Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

You don't even grasp the irony of your own gushing subjective words or spending $15K on an audio toy that ended up being useless.  The very behavior routinely ridiculed on ASR.

That's not the same and you know it.

You know very well that "snake oil" is a reference to products that do not do what they are claimed to do. 

That TacT Amir owned did what it claims to do: perform audible corrections to the sound.

That something breaks doesn't make it "snake oil."

That's just a disingenuous attempt at some "gotcha."

Seriously...and you guys are up Amir's butt for the style of HIS posts?

@prof Pretty sure when they said snake oil they were referring to the price tag and how it probably doesn’t do anything better and the fact that it bricked on a firmware upgrade. I’ve never even had any product do that, and if it did I could revert back to the old FW. Amir states snake oil are cables that claim to improve sound when they cost $1000. Now it's a hard pill to swallow that this eq piece works that much better than say a mini dsp or Dirac unit. Or even a Trinnov which can be had for 1/15th and 1/3 the price respectively. 

Amir saying that room eq is valid but most acoustic treatment isnt is bogus!

Let me ask you, do you think everything he says is gospel? It seems you are up his butt for different reasons.

Snake oil refer to any deception AND self deception, deception and self deception are TWINS... as Feynman said the easiest person to fool is ourself for this REASON... ..

Buying a 15,000 bucks piece that did not do  the job intended is not less ridiculous that buying am amplifier who did not sound as we asked for ...

i dont see the difference Prof...

By the way i described how today i read  on ASR attacks on a well known designer  ( i will not name him because i dont want to drain him in the swamp of this debate ) because he used his knowledge about the non linear way the ears perceive sound to design his amplifier using harmonic distortion in a wise psycho-acoustical way... Few people as  "wise" and less "wise"  as amir attacked him about any aspects of his work, and i say attack , because they suggested multiple times that this "distortion" business is if  it is not fraud it is for  useless deluded ignorance of audiophiles..

The designer was a gentleman and answer them politely... I had the EXACT same discussion here with Amir about the way the ears hear, NON LINEARLY IN HIS OWN TIME DOMAIN... Then no one can equate a limited of linear measures in the time independfant domain with AUDIBLE MUSICAL PERCEIVED QUALITIES. Claiming otherwise is not psycho-acoustic knowledge but ignorance...

No set of measures about audible qualities can be reduced to measures about the linear well behaviour of circuits ... Oppenheim and Magnsco experiment demonstrated why... they even suggested why we do more experiments in the context of ecological hearing theory...

Amir answered with ad hominem attack against Van Maanen and reduce the lesson of Oppenheim and Magnasco to be trivial experiment about mere hearing acuity limits , forgetting how the experience illustrate non linear behaviour of the ears in his time domain... This is BAD FAITH motivated by his business : selling his set of measures as ABSOLUTE truth about musical qualities...

Now prof, if some of the ASR crowds treat a well respected designer this way, contesting him ,and asking for PROOF , and almost insulting him; imagine how they will treat me ?

they will never listen to me a second and they will not be polite at all..

I listened politely to Amir thanks him 15 times. oppose my arguments, but instead of answering, he use any means but NEGATE the central problem in hearing theory as it never existed..

i lost complete trust in Amir...

i am naive but one thing i know : i learned how to analyse any text scientific or not... i know what is a valid argument or when someone drown the fish..

That’s not the same and you know it.

You know very well that "snake oil" is a reference to products that do not do what they are claimed to do.

That TacT Amir owned did what it claims to do: perform audible corrections to the sound.

That something breaks doesn’t make it "snake oil."

That’s just a disingenuous attempt at some "gotcha."

Seriously...and you guys are up Amir’s butt for the style of HIS posts?

@mahgister 

He means that we fool ourselves any time if we dont LEARN if it is the time to trust only ourselves or the time  trust an other...

We are the easiest person to fool because we dont know why it is time to go alone or to listen others... Simple...

No, you wrote in utterly vague circles, never landing on his actual point. 

His point clearly had to do with what separates the scientific endeavour from everyday level inferences.

When Fynman says "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

That is clearly a warning about the influence of human BIAS in distorting and guidling our conclusions.   "You are the easist person to fool" is a reference to how easy it is for us to filter explanations and evidence to fit our desires or biases.  In fact, we are easy to fool through various pitfalls in thought, even when we are trying to not be biased.  When YOU are the one doing the testing YOUR actions and interpretations will have a blind spot of your own bias.

He admonishes us therefore The first principle is that you must not fool yourself,"  which means we have to incorporate guardrails against fooling ourslef in to our methods of inquiry.

This is so obvious it's just hard to believe folks like you and rodman can't just state what he meant.

Since our biases form such an obvious, first problem in interpreting results, this is why there are various methods of mitigating the influence of bias in scientific testing.  It's why for instance many therapeutic trials are done blind, double and even triple blinded.

It's why you want to have a hypothesis that is testable by other parties, looking to prove your hypothesis wrong, themselves using safeguards against their own bias effects.

This has OBVIOUS implications for testing audio claims.  If for instance sighted bias is a known confounding variable - a prime way of FOOLING YOURSELF - then Feynman's admonishment clearly indicates you should find a way to rule out that way of FOOLING YOURSELF.   Job ONE of the approach he is advocating!

This is why most of the scientific level of research on human perception in general, and much that is available on the perception of audio gear (e.g. the research often cited by Floyd Toole) is done with controls for those variables so the FOOLING YOURSELF part is mitigated as much as possible.

Of course neither you nor anyone else no this forum needs to do scientific-level rigorous research in order to enjoy the hobby or buy whatever you want.  But if someone is invoking Feynman in a thread that clearly entails the relevance of science to audio, then at least get what he was saying.  You can ignore it...but at least understand it.

@prof do you run an alt Amir account because you sound rude just like him LOL

Saying "anyone" on this forum needs to do scientific research is baseless and overstated. I do scientific research. I don't do things without research and some sort of basis in reality.