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

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Amir said this :

Our mission at ASR Forum is to see if a product is well engineered or not.

It will be perfectly weel if it was the case...

But ASR impose through a fanatics kernel of techno babble groupies of him what are the NORM of engineering that will produce REAL sound qualities, the so called "transparency" with no distortions... To do so they negate the ears/brain real working ways , non linear and time dependant, and they bashed and attacked a well known competent  designer using basic psycho-acoustic facts about the way we perceived harmonics signals and accused him bluntly to create BAD DESIGN to please deluded audiophiles...Incredible arrogance coupled to complete ignorance...

Amir called this dogmatic ignorance about psycho-acoustic , science...

And me, who tuned my room using my ears learning concretely acoustic, i am supposed to be the deluded one...😊

No one deny there is information on ASR and useful one...No one deny there is balanced mind people on ASR not only Amir groupies ...

No one can deny there is also  a basic dogmatic ignorance of elementary psycho-acoustic pushed as SCIENCE, because they use some set of  measuring tools..

By the way, i did not used only material treatment with the right ratio for reflective/absorbing/diffusive surface and volume, i created my own large band MECHANICHAL equaliser with one hundred distributed tuned Helmholtz resonators all around critical spots in the room... I used equalization in my own way with SUCCESS...No cost...

Am i deluded ? Yes for Amir...

He read Toole book but never apply it... He trust only tools not his ears...

He think the brain /ears work like a Fourier computer...

He really claim all the phisicists i used to explain all my points were deluded, incompetent or they are as Van Maanen gear seller...

Bad faith at his top expression...

Not a SINGLE argument to counter the fact that we need a non linear and time dependant theory of hearing for interpreting sound qualities real meanings in an ecological theory of hearing and to MEASURE the limits of our Fourier tools themselves  ... it is WHY any acoustician know that the Fourier hearing theory need to be complemented by an ecological hearing Theory... Amir does not know how to spell e-c-o-l-o-g-i-ca-l ... 😊 He never wrote this word to counter it with an argument...

 

read all his posts...

He sell his tools and site ideology...nothing else...

 

 

 

@prof 

I have over 5,000 posts on ASR.  How many do you have in terms of actual familiarity with day to day content?

And there it is, one of the ASR faithful has joined the effort to hijack Audiogon.  The day to day content on ASR is exactly why the hypocrisy is being called out. 

Stop spreading misinformation, and  then maybe Amir won't have to spend his time showing up to correct it.

Once again, the cult like mantra appears - Amir is right, everyone else is wrong.  Is that pile of backlogged equipment to measure getting any smaller? 

If Amir really thinks correction is needed then allow discussion on ASR as on display here.  Oh no, sorry, that would not work.  Only group think allowed on ASR, so Audiogon is now the soapbox for Amir.  

 

 

I will add this :

As Einstein famously said :

What was Einstein’s best quote?
 
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
 
What does it means for hearing theories if we pounder this deep quote...
 
 

The problem-solutions in a field of study is the passage from one level to the next in a deeper spiralling wheel at each steps...

What does this means for hearing ?

Hearing is related to the way human produced sounds with their body and to the way evolution tuned together the perception of sound which is at the same time the child and the father of the gesturing body which is in a constant resonant synchronized relation with the various natural sound sources as INFORMATIVE AFFORDANCES as called them J. J. Gibson , or concrete qualities, around him at each step of the evolution spiralling wheel ...

When we separate now artificially in a laboratory the perception of QUALIFIED sound in an abstract theory ( Fourier MAPS of abstract linear factors : frequencies, amplitude, phase, duration ) we loose the dynamic link with the NATURAL way to produce sound by gesture of the body members and mouth in the real world ...Then we are at lost to explain concrete qualities of sound in music and speech and in natural environment by only the linear composition of abstract factors...the map become confused with the territory...

Where are concrete factors of hearing ? They are the physical qualitative invariant in the vibrating sound sources we learned by evolution to accurately predict and analyse in the time dependant domain where we live and in a non linear way...

Then uniting together the separate abstract factors of Fourier analysis with the concrete ecological and physical invariants linked to real qualities perceived in the real world we can solve the acoustic problem at the level where it emerge after Helmholtz and Fourier to the next level : a complex synthesis of new proposed set of experiments in the ecological environment where sound are perceived and produced since the beginning...This is the Magnasco and Oppenheim proposition and conclusion after 60 years of experiments in this direction..

Staying at the level of the problem, confusing our tools with the solution to the problem of hearing is non sense scientifically... With Amir it is marketing ideology of tools... He does not even recognize the terms of the problem confusing the Fourier maps with the hearing concrete territory ... The solution stay invisible for him ...There is even not a problem in psycho-acoustic for Amir deluded as it is with his tools-toys...

 

 

 

«The separation between philosophy and science  exist only for bad engineers, imagination  is the father and the child of thinking »Anonymus Einstein reader

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”  Albert Einstein