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
Post removed 

@prof Here is an entire discussion about snake oil and how it’s based on fraud in a lot of peoples minds. Something that essentially doesnt work at all. Not just dubious claims. People in that thread call magico speakers snake oil. I wouldnt say that’s fair. Overpriced maybe. To use Amirs analogy, then an Icon Bronco is snake oil I guess.

This is from that thread and is probably more accurate "Snake-oil: Does none of the things being claimed other than through the powers of suggestion.

Rip-off: Highly expensive but identical in any meaningful way to products with a vanishingly smaller price tag."

Nobody likes it when somebody rains on their parade  with a handful of select facts. 

People in that thread call magico speakers snake oil.

No they didn't.  The thread title is: "What is the difference between snake oil and rip off, or both are the same?"  So comments are made on both fronts.  This is the magico reference and response

Katji said:

Refer to Magico speakers >$600,000 made with expensive materials like exotic woods and Titanium.

Magico/DCS are the contemporary ‘high-end’ they measure well and have super smart casework. Commensurate performance is available at many multiples of expense less of course.

Reasonable back and forth completely inconsistent with your claim.  Really, this dog don't hunt.  You are just showing that you are not familiar with ASR. 

Yes, it is hard to believe that seeking the straw in our eyes you never seek the beam in your own eyes...

As Feynman really means , FOR you ,is you fool ourself by believing that all biases are equal...

What are Rodman and me our common biases : we confide and trust our ears experience and history, it is the straw in our eyes...

This straw sometimes must be takes off by blind test or the ears must be better trained yes anybody can contest common place evidence...Because not only blind test, but training can replace past erroneous biases with better useful new acquired biases...For sure...

What are the beam in your eyes, the biases you dont see and fool you completely ?

It is from the psycho-acoustic history, and from the Oppenheim and Magnasco experiment which confirmed it, the non linear working of the ears/brain and his working in his OWN TIME DOMAIN , not in a symmetrical independant time domain as ALL linear Fourier tools..

The Oppenheim and Magnasco demonstrated, as many others psycho-acousticians demonstrated and thought it before , that the ears/brain PERCEIVE aspects of sounds in his own acquired evolutive way... it is in this way that we created speech in the same gesture than music in a rythmic, melodic unidirectionality of time ...ears/brain work in this time breaking symmetry and caused it... The ears brain dont perceive sounds linearly what does it means:

it means that higher harmonics are not evaluated by the ears in the same way with the same tonality nor with the same perceived value, it means that " Like vision, hearing — which is to say, the ear–brain system — has a nonlinear response to stimuli. This means that increasing the stimulus by, say, 10%, does not necessarily increase the response by 10%. Instead, it depends on the power and bandwidth of the signal, and on the response of the system itself." it means even more , it means that in an ecological theory of hearing :

"under some circumstances, most importantly in the presence of a detection threshold, adding noise increases the signal-to-noise ratio.

I’ll just let you read that last sentence again.

Add noise to increase S:N? It might seem bizarre, and downright wrong, but it’s actually a fairly simple idea. If a signal is below the detection threshold, then adding a small Goldilocks amount of noise can make the signal ’peep’ above the threshold, allowing it to be detected."

https://agilescientific.com/blog/2014/6/9/the-nonlinear-ear.html

 

Then All the Fourier linear and TIME INDEPENDANT tools and methods applied so well to the good predictive beahaviour of the designed electronic components so efficient they are, cannot alone by themselves be able to EXPLAIN the ears/brain way of processing sounds as evolution tuned up for natural sounds perception and emission or production in some recursive loop oriented in his own time domain and making us sensible MORE to the burst of a sound and to his decay than to the inverse direction :decay and burst... It is the time symmetry breaking and the creation of his own time domain by the ears/brain...

But for a set of Fourier linear maps, in a time independant way, the direction not only does not matter, but the basic abstract factors as frequencies, amplitude, and phase and duration, must be linearly ordered and interlinked , and are linearly related under the Gabor limits...But Oppenheim And Magnasco demonstrated with SELECTED MUSICIANS WITH TRAINED AND ACQUIRED MUSICAL BIASES, that the ears/brain can beat the Gabor limits or the Fourier uncertainty limits even thirteen times in some case...

Then what is the BEAM in the eyes of the Amir sect: it is the erroneous equation determining with  very small set of linear tools , the Fourier tools used to design gear and electronic components which must well behave linearly in a time independant way, which are now  dogmatically used to characterise all audible qualities  as pertaining to gear "transparency" or to be illusions or artefacts of the deluded brain biases... This dogma is the BEAM in your eyes...It induce a BIAS which you are not conscious of and this bias reduce all Musical qualities perceived by audiophiles or the average people as REAL  MUSICAL QUALITIES,  to be mere illusions of the brain, or mere artefacts, or the biase we must eliminate...

It is this bias acuired by  trained musicians which biases  you want to eliminate that what SELECTED and  used by Oppenheimer and Magnasco, selecting trained musicians to demonstrate how the ears/brain beat the Fourier uncertainty limit by working non linearly and in his own time domain,with this ACQUIRED BIAS as a DETECTING TOOL  for a privileged or biased or favored direction in time , which is the BASIS OF THE ECOLOGICAl theory of hearing, A THEORY BADLY NEEDED IN PSYCHO-ACOUSTIC SCIENCE TO COMPLEMENT THE FOURIER FREQUENCIES BASED THEORY...

Do you understand now why Feynman say that the easiest person to fool is ourself ?

It is because we dont know at what MOMENT in our life, the biases we express would be positive for the results of an experiment or negative for this experiment, or positive for hypothesis or negative for the hypothesis, as Salomon did with his judgement with the two mothers, or as Christ expressed it with the beam and the straw, we must chose the right set of biases or became conscious of them...Sometimes we must listen to ourself not to Amir and sometimes Amir is right... We must learn this timing in our life , if not, we will fool oursself each time...

Then Feynman was not speaking about ELIMINATING all biases indistinctly , which act is impossible generally, and a trivial Barnum like saying,  he ask us to choose the right set of biases...

Biases are inevitable as you know... Think about it then...We must select the right one at the right time...

In his dogmatic marketing for his site and to sell his methods of DEBUNKING, Amir is not interested to replace his biases about the way the ears/brain works, this Fourier based tools and frequency based theory of hearing, the way he used it, is  wrong...The ears/brain perceiving musical qualities dont work as a Fourier computer linearly and in the independant time domain ...These musical qualities are real for a trained ears of an acoustician and a musician or for any self trained person able to tune his room they are not biases we must eliminate IN ALL CASES... But it is not the way  Amir see it as a propagandist of his tools/toys...

 

 

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.