7 days each week non stop for one year, because it was fun and it was my hobby being retired ..i learned a lot PRACTICALLY not only by reading equation by specialist and calling it done with a DSP , i experimented too ... By the way i used japanese research among books and papers,for example also Toole recommending using first reflection positively in SMALL ROOM about reflection and immersiveness to guide my experiments...

By the way it is related EXPERIMENTALLY , in each case differently, to the specific ACOUSTIC GEOMETRY (form) AND TOPOLOGY (doors+window) AND TO THE MATERIAL specific CONTENT OF THE ROOM and his acoustic properties (wood do not act as fabric clothes or animal skin etc) and it is then related after all that to TIME AND TIMING hearing and measures it is not related to your OPINION AT ALL and to your toys so useful it can be as a tool...

Contrary of what you said mocking those who informed themselves on the net ALL TOP RESEARCH PAPERS ARE ALL ACCESSIBLE FREE ON THE INTERNET for anybody with a brain...

I just argued with you about your ignorance in ecological hearing theory to balance Fourier theory and their relation to measures evaluation of qualities of sound reading among other papers an unpublished master thesis and papers i discover on the internet..

 

😊

In a nutshell, the most preferred treatment was no treatment

You are wrong here, because you confuse small room acoustic and studio acoustic and great Hall acoustic ... Sorry .. Same physical acoustical Laws completely different applications which must be discovered by some human ears of an acoustician and applied differently in each different acoustical environment...

If i had listened to you my small room would have been what it was in the beginning , horrible and atrocious, before i used my balance treatment with the right ratio and location between reflection/diffusion /absorption and before i used my MANY Helmholtz resonators mechanically adjustable and tuned resonators HOMEMADE distributed at critical location...... All that by my EARS..

No cost...I used garbage in my basement and i bought some tubes and cheap materials..

i am very proud of my room at the time...

i lost it...

And after 6 months of experiments and the right headphone i recreated a three D. room filling soundstage OUT OF THE HEAD, if the recording is good as in many CLASSICAL recording ... Studio recording did not gave the same spatial impressions..

Your friend is right and it is MY EXPERIENCE not by applying DSP but by experimenting:

The second issue not readily evident in the room response though there are some indications is the strong reflections from the very close side walls that will arrive both close in time and relatively high in power compared to the direct response. Yes it is correct that your speakers are well designed with smooth off axis response hence this won’t cause any weird tonal issues making assumptions about your wall materials, but back to the precedence effect, it will affect imaging, and while side wall reflections can make the image seem more expansive and the result pleasurable, when the wall is that close the result is invariably negative. You may not trust audiophile listening reports, but in similar situations, almost without exception where an audiophile was required to place their speakers near side walls, the addition of appropriate acoustic panels resulted in a significant perceived improvement. Anecdotally, you will not find a large professional studio with speakers placed that close to a side wall without use of acoustic treatments.

I won’t say it is universal, but it is almost universal that treatment of first reflections in a small rooms is recommended by professionals. Unfortunately, there has not been extensive research on this topic to draw on and what does exist is mainly around speech intelligibility, however, Brett Leonard in his PhD dissertation did some excellent work showing effects of a rather early intense reflections on perception and even the variability of that perception across music genres. Your position does not appear to be based on the fundamental science, available research, or professional recommendation.

 

 

 

@amir_asr so room treatments do nothing? All of the producers and sound engineers who record with them to create less issues and surrounding booths with it so the vocals are clean don’t know what they are doing?? You can hear the difference. It’s night a day.

No, room treatments do something. Just not what you think.  This idea of copying what "pros" do in the process of creating music is why we are in such a mess.  They forget the fallacy of appealing to authority and jump right in both feet.

You are taking it even a step further.  What a single microphone picks up in a tiny vocal booth has absolutely nothing with you sitting back to listen to music in a much larger space with two ears and a brain.  I am not a recording engineer but I imagine they want a dry recording of that vocal as to then embellish it with as much reverb in post as they need. That has nothing to do with what we do in our listening spaces.

There is this assumption also that if pros do something, it must be right.  A pro creating music has expertise in that field, not in science of acoustics.  They haven't gone to school to learn acoustics, not have they read massive body of literature on effects of reflections in room.  They hire joe acoustician which does what the poster said above: "we need to treat the room" or at least the front if in the form of LEDE or "Environmental Room."  Acoustic products are put all of the walls making the room look special.  This impresses the client resulting in higher billing per hour.

To be sure, at high level, an empty room is too live to be usable for enjoyable of a lot of music.  In that case, if you have a dedicated room like that, you do need to "treat" it.  That can be with acoustic products or in my case, ordinary furnishings that perform a similar job, are not ugly and often are much cheaper.

The research I post above shows that even when it comes to getting work done (recording/mixing), the notion that an absorptive room is right was shown to be false.  People in that space would do well to rethink what they are doing.

All of this was extensively discussed in the thread I linked to.  There is no point you can bring up that was not addressed there with volumes of research, not opinion based on stuff you have read online.  This is what we do at ASR.  We discuss the science contrary to people who think we only "measure."

BTW, if you were listening to that singer, there is a good chance you would want no absorption in that booth.  This hits on the proverbial person's voice sounding best in a shower!

You literally use a tool that mimics an anechoic chamber. You really have your head up your rear end. 

The tool is designed to characterize a speaker independent of the space it is placed in.  Otherwise, its measurements will be specific to that location so not transportable to others.  Research shows that we can use the anechoic measurements of frequency response in 3-D space, combine that with statistical mean of reflections in a number of listening rooms, and predict, with high accuracy, what happens in such a room (above transition frequencies).  I post this already:

See the title?  "Estimated in-room response" which we formally call PIR (Predicted In-Room Response).  This can even be used to predict listener preference although the formula can misfire.

Bottom line, don't go slapping mattresses all of your everyday room.  It is not necessary and will uglify your room and likely not have the effect you think it will have.  Your "aunt's" furniture will do just fine in providing some diffusion and carpets and such (if thick) provide good bit of absorption.  Just get it to the point where talking in there is comfortable and you are golden (if you like, you can measure using RT60 and get in the range of 0.25 to 0.6 second for typical small room).