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.
Well said thanks again...
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You are right for sure... It is way more deeper if we speak about sounds and music though ... No measurements win the race because of its validity ALONE... The measurements must be evaluated in their CONTEXT of application and in their LIMITED bounds of application.. Thats my point discussing hearing theories and what means linear measures for a non linear Ears/brain , and what means out of the design process , measured numbers of material designs which are interpreted in a time independant way for a time dependant unrelated qualitative phenomenon .. Amir said: no need for that, trust the tools and forget your ears save for a blind test... Acuity in hearings for him is not recognizing nuances in soprano voice expression here, for him it is only hertz and decibels... Then the Amir ears are untrained by non amplified classical or persian or Indian or African or Chinese or japan music... he trained his ears with studio and computers... He call that training ears in resolution and acuity ... He dont know that even in perception the ears/brain to perceive something as meaningful and not only as audible noise in background must have the different experience of different musical contexts because without concepts we dont perceive things in a qualitative way ... We reduce them to hertz and decibels... We are then NOT EVEN WRONG... Amir is not even wrong because he miss the question to begin with... He gives an answer to a question he never ask,... What is technology in relation to science ? it is answers for question we never asked... or it is a possible new question for an answer we never imagined.. 😊 An example : Mankind discovered fire by accident... It was an answer for a question about cooking we never asked for...
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I am sorry mapman you miss the points... Ideology here means: someone who use tools to measure, which is a good thing , no one refuse information; but when this person impose his measures out of any Interpretation context, and here the context to interpret measures is not only the behaviour of well designed material components but their relation to sounds qualities, this is the domain of hearing theory...Or psycho-acoustic... No objectivist or subjectivist exist in psycho-acoustic sorry only experiments protocols about hearing... Imposing a limited set of measures to replace hearing theories and perceived sound qualities when the measuring context ( Fourier linear and time independant tool with a frequencies based hearing theory ) is put under the rug is technological ideology contradicting psycho-acoustic facts : Human hearing work in a non linear way in the time dependant domain constrained by his evolutive history with speech and musical produced sounds and natural sounds QUALITATIVE perception .. you did not read my posts... 😊 You did not pass the exam... I know my posts they are too long and with too much articles...😊
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You explain it better than me for everyone... Thanks.. 😊
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Anybody welcome a set of measures and we thank him for that ...Nobody buy his ideological stance about their meanings ...Save naive techno babbling minds for sure.. 😊 Simple... It is not the gear listenings or measuring who rule audio, it is the psycho-acoustic knowledge behind it... it is why the division between subjectivist and objectivist, created by techno babbling objectivist to begin with had no scientific meaning at all... It is marketing of the measuring toys against marketing the gear... It is marketing in the two cases... Amir against the designers, debunking them with his erroneous hearing theory , industrial one or craftmanship one... it is simple to figure out why he is wrong...he dont know that hearing theory contradict his claims... And he believe blind test as some marketer use them too replace hearing knowledge and training... Does he listen and perceive classical music nuances and meanings ? If he did he will know the difference between sound and music and the way they interpenetrate one another through human hearings paradoxical powers history in the recursive relation between productive sound ability and the way we perceive them ( non linearly and in a time dependant domain ) ... No measures mean something out of his context of application and out of his interpretative context ... i learned it in the book of Benoit Mandelbrot about fractals and a complete redefinition of geometrical concepts first published in french, not in english, in autumn 1976... I read my first Mandelbrot article in the french pleiade about science in 1975 and here Mandelbrot described his idea about modelization of phone signals errors in phone lines , the first sketch of fractal geometry and the reason i bought his book the first day he was delivered in north America in french.. I read it in ectasy... Suddenly i realized i did not understand anything about space at all before reading it.... one of the best books i read in my list of books... now fractals geometry is everywhere... i like geometry... 😊 As Alain Connes suggested we can " listen" number theory rythms and we can "see" music shapes ...he is totally right... By the way this is not "poetry" but mathematical facts... |
I learned a lot discussing with Amir... The problem is he cannot nor want to learn anything from anybody even physicists and acoustician... he sell marketing points... But without discussing about his false "theory" of hearing, i will never had learn so much about what is at stake in hearings theory... We cannot discuss with stupid people, but we can learn from ideological people... For example discussing with a marxist you must learn Marx economy theory.. If discussing with a neo liberal economist i would learn about the chicago school hidden roots...Bernard Mandeville the genius behind Adam Smith for example ... Discussing with A chomskyan linguist we learn about other roads... ( Gustave Guillaume genius for me ) etc
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In the beginning i trusted his good faith... Then i set the highest bar for the debate : In what context any set of measures make sense ? In a hearing theory context ... I cited Oppenheim and Magnasco to set the right hearing context theory with their important experiment after 60 years of acoustician thinking around this who goes in the same direction as these two physicists .. Because the ears/brain are non linear and work in a time dependant DIRECTION,not on a mere frequencies basis in a time independant linear way as our tools works... We cannot equate linear time independant measure which are good to create a well working circuits as being equally the perfect norm for "musicality" evaluation, I explained in detail, even using the many articles of a competent physicists and acoustician and designer , Hans Van Maanen , who explain clearly all that matter, He disparaged the Magnasco and Oppenheim experiments as non significative save to be a mere usual treshold hearing experiment throwing the baby of the essential non linear working of the brain out of Gabor bounds with the bath waters of hearing trivial thesholds relative measures, he treated Van Maanen in an ad hominem attack as a vulgar seller , knowing perfectly that anybody who is able to understand science will know that his papers are serious thinking... Especially his paper titled : "Often disregarded Conditions for the correct After that the nail in the coffin , i pointed to the fact that the ears/brain working non linearly in his own time dependant domain , the level of resolution of the perceived signals cannot be enhanced LINEARLY by perfect linear INCREASE in the signals, but INSTEAD can be enhanced in some case with the right amount and right type of noise, then the signal to noise ratio behaviour cannot be measured better than by hearings experiments as with Magnasco and Oppenheim . To no avail...he never adressed any of the main point i gave... Anybody reading his answers will read him as a marketer who drawn the fish of hearing theory in the water of marketing bad faith...
There is one thing i did not understand at all... i know there is plenty of competent people on ASR, and scientifically inclined professionnaly or by taste, if one of them read my discussion with Amir, and his bad faith answers smearing any valid point in the noise of blind test and his limited set of measures with ad nauseam examples from his reviews instead of arguing AGAINST my point... And the complete distortion of the main point with ad hominem attack against three competent physicists, my question is : why Amir is not ashamed and in fear that some competent member of ASR read his techno babble as it is : MARKETING of TOYS...Anyone can see that he never adressed the hearing theory context where any set of measures can be evaluated ? Explain that to me... I discuss always in good faith and i will be ashamed to miss an argument EXCEPT if i dont understand the subject matter by my own fault... is Amir completely ignorant ? or is Amir without shame ? i dont know which one of this alternative is the good one... I never discussed ONLY to win an argument, i discussed to learn first .. I spoke a very bad English because i never spoke english in my life... And i read only the limited clumsy abstract limited vocabulary of scientists and philosophers not great novelists... i read the great John Cowper Powys for example in translation ( too slow to read for me in english because of my lack of concrete vocabulary ), but in french i learned how to read multidisciplinary analysis methods and taught it... My knowledge is limited but i can read anything and compared it to anything...i can even think about for example the relation between non commutative geometry and the musical scale perception and the laws of physical and qualitative invariants behind it and put this in relation with the hearing theory and the time dependant domain in speech and in music.. I did not adressed these questions with Amir because he was unable to adress the basic in good faith, i even can explain why meanings arise in symmetry breaking in linguistic levels as in music ... in short i know nothing but i know how to read people who know something as Alain Connes in mathematics the father of non commutative modern geometry or Gustave Guillaume in linguistic, the greatest linguist over Chomsky himself or Akpan J. Essien in acoustic ( he is unknown by the way ) etc ... Amir know how to sell something and he know how to use his toys tools... Thats all for me...And he know how to "boss" people around him...
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Now a nail in the Amir coffin...
Magnasco and Oppenheim experiment demonstrated the nature of non linear human hearing and how the ears beat the uncertainty Fourier principle or the Gabor bounds and then why we need more an ecological theory of hearing than a hearing theory inspired By Fourier linear frequencies based methods ... the consequence of all this is that a set of linear measure used in design for the control and the good behavior of components CANNOT predicted a good sound experience only by the lecture of the number measured.. Amir for sure negated this fact and never adressed the fact that any measures must be interpreted in some hearing theory context to be meaningful and also compared with the set of all possible measures not only with the Amir limited chosen sets..
But there is more to say ... But what are the consequence of the non linear structure of the ears in the ways audio signals are treated by the ears ? It turns out that a small amount of noise can improve the way the signals will be perceived... Yes you read it here and well... Then "tweakers" and audiophile experimenting with cables can rejoice...😊 Good cable are not those measured by Amir after all... All there is to tell to the ears is not in the perfection of a linearly PERFECT measured signals in the design process , not for the human ears.. it seems that the design process as said Van Maanen is more about noise and signals degradation CONTROLS than about inexistant linear perfection... Van Maanen called these controls the " Often disregarded Conditions for the correct https://agilescientific.com/blog/2014/6/9/the-nonlinear-ear.html
read this short article : Hearing, audition, or audioception, is one of the Famous Five of our twenty or so senses. Indeed, it is the most powerful sense, having about 100 dB of dynamic range, compared to about 90 dB for vision. 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. What difference does it make if hearing is nonlinear? Well, nonlinear perception produces some interesting effects. Some of them are especially interesting to us because hearing is analogous to the detection of seismic signals — which are just very low frequency sounds, after all. Stochastic resonance (Zeng et al, 2000)One of the most unintuitive properties of nonlinear detection systems is that, 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. Like this:
I have long wondered what sort of nonlinear detection system in geophysics might benefit from a small amount of noise. It also occurs to me that signal reconstruction methods like compressive sensing might help estimate that ’hidden’ signal from the few semi-random samples that peep above the threshold. If you know of experiments in this, I’d love to hear about it. Better than Heisenberg (Oppenheim & Magnasco, 2012)Denis Gabor realized in 1946 that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle also applies to linear measures of a signal’s time and frequency. That is, methods like the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) cannot provide the time and the frequency of a signal with arbitrary precision. Mathematically, the product of the uncertainties has some minimum, sometimes called the Fourier limit of the time–bandwidth product.
Oppenheim & Magnasco (2012) asked subjects to discriminate the timing and pitch of short sound pulses, overlapping in time and/or frequency. Most people were able to localize the pulses, especially in time, better than the Fourier limit. Unsurprisingly, musicians were especially sensitive, improving on the STFT by a factor of about 10. While seismic signals are not anything like pure tones, it’s clear that human hearing does better than one of our workhorse algorithms. Isolating weak signals (Gomez et al, 2014)One of the most remarkable characteristics of biological systems is adaptation. It seems likely that the time–frequency localization ability most of us have is a long-term adaption. But it turns out our hearing system can also rapidly adapt itself to tune in to specific types of sound.
That hearing is an active process was known. But the team modeled the cochlea (right, purple) with a feature called Hopf bifurcation, which helps describe certain types of nonlinear oscillator. They established a mechanism for the way the inner ear’s tiny mechanoreceptive hairs engage in active sensing. What does all this mean for geophysics?I have yet to hear of any biomimetic geophysical research, but it’s hard to believe that there are no leads here for us. Are there applications for stochastic resonance in acquisition systems? We strive to make receivers with linear responses, but maybe we shouldn’t! Could our hearing do a better job of time-frequency localization than any spectral decomposition scheme? Could turning seismic into music help us detect weak signals in the geological noise? All very intriguing, but of course no detection system is perfect... you can fool your ears too!
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Do you play idiot or do you think i am an idiot ?... Stop... The point is not about Van Maanen specific design value... The point of the discussion is about the non linear relation between measures and listening evaluation FOR ANY PRODUCT... We dont speak about the market for your method... We speak about the meanings of Magnasco and Oppenheim crucial experiments implications which experiment you dismiss without any shame and falsely as anecdotal ... You could not object anything to my interpretation and you play theater with me now... I will not go further... I am not a clown in a piece written by you where you pretend not to understand for the gallery and put in front of all some points missing completely the main argument... The center of my argument is the articles of Magnasco and Oppenheim... Their conclusion falsify your claims that a limited set of linear measured will always predict Qualitative musical qualities... Your set of measures is not complete and being well and useful for the standard design needs but they never will replace trained hearings ... PERIOD...
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Attack on person , or insults discredited any rational arguments value... I apologized to Amir when i was tempted to do so confusing him and his sincere gentlemanship in discussion with some zealots around him,... I despise those who resort to insults because it undermine the the points under discussion... These points are not personal matter... They are philosophical debate of our times... I learned a lot discussing rationally with Amir... I thank him for that... |
Thanks i appreciated that...
It is hard to read so clumsy english syntax asmine in my posts 😊😁😊 , i apologize to all people and stay very shameful about my posts especially after reading thinkers as great as writers as George Santayana : «Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.» In audio fanaticism the subjectivist are less sinful in their ignorance of technology than the objectivist fanatical aim which is to erase "perceived qualities" so meaningful they could be from the highest designing goal in favor of what is measured or to reduce them to pure "standardization" for mass market benefit ...Alas! mass market production is not high end craftmanship...Values could never be reduced to numbers.. Psycho-acoustic is precisely the study of these irreducible "musical" meanings for sure for the benefit of mass market production but not at the price of reducing these values to mere numbers... Sound and music are arts based on science but not reducible to science, from the recording engineer using his EARS experience to choose the trade-off choices set and the more pleasurable and useful for the recording process and from the craftmanship of designer learning the last discoveries in psycho-acoustic and designing complex new more PLEASURABLE design for the benefit of the BIASED ears/brain system wishing for such to the listeners picking up the gear pieces of his choice to put them in the best acoustical conditions for him...All here is at the same time art and science, not one without the other...Only mass market productions so useful they can be is no more high art and high science but trivialized automatized art and science transformed now in useful techological tools or daily devices or trivial machines ... But we can decide also to design A.I. regulating at the same time our ears and the sound dimension and bent ourselves totally to its ruling and renounce tomorrow our own creativity for an alleged illusory "perfection"... It is a society choice : the perfect hive "knowledge" or the imperfect learning humanity... Science investigate mysteries so deep only naive mind think that these mysteries will be debunk as mysteries and reveal as trivialities ...Mathematician are in awe considering prime numbers distributions...No technological trick would reduce it to a trivial fact... Euler one day discussing with the atheist Diderot claiming as evidence that GOD did not exist, fatigued by his credulous naivete as a thinker wrote his famous equation : e powered to pi and i +1=0... Diderot stay silent and departed... This equation dont prove at all that God exist, but before negating a SOURCE for the harmony of all things we must think a bit...That was Euler point... In the same way the psycho-acoustic discoveries about the non linear working of the ears/brain iin their time dependant fashion made us think a bit before reducing all "qualities perceived" to Fourier method and measures as powerful they are for our technological benefit...
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The DIVISION between "Technophile" and "golden ears", or between objectivists and subjectivists is TOTALLY irrational as a dividing fact instead of a distinction and based on a misunderstanding of what psycho-acoustic science is...
By the way there exist no science in the singular form... There exist sciences with a common method , but this common method cannot be confused and conflated with KNOWLEDGE...Why ? Because VALUES ( good and bad, truth and false , just and unjust, etc ) are freely DECIDED and freely DEBATED by human free individuals who express then their free choices for themselves and their societies...Science is a slave not a master...
Then scientifically speaking the association of a "quality" with an objective set of conditions is the basis of psycho-acoustic science... Then when technophiles or objectivists negate the existence of the VALUED quality and ask for a proof for his existence, they completely go in REVERSE on the road of science... Science dont negate the existence of qualities to begin with but begin and end with them as values... For example timbre subjective perception and evaluation is not a "color" added in an illusory manner to physical objective sound it is INTRINSIC to sound perception and existence ... It is why technophilia and technology dont define science and it is why science dont reduce itself to technology...Science uses measures but is not defined by measures...Technology must eliminate some phenomena from some other one to work in some paramatrezed location, its power come from the reduction of knowledge to a specific "location" or "application", science becoming knowledge encompass and transcend technology...
Once this is said, psycho-acoustic is a science studying human hearings, and we dont know so much about human hearings and the relation between sounds and the perception of qualities as we dont know much about the relation between consciousness and the brain...
The only people who will contradict this are not scientists but technophile, materialist ideologue, transhumanists... They dont need to think, they "know" and they "do"...But it is better to think first as any philosopher will say ...
Where this distinction between objectivist and subjectivist come from in audio and why there is now a complete DIVISION ?
it come not from science but from the efforts by technology and audio market , divided about the GEAR marketing PUBLICITY complementary strategies: is our piece of gear the best well measured by technology, or is this piece of gear the best loved one by all listeners ?
Psycho-acoustic science studying this relation between qualitative human perceptions and objective conditions of observation and analysis, DISCOVERED recently, in a slow process of discovery spanning more than 60 years that the LINEAR relation between the frequencies domain and the time domain is not obey by the human ears... The human ears work non linearly and extract an accurate amount of information which cannot be obtain by linear means , the Gabor limit between frequencies and duration...
The physicists confirming this known knowledge for a long time now in a rigorous experiments of measures on human subjects called it : human hyperacuity...
«The Fourier uncertainty principle states that a time-frequency tradeoff exists for sound signals, so that the shorter the duration of a sound, the larger the spread of different types of frequencies is required to represent the sound. Conversely, sounds with tight clusters of frequencies must have longer durations. The uncertainty principle limits the precision of the simultaneous measurement of the duration and frequency of a sound.»
«The researchers think that this superior human listening ability is partly due to the spiral structure and nonlinearities in the cochlea. Previously, scientists have proven that linear systems cannot exceed the time-frequency uncertainty limit. Although most nonlinear systems do not perform any better, any system that exceeds the uncertainty limit must be nonlinear. For this reason, the nonlinearities in the cochlea are likely integral to the precision of human auditory processing. Since researchers have known for a long time about the cochlea’s nonlinearities, the current results are not quite as surprising as they would otherwise be.
"It is and it is not [surprising]," Magnasco told Phys.org. "We were surprised, yet we expected this to happen. The thing is, mathematically the possibility existed all along. There’s a theorem that asserts uncertainty is only obeyed by linear operators (like the linear operators of quantum mechanics). Now there’s five decades of careful documentation of just how nastily nonlinear the cochlea is, but it is not evident how any of the cochlea’s nonlinearities contributes to enhancing time-frequency acuity. We now know our results imply that some of those nonlinearities have the purpose of sharpening acuity beyond the naïve linear limits. « New sound modelsThe results have implications for how we understand the way that the brain processes sound, a question that has interested scientists for a long time. In the early 1970s, scientists found hints that human hearing could violate the uncertainty principle, but the scientific understanding and technical capabilities were not advanced enough to enable a thorough investigation. As a result, most of today’s sound analysis models are based on old theories that may now be revisited in order to capture the precision of human hearing. "In seminars, I like demonstrating how much information is conveyed in sound by playing the sound from the scene in Casablanca where Ilsa pleads, "Play it once, Sam," Sam feigns ignorance, Ilsa insists," Magnasco said. "You can recognize the text being spoken, but you can also recognize the volume of the utterance, the emotional stance of both speakers, the identity of the speakers including the speaker’s accent (Ingrid’s faint Swedish, though her character is Norwegian, which I am told Norwegians can distinguish; Sam’s AAVE [African American Vernacular English]), the distance to the speaker (Ilsa whispers but she’s closer, Sam loudly feigns ignorance but he’s in the back), the position of the speaker (in your house you know when someone’s calling you from another room, in which room they are!), the orientation of the speaker (looking at you or away from you), an impression of the room (large, small, carpeted). "The issue is that many fields, both basic and commercial, in sound analysis try to reconstruct only one of these, and for that they may use crude models of early hearing that transmit enough information for their purposes. But the problem is that when your analysis is a pipeline, whatever information is lost on a given stage can never be recovered later. So if you try to do very fancy analysis of, let’s say, vocal inflections of a lyric soprano, you just cannot do it with cruder models." By ruling out many of the simpler models of auditory processing, the new results may help guide researchers to identify the true mechanism that underlies human auditory hyperacuity. Understanding this mechanism could have wide-ranging applications in areas such as speech recognition; sound analysis and processing; and radar, sonar, and radio astronomy. "You could use fancier methods in radar or sonar to try to analyze details beyond uncertainty, since you control the pinging waveform; in fact, bats do," Magnasco said. Building on the current results, the researchers are now investigating how human hearing is more finely tuned toward natural sounds, and also studying the temporal factor in hearing. "Such increases in performance cannot occur in general without some assumptions," Magnasco said. "For instance, if you’re testing accuracy vs. resolution, you need to assume all signals are well separated. We have indications that the hearing system is highly attuned to the sounds you actually hear in nature, as opposed to abstract time-series; this comes under the rubric of ’ecological theories of perception’ in which you try to understand the space of natural objects being analyzed in an ecologically relevant setting, and has been hugely successful in vision. Many sounds in nature are produced by an abrupt transfer of energy followed by slow, damped decay, and hence have broken time-reversal symmetry. We just tested that subjects do much better in discriminating timing and frequency in the forward version than in the time-reversed version (manuscript submitted). Therefore the nervous system uses specific information on the physics of sound production to extract information from the sensory stream. "We are also studying with these same methods the notion of simultaneity of sounds. If we’re listening to a flute-piano piece, we will have a distinct perception if the flute ’arrives late’ into a phrase and lags the piano, even though flute and piano produce extended sounds, much longer than the accuracy with which we perceive their alignment. In general, for many sounds we have a clear idea of one single ’time’ associated to the sound, many times, in our minds, having to do with what action we would take to generate the sound ourselves (strike, blow, etc)."
What does it means for audio ?
It means that objectivists pretending that human sound perceived qualities may be only illusions, "good" or pleasant" as subjective qualities being subjective experience are then considered "inexistant impressions... The business to please human ears is for them a fraud... All there is to say about "qualities" is reducible after many blind test ELIMINATED all false pretenses to a mere set of LINEAR measures.... And these linear measures are established as the only standard for creating a good audio design even if any electronic circuits subjected to music bursts into it , instead of sine waves, can produce non predictable audible results...As Van Maanen argue in this article : https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/images/docs/FourierConditions.pdf then if Van Maanen is right audio design must be investigated and conducted under the guidance of human ears... It is a craft ... Not a mass producted activity only... But the crux of the matter is through the discoveries of the fundamental non linear working of the human ears/brain hyperacuity, that this hyperacuity was developed by EVOLUTION history for survival reason related to the urgency to recognise speech and natural sounds, and also music, because music and speech are born TOGETHER... This means that the "qualities" negated by the objectivists not only exist but are the ONLY OBJECTIVE BASIS for the understanding of human hearings...Then the efforts to reduce audio science to "technological linear measures "of the gear reflect complete ignorance of psycho-acoustic science, instead favorizing the direction of mass standardized design productions instead of qualitative experience andhigher qualitative design, because anyway the highest qualitative audio production CANNOT BE REDUCED to mass market engineering productions , nevermind the level of measures excellence used, they are at the end the results of creative artful CRAFTMANSHIP then they are way costlier .. All of what is perceived is not measurable... A rainbow exist but need a neurophysiological subject to exist... Qualities being perceived by humans comes from a field of studies in psycho-acoustic and neurology taken very seriously here and which science never negate them a priori as in the technophile objectivist world motivated by mass market regulations of the PRODUCTS and by also regulation of the human being himself...(Transhumanism is here to stay for now ) We will rule say some objectivists what you will hear and what you will not hear because the "qualities" dont exist anyway... Sound is the domain of subjective "illusions" they claim .... Saying so they are FORGETFULL of the way evolution created our BIASED EARS/BRAIN system because it is biased by and for the survival dimension not as a passive tool; our brain is not a passive tool, it is a participant in the creation of sounds with meanings and for yesterday favorizing our survival, and today manifesting also as what we call our "pleasure" , and which are also qualitative IRREDUCIBLE values ... Then contrary to any industrial tools we used which are ultimately linear and time independant, our ears/brain work non linearly in a dependant time domain for our survival and for our pleasure ...
At the end my opinion :
Did Amir information is useful ? Yes it is... Falsyfying gear market specs is useful information... Did Amir theory about gear design and human hearing is the last word in audio ? Absolutely not... Audiophiles can go on listening and write their faillible opinions.... Science dont negate human experience but study it.... Why science goes on with this study till today ? It is because TECHNOLOGY is far from understanding human hearing not only hyperacuity but cameleonic power as in echolocalization , the brain, and the qualitative perceived world... Goethe is no less important than Newton...By the way it takes real sound source resonating in the world with their intinsic materials qualities to produce sounds for the ears/brain... The physics of sound waves is not enough... Why ? Because most sounds we perceive we produce them by speech acts or by musical craft, then sound is not only waves in the air, it is a sound source with a qualitative perceptible inside we PROBE as dolphin or bat probe an object...Then in psycho-acoustic science the perception and emission of sounds are related IN A NON LINEAR WAY , which means that sound qualities cannot be evaluated as is evaluated industrial material audio design...in the same way audio engineering craftmanship is an ART based on psycho-acoustics not reducible as said the designer and physicist Hans van Maanen to the Fourier domain... |
DonT relax anything... Go on criticize them those costlier speakers designer... I will congratulate you for that... And who in his right mind can oppose to someone who ask " for flat on axis response and smooth off-axis." Not me ... But designers will go on with their trade off choices and you will criticize them... All is OK...i will read you... But dont come to me saying that all there is to say about audio components is their measures set...And dont come to me saying that human hearing impression are all illusory and with no value out of blind test ... Psycho-acoustic dont say that... Trained ears are not the same as untrained one... Furtwangler and Floyd Toole or Dr Choueri or the creator of my headphone a physicist acoustician of genius Dr Gorike all had trained ears...dont put them in the same basket as people who buy an amplifier for the price tag and dials... Dont put them in the same basket than people unable to tune their own room... Etc... The human ears beat the Fourier uncertainty why ? Because he use some aspects of sound by virtue of his non linear structure and brain tools which made him able to EXTRACT 10 times the accuracy information in the time domain permitted by the linear Fourier treshold between frequency and time ... This means that hearing is not explanable only by Fourier methods, and it means that human hearing can be trained and is very trustful when trained at long term... Furtwangler dont need a blind test...he dont pick up his amplifier by reading your measures... It does not means that measures are useless... Who would pair the wrong amplifier with the wrong measures to the wrong speakers? We need measure for regularity and standards... Deriving all audible qualities from them is non sense...
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You distorted Van Maanen intention above ... I corrected you by citing the text and reestablishing his intention... But it seems distorting facts to suit your gaol is an habit... All reviewers and audiophiles DIFFER all day long about anything... There is a multitude of groups and cultist about all possibilities in audio... No one IMPOSE DICTATORIALLY a theory of hearing and a normalized set of measures for all ... With the Correct and only one accepted vocabulary... Are you kidding ? or you are blind so busy to sell your salad ? 😊 Audiophiles debate without end unable to impose anything... They are FREE and want to stay free ... They dont tolerate to be imposed hearing standards through the only good measures theory by statistical and blind tests proof... Musicality for Furtwangler is not the same as for Karajan... Guess why ? A clue : it has nothing to do with "neutrality"... Wait and i will explain it in my musical thread... Hilde45 measure my words numbers post... i must watch myself... 😊
The fact here that you reverse the accusation is revelatory... You are the one who want to IMPOSE a unique view about the relation UNIDIRECTIONAL between measures and what we hear ...No audiophiles do that... Offering his opinions to other is not imposing it through a site with this goal ... Audiogon is not like ASR... There is no hearing ideology here... Only subjective impressions... You are the one claiming what hearing theory MUST BE... By the way i appreciate your site and your reviews AS I SAID NUMEROUS TIME... i dont accept the one way mandatory direction from measures to hearing as hearing theory... |
Yes and it is a good thing... But sound is not images...The qualities of an image are easy to define in a consensual way... The qualities describing sounds are not... Yourself you dont even accept anything "colored" "musical" etc you claim they are WRONG... Neutrality is good but wanting neutrality as a perfect obligatory mandate in design will cost something... You are not God and you cannot decide that tomorrow all trade-off choices in audio will be declared unlawful and only pure abstract neutrality will be the goal and the only qualitative adjective usable for describing a good sound or a PLEASANT ONE...No more pleasure because it is illusory if i read you right... Only perfection is acceptable... The problem is by definition of what is a trade off in audio no perfection exist from recording to speakers.. As i say you had your own hearing theory...Imposing it is not possible and doable anyway... Human dont hear as a Fourier analyser, so useful it is for designing ALL audio components... Than human hearing own a future and will rule future design not the reverse... By the way we dont have a singular accepted theory of human hearing... What we know is that human hearing work as a non linear tool in his own time dyssimetric dimension by history and evolution fatefulness.. Then let the designer create their own trade off choices...I am not against some regulation but i dont want society of audiophiles being ASR disciple repeating measures mantras as synonymus with good sound... 😊 It remind me of some transhumanist who are really sure that man must become part machine to compete...How do you falsify that claim ?
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It is a common place fact that speakers must measure neutral and good... But the design of speakers is a craftmanship too not a mere industrial process.. No one can negate the useful necessity of measuring tools... The problem is imposing our own theory of what is hearing and what is musical... The problem is infering from measures only the excellence of the qualitative results as CERTAIN... Bad measuring speakers will not sound good, it is a common place fact... Good measuring speakers, not only will not sound as musical as someone wishes but they may displease most people... Speakers design is also a trade off art... measuring well is not enough... |
Exactly... The problem is Amir want to create a standard in design... It is not a bad idea in itself...But imposing it will negate creativity in a field where there cannot be a perfect speaker anyway, and there could not be ONE SINGULAR PERFECT SPEAKER FOR ALL NEEDS Why ? Because speakers are interesting by the mutiple trade off choices they offer by DESIGN ... There is no SINGULAR ROOM for all customers too... In industrial design for big company , it is useful and desirable to STAY AND OBEY standards and their trade-off choices ... But individual creative small designer will choose other trade off, he will innovate to PLEASE THE HUMAN EARS OF HIS CUSTOMER NOT HIS MEASURING TOOLS DIALS to be regular for the industrial mass production needs ... Then confusing Industrial and small craftmanship , not only in speakers but in amplifier design, and imposing the same set of measures coming from the same hearing theory is not desirable nor doable... Hans Van Maanen will design his amplifier differently than the Fosi amplifier reviewed by Amir... So positive was his review and i trust him that this amplifier is not bad for the price, you cannot judge with the same set of measures the Van Maanen amplifier design and the mass market Fosi ... The difference in price is astronomical too.. I dont think that the pope of Audio elected will be Amir... He measure well for sure, but he negate what is "musical" for his own "transparency" technologically perfect measured ideal 😊... In sound and acoustic the goal was never and never will be "perfection" of electronical design by the numbers, but musicality even if we dont like the measures of this so called " musical" amplifier ..
You can call as Hinton do, A.I. more intelligent than human, it only reflect your ignorance about what are human beings.. At least Hinton know that A.I. is a danger in our corporate dictatorship... In the same way you may call "musical" what your measuring tools reveal as "perfect" but it is human ears who will decide, in blind test or in their room BY THEIR FREE CHOICES not by design ... Why ? i will not explain it here, because Hilde45 will come and denounce me as creating too long posts.,..He dont read post he measure them... 😊
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I never said that Fourier method was wrong.. You put this in my mouth... These methods are the basis of design in Audio... 😊 I INSISTED on the point that Fourier linear methods are not able to explain hearings power , and they are not enough to create musical design ... The designer must quit his tools and listen TOO... Thats the point... Bashing Fourier method will be stupid , i NEVER did that, criticizing the context of their application and interpretation in human hearings is the point... The ears works non linearly in his own time direction, that is the point which make it powerful for extracting information... We must use this fact in the creation of the design and not use our own linear and time symmetrical measure to determine the design as "perfect" because no distortion and low noise ...It is not enough...Musicality exist ... For you it may be a myth... For some designer it is not...
And now you distort what Van Maanen said : Any electronic circuit changes in amplitude and phase of distortion components caused by modulation frequency. Van Maanen use that fact to show the limit of Fourier method for predicting his behavior...Your three lines attributing to him the idea to made up a circuit with hysteresis HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS POINT ... Here it is in his own word...: «When we look at electronics with active components, such systems are non-linear as has been described in a separate paper (Feedback Flaws). Which is why we have to deal with distortion. The determination of the frequency response of such a circuit is next to impossible (note that nthe dynamic impedance of the diodes depends on the current, flowing through them and is therefore also dependent on the amplitude of the input signal) and it is obvious that the system is highly non-linear. The charge on the capacitor will be a clear function of the history of then input signal, so the system is also not time-invariant. In other words, the application of Fourier theory to electronics is error-prone and there is a severe risk that the properties for continuous
Figure 1: Example of a circuit where the Fourier theory is
i cannot put the figure but anybody vcan go there : https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/images/docs/FourierConditions.pdf
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You are right Amir... You never bashed , i confused and conflated your polite discussion with me here with some people of ASR...I am wrong here... I apologize sincerely to you ... I just answered someone else in a bad mood a post above and this is not an excuse but i was irritate...Not about you...... I dont want to personnalize the discussion too...You are perhaps wrong in my opinion but your are a gentleman... I thank you for your time and politeness... As i said i welcome your information thread, not your theory of hearing, audio qualities, and opinon about listenings and design ... We can differ and be friendly... By the way i must thank you very much ... I learned a lot discussing with you opposing your points... Really...
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Amir did not read neither Oppenheim and Magnasco, nor Hans Van Maanen... Anyway he cannot read them because if he did, all his opinions about the way we listen , and the way an amplifier must be designed to sound musically will be crushes to pieces... Psycho-acoustic science is not technology and debunking is not designing ...And Dogma about the way ALL audiophiles listening are deluded is only that a dogma created on a false theory of psycho-acoustic based on Fourier tools which are linear and not in the time domain unidirectional way of the human ears...Fourier tools are useful in amplifier cdesign for example but the designer to design well must know about the way the human ears work in the Non linear time dependant domain... By the way for sure the time domain exist in the Fourier method BUT THE RELATION BETWEEN THE FREQUENCIES DOMAIN AND THE TIME DOMAIN ARE LINEAR... Do you catch ? I will not go further... Amir will never debate in details the articles i used because his perspective will be destructed... ANYBODY WITH A BRAIN CAN READ THEM... Again so useful his falsification about the gear marker can be and are welcome, his bashing of the way humans hears and listen, for the prevalence of his TOOL ANALYSIS as prescription is false and wrong.. Dont belive me, compare what Amir said with Magnasco and Oppenheim and with the articles of Hans Van Maanen...There are not into techno babble , they are physicists...
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I think that you are not used to people able to UNDERSTAND the limits of your perspective...Or not much people dare to confront you on your site because because they are also technology fad ... I am not... And your memory is not good... I thank you 10 times already for the verification set of measures you takes for your interesting reviews among all insults some gives you... But I cannot accept AT ALL what you derive and impose on us about what is hearing and the qualities we must or must not perceive by listening in our own room...Nobody tune his room with blind test... And nobody use blind test for understanding music ...I am not against measuring tool but the context where we use tool MEANS SOMETHING... Your implicit theory of hearings, the context from what you spoke is FALSE... It is simple to read and comment 2 pages article... You never adress it for refuting it, or for commenting it and use it to prove me wrong... it is not publish in stereophile it is published in physics reviews... https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.044301
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You dont get it anything right but always half truth... I never say that your measure use FFT, i indicated that they are used in the usual theory context about hearings that the ears work linearly and mainly in the frequency domain, this is the inspired Fourier theory of hearing in the frequency domain ... It is falseby being INSUFFICIENT to describe human hearings and DEMONSTRATED by Oppenheim and Magnasco...And Hans Van Maanen explain it COMPLETELY theoretically and for his own design ..¯Read it... What you said about your OWN mesures is RIGHT in itself and you dont use FFT... But the Context in which your interpret what is "sound qualities" and what they MUST BE , is a theory of hearing that is falsified by psycho-acoustic experiments and by many audio amplifier designer...see above...
You spoke like a used car sellers here... Where did i say that FFT is not invaluable in diagnostic ? Did i say that Fourier was an idiot ? I said that ONLY using it in the context of an audio theory of hearings based on linear and time dependant domain is TOO NARROW and direct us to false conclusions about audio qualities as human hearings recognize them...Musician for example speaking about timbre perception and picking each multiple timbres of instruments in orchestral recordings or playins etc... And here again you spew half truth : The bouncing of waves in a small room can create a " soup" yes,but you FORGET to mention that the difference between a "perceived soup" and a balanced ratio ASW/LV in a specific room of precise dimensions is in the PRECISE TIMING and duration.... Reverberation is not always a negative phenomenon... If the timing is not right yes it will be a soup... But all acoustic art is in the TIMING AMOUNT... I know because i created my room...
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Rational approach in audio private installation is related to electrical mechanical and ESPECIALLY acoustic embeddings controls... Amir methods of measures CAN ONLY VERIFY GEAR SPECS as publised by the company and infirm it or confirm it... THATS ALL... Amir cannot choose the gear for your needs and for his QUALITIES... And if as a guitarist you dont trust your ears... What can i say ?😁😊
Myself i learned how to use my ears in 2 years experiments... Are they telling me always the truth ? no... Am i satisfied with my 600 bucks system ? Yes... It sound better Speakers/room and headphone that everything i listened to... and i can identify his FLAWS... Is it perfect then ? Not at all...But most people trust price tags not their ears... It is the reason why a pair of Magnepan in a living room can sound worst than my speakers box in a dedicated room... I know because i verified it... How will it cost me to make my actual headphone system almost perfect ? 15,000 bucks....Not a dollars more... I know WHERE i go and WHERE i came from... Dont trust anyone.... TRAIN your ears in acoustic...And READ articles and books... Not only ASR forum and audiogon forums ...
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Hans Van Maanen is a working physicist in fluid dynamics and a top published expert and designer in Audio with his own "temporal coherence" brand name speakers and amplifiers... Who must we trust? Someone who work with basic psycho-acoustic and design his audio components from it or Amir debunking "audiophiles" ? As i already said, thanks to Amir for information debunking market specs of gear...But the bucks stop here... His bashing of audiophiles is not based on psycho-acoustic facts but on techno babble ideology ... Debunking is perhaps a field work because someone verify specs numbers thats all; but it is NOT SCIENCE NOR DESIGNING in audio it is only some technological tools choices applied for some NARROW goal ... And bashing audiophiles is ridiculous enterprise... Why? Because there is too much difference between audiophiles themselves, and putting them in the same trash bin is RIDICULOUS... And bashing human hearing because of alleged limits in Hertz and Decibels is a common place argument ignoring the non linear nature and the time dependant dimension where the ears really work beating Fourier uncertainty principle; then bashing those who use their ears without even knowing psycho-acoustic basic facts it is ignorance and/or some marketing propaganda for some goal of his own ...
Now look at the article for the context about these remarks by Van Maanen ...
«Feedback seems like a miracle cure for all shortcomings of audio equipment. Yet, in the ‘high-end’ audio community, many critics on feedback can be found. It is beyond discussion that the specifications of many semiconductor amplifiers are far superior to those of loudspeakers and vacuum tube amplifiers, yet this correlates not well with the perceived quality of the equipment. How come? And why is it possible to hear differences between amplifiers with distortions two orders of magnitude lower than the loudspeakers one needs to listen to these amplifiers? Are certain phenomena overlooked and, if so, what can we learn to improve the perceived quality of equipment? This paper analyses some pitfalls and parasitic ............................. «The designer should realize that global feedback can only be applied to a limited extent and that the dynamic behaviour of the amplifier to music-like signals is (far) more important for the perceived quality than distortion figures, in line with the findings of refs. 3 and 4. These probably explain a part of the audible differences between amplifiers or other electronic audio equipment, which cannot be understood from the distortion figures and has given feedback a ................................................................................................... It can be remarked that critical comments from high-end audio enthusiasts are often scornfully put aside by technology experts as “non-scientific” small talk from freaks who do not understand the theory. The author strongly disagrees with this view as too often critical remarks from people with “golden ears” did make sense, albeit that it was initially absolutely nunclear what the technical or scientific background was. Such remarks did help the development team to further improve the equipment, even though it would have been very hard to show the effect of the individual steps in a scientific way. But the progress over the years is beyond discussion...» https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/images/docs/FeedbackFlaws.pdf |
Now for the tasteful pleasure of Hilde45 my post will stop here...😊
I let Van Maanen spoke : «The discussion on the perceived quality of audio systems often lacks |
You say this to me till the first day... English is not my first language ... Perhaps you must SPOKE and DISCUSS the truth and depth of the psycho-acoustic points and articles i submitted , instead of repeating that my posts are too long for 2 years now... No more longer than Amir posts here by the way... And remind this, i am not here to win a popularity contest about my posts... i submit content and ideas not short sarcasm, and short bashing... Explanations need space especially if someone must separate the frequency domain and the Time domain analysis and illustrating it with the articles which are related to this... Put you in my shoes: what will you think of someone who never DISCUSS your ideas but never stop to say that your posts are too long ? You are intelligent i think, then use it... And patronizing people even politely work few times, i even thank you and i apologize, the last time but patronizing dont work for two years... I will not change my english skills mastery nor my thinking in the next month..Sorry... i dont want to be rude but i hope for DISCUSSION WITH YOU ..Not for the same repeating useless criticizing of my style.. Discuss with me... Dont repeat the same melody about my long posts.....Do you think there is NO SUBSTANCE in the works of the 4 physicists i proposed here ? By the way these 4 posts of the same articles were for Amir who never commented till this day about the Magnasco and Oppenheim experiments and their consequences about human hearings and audio analysis .. And by the way instead of repeating this critics about my posts, WHY YOU DONT READ THE ARTICLE AND COMMENT IT HERE YOURSELF ? I mind about facts and i think now your posts are TOO SHORT and miss the point`: THE CONTENT OF THIS ARTICLE BY OPPENHEIM AND MAGNASCO ... Not my syntax...
By the way you miss my point here ... Perhaps you could have read the articles in my long posts instead of bashing my too long posts because they appear too long for your taste... The data measured and read coming from the frequency domain and interpreted from this linear Fourier perspective is not the same that the data measured and interpreted from the time domain in a non linear perspective of analysis ... The ears works non linearly... Do you catch it ? If not read the articles of Van Maanen...If i resume it all details it will take 15 pages... Then Amir is wrong and you are wrong: the tools give us data yes, this is a common place useless fact ; but the CONTEXT where these data will be interpret or not is the most important factor , will it be only the frequency linear domain or also the time non linear dependant domain ? Dont imitate Amir, who dont read them, and stop repeating his points as a parrot... My post are LONG sometimes with no reason you are right, but sometimes there is a reason...
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You dont get my points... I am not against blind test...They are the norm in some psycho-acoustics experiments and in some design process ... I am against posing blind tests as replacing ears training in acoustic and in progressive and FINAL evaluation.. I am in favor of rigorous tests as you are... But bashing audiophiles for some right reason ( you are right audio is not about Taste) dont justify your ideology: only my measuring tools linear and time independant tools in the frequency domain will say the last truth about the qualities perceived through the gear... I dont "put my trust in the wrong person" as you said reminding us of an attitude in cultist group, I THINK WHEN READING, and i read that most of what the ears does to create meaning and catch meaning , in music , in speech , in natural sound, and then in a psycho- acoustic laboratory is not only in the frequency domain but in the time domain where the brain extract information in a non linear way... Then there is a high cost to pay if we TRUST the Fourier linear tools and if we work ONLY in the time independant and frequency domain... The price is we loose contact with the basic of human hearings... Then your tests are useful ONLY to reinforce your false hearings assumptions... Not about the limits of hearings, we are as you know limited indeed in the decibels and in the Hertz scale, even if we beat the Fourier uncertainty, but the meanings and qualitative physical sound phenemona associated with a system/room cannot be described by your set of measures... Saying the opposite may be ressembling a technological cult but it is not science and it is not amplifier design... It is debunking stategy nothing more... But you debunk the wrong thing easy to debunk : human earings , you never debunk the false assumptions from psycho-acoustic ruling audio design... On the opposite you try to reinforce them...Ears /brain dont work like a Fourier computer... I am not in this cult , i think when i read... I dont read only Hans Van Maanen by the way...And anyway all his work is founded on psycho-acoustic, among other thing funmdamental, the psycho-acoustic fact behind Oppenheim and Magnasco experiments you NEVER EXPLAINED NOR COMMENTED HERE EVEN AFTER I SUGGESTED IT 5 TIMES.... You could not because this will demoslish your pretense to capture the audible qualities through measurements... And you could no more bash audiophiles for their ignorance which is an half truth, because they ignore acoustic most of them but at least they trust their ears even if they go in the wrong direction ( upgrading with the wrong purchases) by lack of information...Anyway even your "disciples" trust their ears at some point... Your analysis of gear dont cause any unanimous acceptation for sure... It is more easy for you with dac, less easy for amplifier, and way less confortable with speakers/room... More you go near the human hearings the more difficult it is to impose your analysis tools... At the end even yourself know and you said it that hearing must be used... Then all the fuss about your ideology is bashing people and anyway you used the tools in the wrong way, instead of using it to modify the audio design accordingly to psycho-acoustic non linear workings of the ears in the time domain, you use your tools in a linear way in the frequency domain to DECIDE what gear is good and which one is bad and to as you said DEBUNK ... You debunk thinking you are right, you do not design...The proof is in the pudding, Hans Van Maanen DESIGN according to his understanding of psycho-acoustic law, "temporal coherence" is his trade mark.. By the way without naming names, there is amplifier designer who designed according to what they know about the time domain even here ...There is many Van Maanen in the world... All creative designer go accordingly of what they think work from psycho-acoustic, for example in the tubes amplifier design... It is the same for speakers design at some high level...
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We live in an era where men decrease themselves smaller than their tools, calling it progress and the new norm, in ancient times it was called idolatry : obsession with some tools transformed in new gods... Myself i try to think by myself, and i am allergic to cults, ideology and groups...
In philosophy we differentiate the means and the ends without confusing them... |
You are always upside down... You know nothing about psycho-physics it seems... or better said, you dont want to know... Because it will destuct your Fourier linear and time independant ideology...
The human ears dont listen abstract measures, but in the time domain the ears brain non linearly decode information so complex none of your tools can describe it...It is not measured in decibels, or in hertz... Etc... it is called Qualities... these qualities are investigated RIGOROUSLY in psycho-acoustic for example in the work of Oppenheim and Magnasco , you never commented about and i posted it 5 times.. We listen music, speech and natural sounds and we RECOGNIZE them we dont listen to level of distortion and we dont perceive it in isolation as your tools can in their linear and time independant way ... You listen to your tools first , we listen music first ... But read Hans Van Maanen... Debunk him... if you are able to debunk him... And i invite your audio disciples to read him too... Explain to me where he is wrong...Go and do it... His work in speakers and amplifier design called " temporal coherence" because it is founded on psycho-acoustic hearing basics... Not on Fourier linear and time independant tools as your debunking tools ... The tools you use to debunk... He use other tools measuring scheme to DESIGN his own works in amplification and speakers after studying psycho-acoustic real discoveries about hearing.. You may convince yourself that using these linear time independant tools will give you hints about "transparency" as you call your fetish acoustic concept...But timbre accuracy and musical sense live in the time domain and are more fundamental because they are determined more by the ears acoustic than by electronic chip well "measured" by you and well scored by you ... Measuring Dac is one thing... Measuring amplifier another things, and measuring speakers another things... as you know already for sure ... BUT measuring all that at the end is BY THE EARS/BRAIN not by Tools working linearly in the time independant domain...designing business is not debunking business at all ....
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Your site is well designed and Interesting Amir... I appreciate design and observations from various corners.. The fact that it draw many people talented in audio dont surprize me... It does not means that your basic measuring and debunking philosophy is right... In audio, in medecine as in politic, unanimous crowds are most of the times deluded...Ideology and technology are not science at all... It is not simple matter to understand something... Especially basic audio debunking ... basic medecine debunking and basic geopolitic debunking ... Imagine psycho-acoustic debunking now ?
«My tool are better than your ears, it is simple , they measure distortion at level that you even never will dream to detect » -- Groucho Marx audio engineer 🤓 |
You answer is upside down again...
You are so lost you did not even understand my point... But i cannot rival Dr. Van Maanen explanation.. I will take your hand ,Read me: measures in INNOVATIVE amplifier design are GUIDED by the designer EARS and psycho-acoustic fact to realize more musical design ... As Van Maanen do... And the point is that the use of Fourier method ,in electronic design and with this specific measuring tools, had a psycho-acoustic cost , the Fourier tools are linear and time-independant... Human hearings and musical sense come from non linear ears structure and non linear reading in the TIME-dependant domain... Then if in the way we design our amplifier we dont take these facts into account, then our amplifier will not sound "musical"... It is why many piece of gear you measured perfect can sound non-musical at all for many listeners ... Amir you SERVE YOUR TOOL , the goal is that the tool must serve the designer... But you DEBUNK with your tools, you dont DESIGN amplifier, as Van Maanen did... It is the reason why yourself with more, way more deeper experience than me in audio, you dont understand this basic psycho-acoustic facts...and you read anything UPSIDE DOWN... I learned it myself thanks to you, because i reacted to your arrogant dismissal of human hearings as FIRST RULER in audio, instead you put the MEASURING FOURIER TOOL as first ruler .... It is the reverse for a designer, knowing that the ears/brain use non linear time dependant methods the measures are used IN THE DESIGNING PROCESS ITSELF to serve better the pleasure of the human hearings not to be on the optimal spot of the measuring dials or graphs for some debunking work ... Do you catch where you are lost and why ? Van Maanen will teach you the technicalities... Myself i am not in your field and you cannot take me seriously... Except if you read Van Maanen and the meaning of Oppenheim and Magnasco experiments... Thanks for your patience with me... |
it take me 2 year to design my room and tune it... I was in sonic paradise at no cost.. I loose it and music too in an abrupt way... I was very sad and depressed, but you know it is NOTHING, compared to what fate do to others... Anyway i tell you that because you can know how i was feeling and why without any audio system nor music i did not came back for 10 months... I came back here, because this fateful loss was a turn of luck... I studied my headphone 6 months non stop , did 6 modifications, and believe it or not it rival my room in his own way and improve on it on bass and high frequencies... The K340 is an electrostatic with a dynamic driver... I even study the patent of Dr. Gorike to understand what i nmust do to improve it...It is the first headphone i love, i dislike all other 9 one ...So much it is the reason why many years ago i come back to speakers but this time experimenting with acoustic... I was so excited by my sucess with the K340 i came back here ... I like most people here, even if we disagree... I like discussion.. I miss my students... Thanks for your kindness ...
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Amir you are completely lost...😊 Discussing with you enlightened me a lot ... I must thank you for that sincerely... But you dont understand the relation between psycho-acoustic of human hearing and amplifier design nor the relation with music...If i can see that myself being in no way a specialist in this audio matter anybody reading a true scientist as Hans Van Maanen will see it in an hour.. I posts many articles and even an hour video of him... If you dare to listen the video and read the papers of Hans Van Maanen , he will explain it better than me...
The system will not react the same to sine wave or to a variable dynamic strong burst of music sorry...You forgot that you implicitly supposed that the tools you use with the Fourier method as background for hearing theory are truthful to human hearings but tthis is FALSE and they are not truthful to human hearings ... Hans Van Maanen dont design amplifier the way you measure them he explain way... Study it if you look for truth... But if you read it your ASR is dead as it was with the measurements you used as SCRIPTURES absolute truth... If i can understand it in one hour anybody can... Any ASR member reading Hans Van Maanen will be lost for you... But the most important is that the tool you use to measure a design are not appropriate to the human hearings pasycho-acoustic basic science and not even appropriate to amplifier design... You must listen and read Hans Van Maanen... He is not a clown if you read his bio and what he do.... his explanations are so clear anybody can read it , even you... You are lost in tour technology... This physicist will explain it to you or to anybody of ASR reading my post if he dare to read Van Maanen... I am no more surprized now about the reason why you did not comment about this extraordinary experiments by Oppenhein and Magnasco... i learned a lot researching about your post and methods and why uour are completely wrong... i will not repeat Hans Van Maanen... anybody reading him and what you claim will debunk you easily if he was well versed in audio.... I dont think you will read my "verbose" arguments,... You have a blind spot easy to identify: Electronic audio components mus be designed for human EARS not for the measuring tools practice... WHY ? Because your tools and the way you use it put you the head down and the feet over for PRECISE PSYCHO_ACOUSTIC FACT you dont rexcognize, because recognizing them will destruct your ASR site...you act as a sellers not as a scientist... You did not responded to psycho-acoustics arguments and you cannot see the link with amplifier design and the FLAWS related to your fourier tools and linear time dependant measure in a domain , where non linearities and time dependant RULE.... Hans Van Maanen explain it, and i ask to anybody to read him... He designed speakers and amplifiers and is a succesful physicist in field related to acoustic mathemahically... You cannot dismiss it as a clown sorry... I am not a scientist but i can read and undertand text...and i am not afraid of equations..
A distortion do not exist if we dont have a reference point to begin with , from which the distortion will be described as a negative pertrubation or as a positive addition, the DIFFERENCE will depend if you use a linear time independant tool as your first and last gesture OR the non linear time dependant ears/brain as your first and last gesture ... Alas! you live in a techno babble where psycho-acoustic facts about human hearings means LESS FOR YOU than the results of your measuring tools... They are these tools USELESS to determine what is GOOD SOUND...I am sure you are desinterested and not motivated by money thyough, but by your ideology... Thanks to you i understand that better now... |
Thanks prof... I must apologize to you because i thought that your questions was a sarcasmm My only excuse was that someone, a seller of "tweaks" who did not like my homemade no cost experiments mock my for many days... I take off the photos because i add a new system... More economical... But more performant because my speakers so good they were did not go under 30 herts as my actual headphone... I was very sad loosing my room and house and quit audiogon, because i did not have anything to spoke about... I came back after my 6 monhths of optimization of the K340... I as astounded and no more sad.,.. T?hanks for your kind words... We may differ of opinion but you are a gentleman...
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They were no mere "tweaks" as you sarcastically claim.. They were mostly a balance between absorbtion/reflection/and diffusion materials for my room.. I used a grid of Helmholtz resonators of my own making and my own method to increase and inmprove my speakers soundfield performance ... It was not perfect but there was no comparison between before and after... Then instead of mocking my experiments successful for me in acoustic at no costs, why not answering me about the Magnasco and Oppenheim experiments about hearing and the uncertainty limit and his implication for audio improvement... Why not answering the articles and video of Dr, Hans Van Maanen? You resort to ad hominem mocking me as arguments ? Do you think when i post these photos that i was afraid of idiots mocking me on apperance ? 😊 my room was unesthetical but very revelatory about the power of acoustic treatment and control... other interesting post of you ? Loosing my house and room, i was sad but i modified akg K340 headphone and i am very happy listening music again thanks to Dr.Gorike for this amazin successful hybrid headphone..
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Distortion level detection is not what the human ears do well ...We do not perceive distortion in itself we perceive natural and musical sounds WE RECOGNiZE... This is precisely the problem... You use blind test to confirm your linear measuring tool and design in the symmetrical time domain... The problem is human hearing dont work in this way and in this time dimension, human hearing is non linear and time dependant , he is sensible to natural sounds, and music not to distorsion "per se" as an electrical measuring tool ...We dont listen sine wave function in real life... We dont speak the same language... The physicist Hans Van Maanen explain it completely i dont expect you will read it... You are on your technological blind crusade...
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You play with words here.. Proper listening tests are LONG TERM MEMORY TESTS using musicians, acoustician or trained music lovers...( not sellers and reviewers as you say) Short term memory test are good for SUPERFICIAL debunking ...The basic of psycho-acoustic is not founded on blind test , they are SECONDARY tool...
Why long term memory for test ? Because hearing is better in long term memory span than seeing, it is the opposite for seeing which is better in the short memory window... And BECAUSE Human hearing IS based on time dependant evaluation and non linear means , time independant measuring linear tools as fourier tools cannot capture his tracking and resolution power adequately... It is the reason why the main tool of acoustician cannot be blind test and it is the reason why Fourier modelling does not describe human hearings.. ...As Oppenheim and Magnasco demonstrated in their experiment where human hearings beat uncertainty of Fourier method and the Gabor limit... You use blind test to confirm your biases about your own limited set of measures linear and time independant one...ThaTS ALL... This physicist here contradict most of your claims in these videos: And he designed his OWN components speakers and amplifiers.. Will you claim he is incompetent ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW74J7CxqDo
Instead of answering my points about the importance of this discoveries by Oppenhein and Magnasco about the non linear and dependant time ears/brain working and his relation to our perception of audio qualities and the way the perceptive abilities of humans beat the Fourier barrier uncertainty you said that my physicists were phony... In the same way you attacked AD HOMINEM 2 of these physicists and now you attacked me for being "verbose" as your LAST argument... Listen this one demolishing your approach in twenty minutes.. Debunk him... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW74J7CxqDo
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When Amir proposes his set of measures, basic linear and time independant measures, as falsification of marketer specs design, then i had no problem... When he disparaged any trained listeners to be meaningless in favor of his set of measures only to be confirm by his own listenings and listenings protocols putting all experienced listeners in the trashbin, proposing short term blind test instead of long term listening test, but more than that ignoring psycho-acoustic basic science about non linear and time dependant Ears/brain decoding and pushing his simplistic electrical sets of measures over the head of anyone, this is not even technology over science it is worst, it is ideologically motivated stances...I will not speculate about his motives i dont like ad hominem attacks...
The 4 physicist i summoned he disparaged two BEFORE reading them as ignorant...Two of them are author of the papers about hearing beating the Fourier uncertainty, he never adressed these two experiments...And the last one Hans Van Maanen, he disparaged him on the spot, but not only is a working physicist but he design amplifiers and speaker which are based on his studies of the non linear working in the time dependant dimension of the hears/brain... This dude is not phony, it is simple to read his papers...He know much more about audio than Amir who play with technological and computer tools but did not created his own components design as Van Maanen around psycho-acoustic fundamental facts in hearing theory... By the way Van Maanen asked and praised long term trained listeners to improve audio design, especially musicians, acoustician and trained music lovers ... He did not favor blind test as a cure for all needs which are always anyway used for very limited and special utility in a narrow phase of the design window or for marketer fun and publicity ... An amplifier is not a drug , we dont test it the same way with blind guinea pigs with their short memory window...
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Am i the only one to defend psycho-acoustic and trained listenings over linear and time-independant set of measures ? https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=15002.
Subjective and Objective Evaluation of the Acoustic Vacuum-Tube Amplifiers The subjective and objective evaluation of five high-quality vacuum-tube audio power amplifiers is presented in the paper. As the reference, a professional transistor amplifier has been used. The subjective evaluation has been done by a team of judges, as well as using a computer-based psychoacoustic model in accordance with PAQM protocol. The amplifers’ sound quality assessed by the listeners is consistent with the one evaluated with the use of the psychoacoustic model. It was found that the best sound quality is obtained by vacuum-tube amplifiers, the worse – by the reference amplifier. The results of subjective evaluation are inconsistent with quality assessed by measurement of objective parameters: all amplifiers have comparable quality but transistor amplifier is the best one due to the lowest THD+N level. |
In a word: human hearing is neither linear nor time-invariant... Measures based on Fourier linear and time invariant tools cannot be qualified as describing real human hearing impressions nor to predict them...( They are not even enough to capture all amplifiers design essential specs for the human hearings as described by Dr. Hans Van Maanen in an article on fourier conditions on his site ) Then Amir verifying gear specs of brand named and falsifying them "may be" useful, yes or pehaps... But his attacks on experimented trained listeners impressions as non valid goes too far... It is one thing to measure and another thing to claim that this set of linear and time invariant measures will predict audio qualitative impression... I summon 4 physicists to express that on different perspective... Papers are there to be read... No one can accuse me to insult him doing so... But i am able to read... And my conclusion is Amir goes to great lenght to disqualify any trained listeners because of his linear and time invariant set of measures which can in no way predict qualitative hearing impressions... Measures dont convey all there is to say about the qualitative perceptive impressions of an audio system in real acoustic conditions, especially linear and time invariant set of measures because human hearing power is non linear and time dependant... By the way disqualifying listeners with blind test protocols is preposterous, because the qualitative impressions must be verified by long term listening of trained listeners as musicians, acousticians or experiment audiophiles... Short term memory testing on subtle on selected acoustic factors are not enough at all... Blind tests is almost useless to test components because long term memory and long term listenings are necessary... I conclude that Amir use these blind test protocols to deconsider any serious listenings tests...Then only his set of linear and time dependant measures can be valid and any "subjective" expert listenings contradicting them is eliminated at the start... But Audio is not based on gear measures or gear impressions, it is based on psycho-acoustic real life long term memory trained listenings experiments and on a set of measures able to capture all aspects of the non linear and time dependant human hearings impressions.. ... As any acoustician knows already or any good amplifier designer ... By the way in audio as in philosophy, ad hominem attack disqualify anyone from the debate... Period...
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It seems measuring amplifiers in real dynamic musical input conditions is necessary:
Tone burst response of amplifiers to determine some properties of their
Author: Dr. Hans R.E. van Maanen (Temporal Coherence) The rest of the article is there : https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/images/docs/DynamicResponseAmplifiers.pdf |
Take a look here and listen what this physicist had to say about high end design he created himself...Compare it to the simplistic case of Amir dogma about the measures he use and the idea of what is human hearing impact in audio...And why we must ALL OF US renounce to our hearing history and obey his simplistic protocol of measures as hearing truth... Measures dont convey all there is to say about an audio system in real acoustic conditions... There is plenty of articles and videos here...This guy, Dr. Hans R.E. van Maanen, is a real scientist not a cult leader deciding what people will hear and must hear in audio...
There is what he say in an interview about listening tests : «Many designers look at the figures, based on measurement signals. They do not
https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/en/reviews Hans van Maanen design high end audio, amplifiers and speakers... Read his bio and decide if this scientist is an ignorant as Amir toss it away in no time... His bio resume : Dr. Hans R.E. van Maanen was born in Arnhem, Netherlands where he attended primary and high school. After finishing his high school education, he started working at the Shell laboratories in Amsterdam. As it was clear to him that he would need more education, he studied at the University of Amsterdam in the evening hours, from which he received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics with Mathematics, Information Science and Chemistry, both with honours. At the Shell laboratories, he worked on flow measurement techniques, fluid mechanics, chemical engineering and turbulence, resulting in several publications. Then he worked on the application of small computers in experiments and the related data-processing. He applied his experiences to the dataprocessing of Laser-Doppler Anemometry data, which he laid down in his Ph.D.-thesis for the Delft University of Technology. In 1997, he moved to the Shell laboratory in Rijswijk (Netherlands) and worked on multi-phase flow rate measurement in the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry. He was heavily involved in wet-gas measurement, for which he extended the work of Rick de Leeuw and others for horizontal Venturis. This resulted in a mathematical model for the multi-phase wet-gas flow in Venturis. After leaving Shell in 2010, he became an independent consultant for Hint Europe and in that position he extended his modelling to vertical upward Venturis. He presented his work on many different conferences and published numerous papers. His hobbies are listening to music (mostly classical), developing high-end audio systems and riding a motorcycle in a touristic way.
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Amir claimed he is right about the relation of measurements and audio perceived qualities by dogma and inquisitorial blind test and banishment of any subjectivist... All the four physicists with their 4 articles are morons who know less in psycho-acoustic than him it seems ...Even the one designing high end audio systems and contradicting him... Human hearings trained abilities are worthless and only Amir measuring gear test say all there is to say about gear experience and even in psycho-acoustic... In the meantime not a word from him about the fact that human hearing beat the Fourier uncertainty barrier with his non linear methods in the time symmetry broken domain...What does it means that trained musician can extract information over this barrier up to 13 times in some case ? Nothing for Amir, gear measuring tools say all there is to say about dac, amplifiers and audio experience... As i said already, yes welcome to the measuring gear information and gear specs debunking, but suggesting that all subjective audiophile listenings is the same bullshit ready to be thrown in the same trash can because only measuring tools used by him is the ultimate truth this is going too far... Human hearings, especially trained one are more trusty than measuring tools in many cases... Because the gear response to measures cannot either be read as always a warrant for audio qualities... Anyway Amir do business not science...It is my opinion now... Measuring gear is informative thanks for that ... All the inference made about hearings deduced from that are ideology not science ... |
Do you undertand what is the time domain ? Do you understand that hearing is related to the long history of decoding natural sounds meanings then hearing works in a non symmetrical time dimension and non linearly at all ? Amir never answered about that and about the 4 physicist i summoned all saying the same things.. Then i am here to discuss...Why did you claim i am not for discussion ? who else here proposed 4 articles for the discussion ? Where are Amir psycho-acoustic science backing his claim about hearing experience not so valuable as gear measuring tools ? You are so naive to believe posting a tool analysis of an amplifier is a proof in psycho-acoustic and an answer to my 4 articles ? Answering my point in psycho-acoustic by proposing chart analysis of amplifiers or cables is NOT AN ANSWER... Before judging my posts have you read the 4 articles? What means for you the fact that human hearing beat the fourier uncertainty? say to me what this means please ? i wait...
By the way you said i lack comprehension about Amir... Sorry but i thank him about the measures information about the gear... I cannot accept his stance about hearing experience to be replaced by the listenings methods he proposed based on his gear measuring methods and then the bashing of any OTHER hearing experience... Perhaps you did not understand the points discussed in these articles? the human hearing limits are not those Amir claim they are... What did they said these articles ? Try yourself to understand BEFORE JUDGING ME ...
Are you able to read this : ( why amir did not answered about this article physicist ? I discuss here, not him ,because he refused to answer about fact... The ears dont work as his measuring gear tools... And nobody can predict how an amplifier will sound only with measures of some specs... This physicist is Dr. Hans R.E. van Maanen, His hobbies are listening to music (mostly classical), developing high-end audio systems «Although the Fourier theory has been well established since the second half of the 19th century,it is surprising that so little attention is given nowadays to the conditions, required to apply the linear theory. It has been applied unreluctantly to electronics and human hearing, even though neither fulfill either of these requirements. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the results are inconsistent with listening experiences. » https://www.temporalcoherence.nl/cms/images/docs/FourierConditions.pdf
«The effects in time domain of non-linear behaviour in combination with memory effects could explain why e.g. amplifiers with similar properties regarding frequency response and distortion |
Blind test are useful for short term memory verification of subtle audio cues... You dont pick gear choice by blind tests and measures numbers only... Trained ears in acoustic or musicians dont use blind test because they work with long term acquired acoustic cues perception habit... Amir negate this and claim it to be ONLY delusion because he think his measuring tools are adequate to replace the ears natural long experience and in some case trained in acoustic and music ... but the way psycho-acoustic reveal how the ears/brain work in non symmetrical time domain and with non linear hearing strctures and methods contradict his llinear analysis time symmetrically dependant tools ... A pair of ears is no electrical tools...Fourier methods are no more enough to understand human hearing, then it is preposterous to reduce human hearing to gear measuring tools... Only ignorant people can believe that... Not one of the 4 physicist articles i proposed contradict my stance, it is the opposite and Amir was unable and unwilling to go on that road... His goal then appear to be a circle around him not truth... |
Incredible! It is impossible to discuss with you Amir... You are here to recruit? I am here to discuss... You answered BESIDE my points completely... You cannot equate your measures of gear components as replacement for hearing experience and you cannot even claim that this is better than hearing experience... This is IDEOLOGY not science... Your measures of gear are useful to inform us about some claims and truths about their specs THATS ALL... Anything further is no more credible scientifically... You never answered... And i am among the few one here giving FACTS FROM 4 DIFFERENT PHYSICISTS ARTICLES PDF , ALL SAYING THE SAME THINGS, i did not give you insults... I know believe that your motives are less desinterested than what it seems or what you claims ... Yes i am naive... i am too serious to be cynical... 😊 By the way i taught reading analysis...Then english is not at all my spoken language, i almost never spoke it and learn it in philosophy books or science books, i express myself then in a clumsy way... ...But i am able to read ....
«The emperors may be had no clothes but my wife had many» -- Groucho Marx 🤓 |
When the ears/brain detect a meaningful REAL information qualities about two nuanced singing sopranos voices, no tool can qualifies these voices "harmonious" or not so harmonious blending... A tool can detect information, not qualify it as meaningful by itself...A musician can OBJECTIVELY qualify the blending of two feminine voices nuances and not only that he can detect their blending in time 13 times more precisely than Fourier analysis can predict.. Why ? because the ears /brain of the musician is trained to recognize the MUSICAL QUALITIES as an OBJECTIVE reality that can be TAUGHT... NO need for a blind test...Now tell to this musician , that he cannot trust his ears to pick an amplifier but ONLY the measured verified specs , not even with all possible measures, but only with the limited set of linear Measures proposed by Amir, and say to this musician that to choose an amplifier , nothing else will warrant musicality than these limited set of measures... He will laugh... 😊For sure as he said Amir listen too...But biased by his numbers he listen as if they were predictive of musicality... They cannot.. And he want to blind test anyone saying that his set of measures is not all there is to say about the gear not only about his material design but about his sound qualities... He goes too far with his claim... The limited set of measures proposed by Amir are useful to verify the company specs claims... NOTHING ELSE... Musical quality must be perceived and cannot be predicted and interpreted by tools without ears, sometimes musical quality correlated with some measures, sometimes not... Design is not only an industrial process it is also a guided by the ears craftmanship and by psycho-acoustic principles and laws of hearings and the law of hearings are not Fourier frequencies based but based on an ecological theory as Gibson did for visual theory ...Fourier is good but not enough... Why ? Because any prediction must be based on an interpretation space... The Fourier interpretation space as tool cannot predict which is out of his linear window frame of interpretation, but pertain to the time dependant real world event of natural sounds and which qualities the ears perceive non linearly... QUALITIES as objective phenomena... Music is the main example... Measuring the linearity of a well working circuit did not predict musicality as qualities perceived non linearly by ears... |
