Perfectly measuring gear is just spin for sales. Everything made goes through measurements and is made to spec and gets that CE approval so you know it won't burn your house down.
There is a difference between performance metrics and safety. A car can accelerate fast/slow and be safe or not safe in a simulated crash. These concepts are orthogonal to each other. On that topic though, safety certifications and regulatory certifications are often missed from audiophile products. Especially shameful is when it is a power cord where safety matters.
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It’s great that something can be so fiendishly designed so as to look picture perfect but the proof is in the listening and how it jives with your long established tastes and not meant for one to surrender their wallet.
Again well said. The problem is, someone saying this and that sounded this way is not "proof." After all, I can get someone to say the opposite. Provide proof and we would all line up to believe you! :)
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Now if a designer wants a certain sound and it means adding some distortion in order to achieve that goal, there's nothing wrong about doing that. It's already been pointed out by musicians, technicians and recording engineers. Again, nothing remotely wrong about that.
Well said. Simple request would be to a) show measurements so that people know you have put that in there and b) do a controlled listening test with a group of audiophiles showing the benefit. Having me doing the measurements for them and you doing the listening tests doesn't make much sense.
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As a follow up to above with respect to multiple subs, this is a computer (CFD) simulation used to optimize placement of multiple subs in our theater. Even with that optimization, response is still on even and requires EQ:
https://youtu.be/5R6S9G0RCiU
So the rule is simple: if you are not measuring your room and correcting for bass, you don't have an optimized system. Yes, you can reduce some of the impact by proper placement of speakers/subs and listening location but you cannot get the proper response without equalization.
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As just a “normie” who spends some money on audio, a pox on both your “measurements rule” and the “golden ears” side that dismisses anyone not “trained”..
I buy what is pleasing to me. Don’t give a dang about “measurements” which mainly are measuring that which is beyond audibility for anyone over 40 that has actually had any kind of “blue collar” job.
Got it. Thank you.
Can I tell the difference between consumer grade klipsch vs magnepan and tektons? Absolutley. (I have all 3).
Nobody was debating that but thank you again for stating that.
Can I tell the difference between an underpowered amplifier and one with sufficient power for the dynamic range of what I listen to and how loudly I listen to it? Yep.
Excellent. Again, no one was debating that. Question is how you can tell that before you get the equipment to listen to. I provide that information with measurement and sometimes with listening tests.
Can I tell that I prefer tube amplification for mids and highs, using SS amps for lows and subs for under 100hz (for music)? Yep.
So you say. We have no way of knowing if you really can or not.
Can I tell the difference between a 192/24 vs mp3, especially as volume increases? Definitely.
So you say. We have no way of knowing if you really can or not.
Can I tell that I prefer a $2000 tube amp over the same power $20000 tube amp?
Or at least hear no difference..? Yep.
The second part I can believe. The alternative, "we have no way of knowing if you really can or not." :)
What I buy, and what equipment provides me with hours on end of continued listening enjoyment, at a price point I am willing to pay, has NOTHING to do with some elitist, sneering, snob telling me that I am “wrong” because my equipment doesn’t “measure up” or that my choice is wrong because some “golden ear” says so.
Again, got it.
THAT is “my kind” @amir_asr
Very clear now. Thank you again.
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Back to the cable thing, is this gentleman saying that the entire cable industry is without musical merit? If so, he's literally deaf, or has a terribly low quality playback system/room
First, if that is what I hear and I am supposed to trust my ears, I don't know why you would say I am deaf.
Second, why are these system requirements not documented some place? Never seen that from any cable manufacturer for example. How would a potential buyer be informed prior to buying these things that their system is not "low quality?"
Here is a picture of my system. Would you please advise if it is low or high quality?
Thank you.
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@amir_asr Thank you for posting your system photo. For someone so into the science of audio, I am very surprised that you have seemingly given no consideration to room acoustics! There are a number of great room acoustic products/treatments that i am certain would do marvels for your SQ in your room. You may want to try some of them, although I admit, they are all passive, and as such, pretty hard to measure! Your ears would be in for a treat though....if you would allow yourself to believe in them.
My pleasure. Did you think the system is resolving enough to tell the difference between cables? If so, or not, how did you determine that.
As to acoustic products, this is my field of study as I post yesterday. Quickly: there is a lot of money wasted there on stuff people intuit and read online. The confusion there is much worse than it is in audio cables!
But addressing your question anyway, did you not notice the measurement microphone and computer in that picture?
They were there in the process of testing Lyngdorf's excellent RoomPerfect EQ system. I clicked on your profile and i see no DSP solution. Shame as that *guarantees* your bass response is poor. And that what you are hearing is bloated bass that is obscuring the detail in the rest of the spectrum.
Forget everything we have been discussing here. If you are not measuring your room and correcting for bass errors, you have a lousy audio system. Period. Measurements will absolutely show that the acoustic stuff you have thrown in there have little to no impact in this regard (don't be fooled by the name "bass trap, " they do no bass trapping).
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@amir_asr You may notice that I did NOT call your system a ’lousy audio system’...I wonder why?? I could have stated that having a big screen TV between the speakers and having your gear placed on your auntie’s dining room side board cabinet is not exactly anything but...laughable! But, for some reason i did not say that before, however since you want to play that card....;0)
It is only laughable if you have gotten your knowledge of acoustics from stuff you read online and lay intuition. Due to precedence effect, the on-axis sound, and not the reflections rule predominantly what you hear. And this is naturally not impacted by the room (above transition frequencies). What reflection there is, gets attenuated due to much longer path length of that front wall.
Now, if you have a speaker that has screwed up directivity/off-axis response, these reflections than change the tonality of on-axis sound. This is why our speaker measurements include such information:
Notice how smooth the back-wall reflections are and how similar they are to on axis. The only ones that deviate are the ceiling and floor ones. For that reason, I have a special rug that is very thick and is designed to absorb down to that frequency. Yes, not every acoustic product needs to look like a child blanket hung on a wall!
Back to this speaker, see how nice the sum of early window reflections are (in blue) relative to on-axis response (in black):
This is nearly textbook perfect. You can see it in the predicted in-room response which includes all the reflections you think are "bad:"
This matches top class studio monitors used to produce content:
Perceptually, your brain adapts to the room above transition after a short period. It learns that the room reflections are a constant secondary data that adds little to the primary sound. So it starts to filter them. For this reason, a specific speaker sounds similar when placed in many different rooms. The speaker dominates, not the room.
If the speaker has really awful off-axis response however, the brain thinks that it is bringing more to the table so adaptation doesn't occur as much. For those speakers, which you should have avoided, you may want to put more absorption on the walls.
BTW, Amir, do you really think as an ex-pro musician and music teacher, plus being in the a’phile hobby for over forty years( dates me), that I cannot set up a couple of subwoofers in my system? Instead, i need to have an artificial tool to aid me...get a clue
As a musician, you hear sounds from a different vantage point than listeners. So that doesn't train you as an audiophile anyway. That aside, physics of sound don't stop in your room because you learned to play an instrument. That physics says that at frequencies below transition the modal density is low so you can get pretty narrow resonances at multiple frequencies. There is no way, no how you can just use your ears to tease them out let alone correcting them. Even the best acousticians in the world measure and then correct using DSP. No number of subs, or acoustic bandages is going to remove the need for this. Your room is ringing at some frequencies regardless of any manual tuning you have done.
Get a DSP and a measurement mike and be ready to transform the sound of your room and arrive at your next stage in audiophile life. Don't keep chasing the next cable, tube amp, etc. And oh, get speakers that have proper directivity or your acoustic life will be very difficult.
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You can take a measurement all you want of this room, but room correction is not going to fix some glaring issues visible in this graph and system photo. No call to authority is going to change that but appropriate well placed panels will.
Wall panels will not do jack for those measurements. They won't even register on the graph! Go ahead and show the measurements before and after you hang a panel on the wall.
Here is the real image of that measurement:
We see bass response going down to 20 Hz which is great given the fact that there are no subs involved (the one in the picture is not used). I don't listen to the No-EQ graph. I turned off my own Room EQ to test Roomperfect. We see how the room created that large peak and dip -- both of which were mostly corrected by RoomPerfect EQ.
A system can sound wonderful if you have the right speakers, apply bass EQ, and have ordinary furnishings in your room. Do NOT let anyone shame you into slapping ugly panel on the room as to fit in the club. Folks advocating that have not read a single piece of research into acoustics of room. They are just repeating what they have read online...
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@amir-
If I understood your last post correctly: you own Lyngdorf gear.
Nice stuff, not to mention: a good looking listening/media room.
Having been in the loop so long: you've got to remember Peter & Boz's TacT venture.
I'm still using the old Tact RCS 2.2Xaaa (with a number personally addressed mods/updates, of course).
The Lyngdrorf was a loaner from a member so got returned. I did however purchase the TacT TCS 8 channel system. Nothing transformed my audio system and ideas more than that processor. My jaw fell on the floor in the way it seemingly removed the walls from my listening room!
Alas, the story did not end well. After spending $10K on the processor, I spent another $5K to upgrade it. I didn't get to use it for a couple of years and when I went back to turn it on a couple of channels were flakey. As a last resort, I tried to update the firmware from the image on the website. The firmware completely bricked the system by causing it to get stuck in the start up screen!
I sent an email to Boz (or did I talk to him?). As soon as I told me I upgraded the firmware he demanded to know why! I told him the issue and he said you should not have upgraded the firmware. I told him that he had the firmware on his website. How was I supposed to know I was not going to use it?
I then asked him if there is a fix. He said no. I asked how that could be. Wouldn't he have a way to force a factory reset or something? He said no. That was that and to this day, I have this gorgeous looking but broken door stop. :(
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Quick, tell me what frequencies in this graph are room modes, and which are boundary issues?
The mere question indicates you don't know what you are looking at. Hint: look at the measurement again. It says right there.
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I won’t say it is universal, but it is almost universal that treatment of first reflections in a small rooms is recommended by professionals.
Those are the professionals you want to stay the heck away from. That is old school thinking invalidated by a ton of research into what makes a pleasant listening environment.. The advice persists because people don't bother reading any research in this area and really learning the topic.
Unfortunately, there has not been extensive research on this topic to draw on and what does exist is mainly around speech intelligibility, however, Brett Leonard in his PhD dissertation did some excellent work showing effects of a rather early intense reflections on perception and even the variability of that perception across music genres.
His thesis is excellent but you are completely misrepresenting it. That work was completely focused on ability of professionals to get *work* done in different acoustic environments. It had zero to do with listening for enjoyment. If you had just looked at the abstract you would have realized that:
"This new methodology involved constant interaction with the test, and provided highly trained recording engineers a set of tasks and controls similar to their normal work."
Testers were given some common tasks in mixing content and they were timed in their ability to get them done. Subjective results were also captured on their preference. This subset was published in Journal of AES in paper, he Practical Effects of Lateral Energy in Critical Listening Environments
I cover a synopsis of it in this post. In a nutshell, the most preferred treatment was no treatment (reflective):
Back to thesis paper, in an experiment related to dialing in the right amount of reverb under different acoustic conditions, this was found:
"If consistency and repeatability are desirable characteristics for an engineer in a given environment (which they most assuredly are), the reflective environment may in fact be a better mixing environment. This could in turn contradict the idea that an acoustically untreated facility is inferior, at least in this one regard."
So even in conditions that "everyone thought" absorption was the answer, i.e. studio work, your own cited research indicates the assumption is false.
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@amir_asr so room treatments do nothing? All of the producers and sound engineers who record with them to create less issues and surrounding booths with it so the vocals are clean don’t know what they are doing?? You can hear the difference. It’s night a day.
No, room treatments do something. Just not what you think. This idea of copying what "pros" do in the process of creating music is why we are in such a mess. They forget the fallacy of appealing to authority and jump right in both feet.
You are taking it even a step further. What a single microphone picks up in a tiny vocal booth has absolutely nothing with you sitting back to listen to music in a much larger space with two ears and a brain. I am not a recording engineer but I imagine they want a dry recording of that vocal as to then embellish it with as much reverb in post as they need. That has nothing to do with what we do in our listening spaces.
There is this assumption also that if pros do something, it must be right. A pro creating music has expertise in that field, not in science of acoustics. They haven't gone to school to learn acoustics, not have they read massive body of literature on effects of reflections in room. They hire joe acoustician which does what the poster said above: "we need to treat the room" or at least the front if in the form of LEDE or "Environmental Room." Acoustic products are put all of the walls making the room look special. This impresses the client resulting in higher billing per hour.
To be sure, at high level, an empty room is too live to be usable for enjoyable of a lot of music. In that case, if you have a dedicated room like that, you do need to "treat" it. That can be with acoustic products or in my case, ordinary furnishings that perform a similar job, are not ugly and often are much cheaper.
The research I post above shows that even when it comes to getting work done (recording/mixing), the notion that an absorptive room is right was shown to be false. People in that space would do well to rethink what they are doing.
All of this was extensively discussed in the thread I linked to. There is no point you can bring up that was not addressed there with volumes of research, not opinion based on stuff you have read online. This is what we do at ASR. We discuss the science contrary to people who think we only "measure."
BTW, if you were listening to that singer, there is a good chance you would want no absorption in that booth. This hits on the proverbial person's voice sounding best in a shower!
You literally use a tool that mimics an anechoic chamber. You really have your head up your rear end.
The tool is designed to characterize a speaker independent of the space it is placed in. Otherwise, its measurements will be specific to that location so not transportable to others. Research shows that we can use the anechoic measurements of frequency response in 3-D space, combine that with statistical mean of reflections in a number of listening rooms, and predict, with high accuracy, what happens in such a room (above transition frequencies). I post this already:
See the title? "Estimated in-room response" which we formally call PIR (Predicted In-Room Response). This can even be used to predict listener preference although the formula can misfire.
Bottom line, don't go slapping mattresses all of your everyday room. It is not necessary and will uglify your room and likely not have the effect you think it will have. Your "aunt's" furniture will do just fine in providing some diffusion and carpets and such (if thick) provide good bit of absorption. Just get it to the point where talking in there is comfortable and you are golden (if you like, you can measure using RT60 and get in the range of 0.25 to 0.6 second for typical small room).
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The snake in snakeoil bit you in the butt. Wonder what kind of reception the above statements would receive over at ASR?
Snake oil? No way. Benefits of Room EQ is proven conclusively. There is no snake oil involved. Performing this across 8 channel 20 years ago was expensive. Fortunately it is not today. Here is a nice paper to read on power of EQ in fixing room response:
Three systems beat no EQ (dashed black) in controlled listening tests. Notice the peaking in bass response of the no-EQ system. If you care about high fidelity and you have that in your room, I don't know what to tell you. You can get variations as much as 25 dB in bass without equalization!
Above is not a surprise by any regular menbers and readers at ASR as many deploy EQ just the same. Yes, it took some explaining and repeating for even our crowd there to get it but it is the consensus view.
Bottom line: the first step in creating any performant audio system is to figure out how you are going to perform equalization.
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Oh really now. You mean this graph? I know exactly what it is showing. Do you? There are clear room modes in the response. There are clear boundary effects in the response (and not low frequency reinforcement which can be corrected). Do you know which is which? Can room correction fix this? No. Can acoustic panels fix this? Absolutely.
No. The graph cannot be used to determine modal response or SBR. It is absolutely the wrong presentation for that use. Again, it says so right on the graph what it is for. I only post it because that is the shot you were seeing on the computer monitor, not because it is suitable for the purpose you are asking about.
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What is unfortunate is I agree with you far more often than not, but you like so many here let your ego get the better of you and you let that drive a need to be right to the point that you make poor use of the available science, drawing conclusions that are beyond what the science is able to reliably claim.
Why these continued personal remarks? Why not stick to the technical topic and leave it at that? Every one of you is doing this. How do you not sit back and realize that is bad in the context of trying to prove a technical point? Who cares what you think of me personally? They can't use that to get better performance out of the system. State the technical point and don't keep getting personal this way. It is like you all copy each other's style.
If what I say is right and you agree with it, leave well enough alone. Don't detract from the technical point on which there is consensus between us with comments like this.
But no I did not "make poor use of available science." You did that by putting forward a research that had to do with ability of professionals getting their jobs accomplished, wanting people to think it had something to do with enjoyment of music. The study had nothing to do with the topic of interest in this forum. You either didn't know what the research was about, or if you did, misrepresented it as such.
It is clear you thought you knew more than me so by mere mention of the paper you expected me to fold. This is what I call "ego." After all, you would have quoted the paper if you wanted to have a proper discussion.
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Does that say more about the processor or more about your room?
Says it about everyone's room unless you have a massive space where transition frequencies get so low as to not matter. Few have such spaces. But partially yes. My listening room at the time was small so the effect was more dramatic than in my larger space now.
To expand, wavelengths of sound below 100 Hz get massive as to make any velocity based absorber to appear to not even be there. Yes, if you slapped 50 of them around your room, it will make some difference but you will not get neutral response. EQ is a must. No question about it.
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The graph on its own cannot, but we also know the speakers and with enough accuracy the speaker placement as I noted we had your system image. Look at that graph, now go do a bunch of measurements on your speakers and their relationships to the walls and your room dimensions, calculate 1/2 and 1/4 wavelengths then start relating multiples of those numbers to your graphs. Science, not conjecture.
All of of that would be conjecture. Folks looked a picture without even those dimensions and declared this and that. Even if I gave you those measurements, walls are not built out of concrete so distances don’t automatically convert to modal frequencies. My ceiling is sloped making any such back of the envelop computation impossible. We measure because that is the proper science, not looking at a 1/3 octave smoothed graph meant for overall target curve and claiming you see the modal response there. You absolutely do not. You have to take into account perceptual effects of room reflections and that requires careful filtering of the results.
Regardless, I did not put forward my room as a laboratory or best example of a listening room. It was space I had, I put wonderful speakers in it, put in appropriate furnishings as to keep it nice looking and function, applied EQ and got wonderful sound and enjoyment out of it. Science backs all of this.
Some people want to make it their life project to screw around with their room acoustics. That is not me. I have function and aesthetic needs that they do not have.
Claiming that people should go and absorb reflections as you claimed is simply wrong advice for huge swath of audiophiles. It is misinformation that leads to people agonizing the sound of their room, wasting a ton of money and often arrive at too dead of the room.
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@amir_asr No it’s not about audio.
Got it. For a minute I thought you were saying you were doing research in audio. Wasn't likely given your history of posts but thought to ask.
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In terms of throwing out those "professionals", I would have to throw you out as well for your insistence on only your way when your luminaries don’t even say what you claim.
The luminaries not only say what I say, if you knew them personally as I do, but do as I say. Here is Dr. Toole’s California room (he is selling and moving to Canada):
Does this look like it has a bunch of crap acoustic products all over as you claimed people should put in their living spaces? It doesn’t right?It even has a TV in the middle!
Just like my room, standard furnishing is used to provide adequate overall absorption so that the room is not too live. That’s all. He uses multiple subs with advanced DSP (soundfield management) to get excellent bass across multiple seats. This is science. This is science in practice. This is science that doesn’t uglify your room to create great satisfaction.
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@prof They absolutely do dismiss expensive stuff. Here is one. Amir shows it does the same thing as the less expensive versions, and therefore doesnt recommend it. Explain to me how that is not exactly what youre saying???
These are the marketing claims for that $1000 USB cable:
New micro insulated quad Alumiloy conductors in a very flexible noise rejecting shielded design offers all resolutions of digital audio beyond DSD sampling rates with excellent clarity. As with analog interconnects, excellent low level details and a highly refined sound. Not dull and boring nor thin and bright, this USB cable lets you hear your music through your front end electronics with true clarity and life.
The clear implication is that standard USB cable lacks clarity and sounds dull, boring and thin. If that was the case, $1000 would be money well spent. Of course the company provides no proof points for any of this. No listening tests. No measurements. Nothing. So we roll up our sleeves and check:
32 tones are thrown at the DAC using this and dirt cheap USB cable. There is absolutely no difference in frequency response, distortion or noise floor measured down to -140 dB (25 dB below threshold of hearing).
Listening tests were provided:
JPS Superconductor V USB Cable Listening Tests
I connected the output of the Topping D70s to Topping A90 which in turn drove my Dan Clark Stealth headphones ($4000). I used the high gain on the A90 to make sure I could hear any difference in background noise. I started with the JPS cable and the sound was as wonderful as I remembered on my standard reference tracks (which I have listened to hundreds of times). I then switched to the generic USB cable. Surprising (not), it sounded louder and more dynamic! I switched back to the JDS USB cable and difference vanished, leaving me with less perceived fidelity. Of course, this not a valid test as the switching time is way too long to allow proper comparison for small differences. But if folks want to run by "what I heard," I heard the generic USB cable sounding "better."
Those of you who ask "just listen" would have to believe that the generic cable far outperformed this "superconductor."
Conclusions are thus obvious:
"Conclusions
USB cables in short length deliver all the bits correctly. The ground connection though from the PC to DAC is an analog affair so in theory, some difference in noise can be there. If there is, and you can audibly hear something the solution is not another USB cable but to use better isolation (Toslink, XLR cables for interconnects, etc.). Measurements here show that there is no difference even in that department when with a "noisy" source like my desktop workstation PC.
Ad-hoc listening tests as usual produce unreliable results which if taken at face value, put the generic USB cable ahead of the JPS cable! So if you want to go by that, we still don't have anything of value here.
As you can predict by now, I can't recommend the JPS Labs Superconductor V USB. It is just a waste of money compared to any half-decent generic cable."
Company claims were not shown to be true so they charged $995 more than they should have. They misled customers and took their money. Nothing at all like a high performance DAC which produces stated of the art performance matching company's claims.
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Saying "anyone" on this forum needs to do scientific research is baseless and overstated. I do scientific research. I don't do things without research and some sort of basis in reality
Ah, what are examples of that scientific research? Hopefully it is about audio since you brought it up here but do tell.
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Show me the science where it states that room treatment is bogus, and people dont need it to help with the eq in their room?
Room treatments are not bogus. Telling people to go and slap them on their walls in their living room as otherwise their sound is crap, is bogus.
It is beyond the scope of this conversation to provide you more education on that. I have put a ton of research data in this thread as I have post. Bottom line is, if you have not spent considerable amount of time getting educated here, or at least read Dr. Toole’s book cover to cover a couple of times, you have no business opining on this topic.
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@mapman
@amir_asr need to point out I did not say what you have me quoted as saying above. I think you made a mistake there.
Sorry about that. Was just copying and pasting what the person had said. I took out the member references.
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@amir_asr Seriously why are you still here? Don't you have some donations to pole dance for?
I am here because additional points are being raised about who or what ASR is so I am answering. What on earth have you been doing here from start? Did you read OP?
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@prof Wait I never called the tact eq box snake oil. The other member of Audiogon did. Then I tried to explain why that argument was somewhat valid but I agree it's not snake oil in the strictest sense.
TacT processor was not snake oil in any sense, strict or otherwise. It was a pioneering system with multi channel Room EQ and digital in and out. It was what led to Room EQ eventually becoming standard in every AV processor or Receiver you buy today. It was and has been transformative.
The processor was expensive to build. Each channel had a dedicated board with its own high performance, dedicated DSP. It was a marvel of audio engineering:
You are completely out of line with this line of questioning and discussion.
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People in that thread call magico speakers snake oil.
No they didn't. The thread title is: "What is the difference between snake oil and rip off, or both are the same?" So comments are made on both fronts. This is the magico reference and response
Katji said:
Refer to Magico speakers >$600,000 made with expensive materials like exotic woods and Titanium.
Magico/DCS are the contemporary ‘high-end’ they measure well and have super smart casework. Commensurate performance is available at many multiples of expense less of course.
Reasonable back and forth completely inconsistent with your claim. Really, this dog don't hunt. You are just showing that you are not familiar with ASR.
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@amir-
If you're at all interested in getting the TacT TCS up again: try contacting Tip, via this group.
IF you don't already belong,
https://groups.io/g/TacTAudioUsersGroup
Thanks. I used to subscribe to it long time ago. May be worth it to see if at least someone has interest in my box for parts, etc.
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This is cargo cult:
This is not:
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Where do you think i get ideas about Helmholtz resonators ?
Tuned resonators are a bad idea for any unskilled audiophiles to dabble in. They are very narrowband and their response can be screwed up easily in construction. Measurements to tease out the specific frequencies you need to deploy them can be difficult (due to multiple axis resonances can occur).
A single PEQ filter can solve the same problem and lower distortion of the speaker to boot.
Net, net: don't do it.
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Amir keeps quoting that there is extensive research showing reflection and no treatment other than regular furniture is not only good enough, but that it is superior for home listening.
We have hardly discussed room acoustics so the claim that I "keep quoting" research is obviously wrong on the face of it. The other bit is what you are manufacturing on my behalf and then complaining about. Really, the plot is lost.
We got here because someone claimed I must not have good enough equipment to hear the difference between cables. So I grab a picture I happen to have of my room and post if that is good enough. Neither that poster, or another who came to his defense would answer that. So let's agree that the system was good enough and the claim that the system was the problem was fallacious.
Folks then tried to deflect by claiming that my room must sound like crap. Why? Because they saw no acoustic products in there. I explained that ordinary room furnishings can act as acoustic products and that if you have a speaker with excellent directivity, above modal region, there is not much of an issue. And that the focus must be to deal with the modal response first and foremost as that is a constant in every room.
Importantly, I made no statement about superiority of furnishings relative to acoustic products. I did note that audiophiles tend to not understand room acoustics and slap these things everywhere on their walls and ceilings, and then start to shame others who don't have them. This is just wrong. This is a complex field and doesn't yield itself to such approach.
You then chimed in claiming this:
I won’t say it is universal, but it is almost universal that treatment of first reflections in a small rooms is recommended by professionals. Unfortunately, there has not been extensive research on this topic to draw on and what does exist is mainly around speech intelligibility, however, Brett Leonard in his PhD dissertation did some excellent work showing effects of a rather early intense reflections on perception and even the variability of that perception across music genres. Your position does not appear to be based on the fundamental science, available research, or professional recommendation.
I quoted from the very research you put forward that it had nothing to do with listening for enjoyment but that it was a test of recording/mix engineer productivity. And even there, a reflective sidewall as preferred by majority so quoting that was totally inappropriate and wrong. Ergo, the claim that "almost universal that treatment of first reflections in a small rooms is recommended by professionals" is also misinformed.
This led to this admission:
Here is the thing, though, referencing this paper was a bit of a intentional trap.
If you don't mind, we rather have a proper discussion here than laying "intentional trap" for readers.
Back to your claim, I have repeatedly said that acoustic products are likely a good choice for a dedicated room. If you know what you are doing of course they can be used. What makes room furnishing superior is this:
1. Often they cost nothing. Acoustic products can get quite expensive. Yes, you can DIY them to save money but that is miserable work and at any rate, still cost more than decorating the way you like to live and look.
2. Ordinary furnishings look nice and don't create conflict with others living in the same household.
These are hugely important benefits to audiophiles. Not necessarily on acoustic front but from point of view of deployment.
3. The path of treating all reflections with absorption will inevitably lead to people slapping absorbers over every surface they can find. After all, if a little bit is good, a lot is better. Soon the room is deader than the steak on your plate, sounds lifeless and the room ugly as heck.
Bottom like, get speakers that are well designed, do some EQ for low frequencies where acoustic products have little prayer of fixing issues there, put standard furnishing if this is an everyday room, and start enjoying your music. Do NOT listen to people claiming expertise based on stuff they have read online. And certainly don't let them shame you into throwing blankets on the wall or else your system sounds like "crap." They don't know what they are saying.
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One thing about "science" in these discussions. Much of what we want to convey has nothing to do with "science." Ordinary engineering knowledge and methods are more than adequate to prove or disprove marketing claims or fidelity. Equipment is said to have darker background and hence, lower noise floor. Well, we can trivially measure that and we do that day in and day out at ASR. We do not need to invoke "science" in that.
When we do use science, it is not in the process of creating more of it. Example: more than four decades of scientific research shows that speakers that are most preferred are the ones with on axis and smooth off-axis (not flat). So we measure those parameters and get to use science to predict what sounds good to us.
Sadly, the word science is being used as a weapon in these discussions. Folks claim that "science says it doesn't know everything" so we should pretend we know nothing about how a piece of wire works. Well, no, again, we are not attempting to create science. Simple testing shows whether said wire does something good, nothing, or makes things worse. Science doesn't get involved or invoked in that.
Much of what audiophiles worry about is subject of any scientific research. Why? Because such research is not deemed necessary. We know the answers. We don't need to keep looking for an alternative.
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@kevn
@amir_asr
Amir, what of the fact that all along, you have only been measuring just the electrical half of electromagnetism. Can you explain the loss of logic in basing your entire belief system on that?
Huh? What do you call speaker and headphone testing? Devoid of magnetism? How do they make sound then (putting aside electrostatics and such).
Power supplies in audio gear use transformers so their magnetic properties are also encapsulated in the overall performance of a device.
The ending of that sentence is key: don't try to get ahead of the train. As an audiophile, your only concern should be what comes out of your audio gear. Not how some physical theory acts on the design of said equipment. You don't listen to that phenomenon.
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Do you know that every scholars research is available on the internet ?
On the Internet? What does that have to do with anything? For the record, vast majority of research into acoustic science is NOT on the internet. Papers are behind paywalls at AES, ASA, etc. I am a member so get access. If you want an extremely cogent synopsis of them for almost nothing, again, buy Dr. Toole's book.
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What is a well designed speakers ? Is Tannoy dual concentric bad design ?
Maybe, maybe not. You can't go by a brand name. You must measure it as a first step. I reviewed the Tannoy Revolution XT 6.
You pay $1,200 and get this response:
Fortunately subjectively is not as bad as it seems (due to bandwidth of our auditory filters). Still, there is no reason to put up with such a response (and distortion) when there are plenty of superior choices at those price points.
This was my conclusion:
Conclusions
The Tannoy Revolution XT 6 brings distinct looks to a crowded market which I liked. Objectively though, the coaxial design brought with it a choppy and uneven frequency response which research and my experience shows to not be good. Fortunately the audible effect is not severe. What is severe is level of measured distortion. This distortion in my opinion is audible and serves to produce a distorted sound. Fortunately careful EQ seems to deal with them but then wind up with so many patches to get the speaker to sound right. The designer should have done this, not us.
So overall, I can't recommend the Tannoy XT 6.
Bottom line, don't run with concepts such as coaxial. Insist on measurements to show efficacy.
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Mainly what I see is audiophiles, from their own experience, and that of acoustic professionals, is that they have added a limited number of panels to fix a perceived problem, usually caused by limited space, and that the majority have been happy with the results.
Oh, you are going to convince yourself that you are happy after spending all that time online reading incorrect information, buying and slapping those things on your walls. And as long as upstanding citizens like you encourage them to think that way, they will be starving their ears for good sound.
The wrong information about room acoustics is so entrenched online that it takes incredible amount of effort to finally shake someone to rethink their assumptions/knowledge. To wit, it took more than 1,600 post in the acoustic thread on ASR to get that to happen:
Hmmm...not sure how to start this post. I wish I had better writing skills and knowledge of English. Please bare with me and let me try.
I feel like a Neo in Matrix where @amirm is Morpheus and he's offering a blue pill in one hand (absorption on the side walls) and a red pill in the other (no side wall treatments). After all Amir's efforts in this thread, I decided to say fuc*@ and take a red pill. LOL.
Well after I got unplugged from Matrix and first puke, I was sitting in my listening chair in disbelief at what I just heard. I was not sure what to expect but I prepared myself for the precise imaging to be gone or at least affected to some degree and to be bothered with extra brightness. To my surprise, imaging was still there, the sound stage was bigger and (for lack of a better word) the overall presentation was more natural. Oops, Gulp, what now?
Look, I don't care if you go and spend $2,000 on a USB cable. That is not going to degrade your sound. But listening to people online about acoustic science will absolutely lead to screwing up the sound in your room. Don't do it. Don't listen to these people.
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it is comical if you realize there is top musicians here, designer engineers and others very informed people about all aspects of audio...
What is even more comical is thinking any of those disciplines teach you anything about acoustic science. My piano teacher doesn't know a tweeter from a woofer. A design engineer is taught how to put electronic circuits together, not deal with psychoacoustics of sound in a room. As to other "informed people," I don't know who they are and what their qualifications are if they are hiding behind aliases.
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That’s a hell of an investment. $100k on a measurement system as opposed to $100k on a system. Whatever boat you float….
I am thankful and fortunate enough to have both. Didn't you see the picture of my system earlier?
You only have audio as a music hobby. I also have it as a hobby when it comes to discovery of performance of those systems and sharing them with others. The joy that comes from that easily rivals if not beat listening to music. Take today's review, the superbly designed Neumann KH120 II Studio Monitor:
Check out its frequency response:
Absolutely stunning. It is nearly as flat as audio electronics yet what you see is an electromechanical device. Read the comments and see the level of appreciation and tell me doing this review didn't bring joy to my heart.
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You cannot have a clue about Helmholtz resonators because you did not even mention them for the bass problem in a room... You mock those who use material treatment favoring EQ alone... It is ignorance...
No, it is impolite and screwed up logic on your part. This is not a thread on acoustics. I am not at all attempting to engage in any kind of full blown discussion on such a complex topic in this thread. You asked me what they were, and I instantly gave you an answer and the cons of the solution. That you don't accept that -- without facts -- means nothing. A day in the park in an audio forum where folks claim all kinds of expertise. Come with data, not just indefinite word salads and personal commentary.
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You spoke to me as if i was a child and not really there adressing a crowd and as if i did not do it already with complete success... You are right on one point, it takes me one year of tuning non stop ... It was very fun but very complex... By the way it COST ME NOTHING.... I
I don't know what you know or have done. I am not a mind reader. You asked me "what I think of Helmholtz resonators" and I answered.
As to you having deployed that, these tuned products are designed to solve a specific problem with a very specific solution. The only way to know both of those components is with high resolution measurements of bass frequencies. You have not provided anything of the sort. For all we know, you may not have had the problem you thought you had, nor solved it the way you think you have.
I have had people report building these things, deploying them, and unlike you, measuring them only to see that they don't do much of anything for them.
And that statement about costing nothing is absurd. Even if you built it yourself, there is material cost. The thing doesn't materialize itself out of thin air, pun intended.
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I learned acoustic by studying but experimenting at the same time...
I don’t know what you have learned. I can only go by what you can demonstrate here and so far, I have not seen you express anything in this thread indicating any knowledge of the field. Maybe you know it, but I don’t know that you do.
You cannot change the fact...by mocking all people here and thinking you are alone with books and articles... and only you can read them...
A claim of knowledge is not a fact. Nor have I mucked anyone individually. I discuss the technical point and show measurements, references, and other data to prove them. You have something like that, let’s see it. Start by demonstrating how you know the perceptual effects of lateral reflections.
As to the book, it costs so little compared to what people spend on gear/content. I suggest you go and buy it and read that, instead of wasting time here. And yes, that includes reading my posts. The book is that valuable.
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@somethingsomethingaudio
Clearly it does bother you. You are still here.
No AJ. It doesn't bother me.
"As I noted, due to lack of time, I do not have listening impressions for you." How the @#!$ do you evaluate a speaker without that? I would love to see a car review without driving it. Astonishing.
There was no proctor available to vouch for authenticity of my subjective listening tests. It was during the time of Covid and proctors just didn't want to make home visits. Meanwhile, we have this:
Do you need help understanding this AJ? Is it befitting of a $20,000 speaker?
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Explain to me how a review for a loudspeaker does not entail listening to it. Joke.
It has been explained. Repeatedly. I have even post a video I have done on it.
Someone’s subjective testing of a single speaker has little to no value. That you seek is useless.
The purpose of my listening tests is to determine audibility of flaws seen in measurements, not something onto themselves. Here, the flaws of the speaker are quite apparent. With the speaker being quite large and heavy, I made an exception to my general stance of listening and EQing it and letting the membership build a consensus.
That you ignore some 300 speaker reviews with listening tests and pick this one to complain about shows anything but good intentions. Move on.
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The overall measured electrical performance of the device, you mean. You're paltering again, Amir. You haven't answered the question - why have you based your entire belief system on just the electrical half of electromagnetism? The point is, you don't really know, because accurate measurement and analysis of the other profound side hasn't been invented yet.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gNEjwvEe8HA
Your ears must have really evolved to detect magnetic field of audio gear.
Make sure you have no jewelry on you as that could disturb the field. When sitting in the room, align yourself with earth's magnetic force as otherwise, the two will fight and will raise the noise floor of your system.
You may also want to orient your speaker backward as to be closer to the driver magnet. That will make them sound louder then because your ears will be closer. Experiment with the speakers on the side. That would make it field more parallel to the magnetic axis of your body.
I am told human body can generate a magnetic field. In that regard, when listening with others, you may want to experiment with having them lay down while you are sitting up. Again, that works on magnetic orthogonality principle which can remove the veil from your system, assuming of course that it is high enough resolution (magnetically speaking).
It will not even matter that many audiophiles may be led down your narrow view - as evidenced by the likes of their comments, they are as perfunctory as you.
How do you know that? Have you been to an audiologist and have them measure your ability to detect magnetic field? Many of the ASR members have and as a class, they are far superior to folks on other forums.
Please don't confuse this with "magnetic personality." That is a different thing. Oh wait... maybe it is one in the same!
What we are hearing from you cannot be definitively measured either, but there is a science that has identified it.
How do you know? Maybe all you need is a compass!
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"So you are saying that you learn nothing from measurements of these two speakers?"
Yeah they have different frequency response charts by your methods.
I would avoid looking at that before listening so I know I don’t have a bias.
And flat FR is sometimes boring.
Virtually useless and perhaps harmful for deciding which sounds better.
Maybe I like resonances at those fregs.
40+ years of research into this topic shows that you are highly unlikely, when you don't the identity of those speakers, to prefer one with resonances and all those frequency response errors.
Regardless, let's state that your assertion that I responded to is profoundly wrong:
And just to repeat, Amir has made me realize how little measurements actually matter.
In the hands of anyone with any familiarity with them, they are powerful tools to determine fidelity and tonality of those speakers. And clearly, absolutely clearly, show the design mistakes in one of them.
The right response from you would have been that you were talking about electronics and not speakers and headphones. But you are deciding to double down with "I may this" or "I may that." W
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@nonoise
Imagine if this were a watch forum and someone went to extreme lengths showing you how your brand of watch is way overpriced for what it does and that a cheaper one is much more accurate and he had the graphs to prove it!
You have the start of a great analogy. Sadly you got the middle and ending quite wrong.
Do imagine that this is the watch market except that all that anyone cares about is accuracy of time keeping. Manufacturers learn this and claim that their watches are more accurate than any other watch. Except, unlike the real watch market, they provide no measure of that accuracy.
Imagine further that companies realize that since no proof is needed, any all things can be sold under the guise of better accuracy. Companies come to market selling aftermarket watchbands that they say improves fidelity. Ergo, they can charge more for some of these bands than you can buy entire watches.
This goes on for a while until a retired engineer, technologies and manager from said watch market says to people on his watch forum that he has highly instrumentation to measure such accuracy. He starts to measure a few watches he has bought and shows how some of very accurate while the others are not even though they cost more money.
He publishes that result and next thing you know, watch owners want to know where their watches land. So they start to send him their watches -- some cheap and some very expensive and he tests and publishes them. Soon it becomes obvious that how much you paid for something does NOT at all predict how accurate said watch is. And that the claims made by companies can trivially be shown to be wrong.
Watch owners love the clarity the above testing brings to market and increasingly support that activity by visiting the site, sending more product, and helping offset the cost of running this activity.
You would think every watch owner would be in favor of this. But no, prior to this development, folks were looking at a watch and without any evidence, claiming that they have found the most accurate watch. But here comes the above testing showing that to be the wrong statement.
A logical person would abandon the old ways and join the new. They would not go on another forum and make up accusations that are trivially shown to be wrong. For example, claim gets made that the engineer above doesn't even wear a watch. All he does is look at the graphs of watches. He shows that he not only has a watch, but multiple ones at all price points. No matter.
Folks start to get personal with him. They accuse him for being in this thing for money. They can't find any evidence of it but hey, if you make the accusation often enough, maybe it sticks.
In a direct one on one exchange, the very same folks don't have any facts to back their assertion of being able to tell how accurate a watch is based on just wearing said watch and measuring how long it takes for an apple to fall from the tree by counting under their breath. No amount of telling them that is not accurate enough to count to fraction of a second gets them to listen.
So here we are. We, I and literally tens of thousands of your audiophile friends try to bring more data and science/engineering to the table. You don't like that? No big deal. Just don't make contrived analogies as if that will amount to anything.
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Ah, the video where you are sitting in front of all the electronic analyzers that you used to visually real time analyze the ABX signals?
There is no such video. Stop making stuff up AJ. I have never, ever used an analyzer when taking these blind tests.
You don't even understand the nature of these tests and whether an analyzer can even help you. Take the Archimago test. That test relies on bit depth of content, not anything that you can analyzer with an audio measurement device. If you don't believe me, go ahead and show the difference using said analyzer.
Why is it that you are not complaining about @kevn? Did he or did he not pass the test of high-res vs standard not just by himself, but a few of his friends?
You are not going to answer that, are you?
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@kevn
Fifth, he is unable to tell apart music files of low and high resolution, and based on this lack of ability, determines that measurements in performance testing is all that is needed to determine what is heard, and what is not.
Hey partner, you are pretty wrong about both of those but especially the first one:
1. You have not told us about any listening tests you have passed of high-res vs CD. That NPR test has a headline about high-res audio but the test is actually CD vs 128k and 320kbps MP3. It kind of says so in the text:
"Many listeners cannot hear the difference between uncompressed audio files and MP3s, but when it comes to audio quality, the size of the file isn't (ahem) everything."
To be sure, I analyzed the javascript/html and confirmed what I just said. Here are the file names for one of the tests:
theres-a-world-wav.wav
theres-a-world-128.mp3
theres-a-world-320.mp3
Pretty clear, right?
Keep in mind that a high-res vs CD test can NOT be done in a browser. The browser uses the standard audio pipeline in the operating system which in the case of Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS, resamples all audio to a fixed sample rate/bit depth. By default this is 48 kHz. I know because my team at Microsoft wrote the audio stack. And I have done a ton of testing showing the limitation of default playback on phones.
To play high-res audio intact, you need to use a dedicated audio player and of course a device capable of producing better response than CD. Your phone running the above test in a browser is NOT capable of doing this.
So no way, no how you have run a test of high-res vs CD that you have shared with us. If there is another test, then by all means, post it so we can examine it.
2. I have most definitely pass double blind tests of high-res vs CD. Unlike you, I have the documentation to prove it. I post that earlier in the thread but you must have missed. Here it is anyway. Note that these are public challenges put forward for the public to run with the assumption that no one can.
First is Archimago (a great blogger) who created a clever test. He took a high-res file, brought its bit depth down to 16 and then converted it back to 24 bits with some countermeasures added to it. This made it impossible to tell the files by analyzing them using computer software. I passed this test:
foo_abx 1.3.4 report
foobar2000 v1.3.2
2014/08/02 13:52:46
File A: C:\Users\Amir\Music\Archimago\24-bit Audio Test (Hi-Res 24-96, FLAC, 2014)\01 - Sample A - Bozza - La Voie Triomphale.flac
File B: C:\Users\Amir\Music\Archimago\24-bit Audio Test (Hi-Res 24-96, FLAC, 2014)\02 - Sample B - Bozza - La Voie Triomphale.flac
13:52:46 : Test started.
13:54:02 : 01/01 50.0%
13:54:11 : 01/02 75.0%
13:54:57 : 02/03 50.0%
13:55:08 : 03/04 31.3%
13:55:15 : 04/05 18.8%
13:55:24 : 05/06 10.9%
13:55:32 : 06/07 6.3%
13:55:38 : 07/08 3.5%
13:55:48 : 08/09 2.0%
13:56:02 : 09/10 1.1%
13:56:08 : 10/11 0.6%
13:56:28 : 11/12 0.3%
13:56:37 : 12/13 0.2%
13:56:49 : 13/14 0.1%
13:56:58 : 14/15 0.0%
13:57:05 : Test finished.
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Total: 14/15 (0.0%)
As you see, 14 out of 15 right which is almost perfect.
Notice how I ran a lot more than the 6 trials that you ran in the MP3 test as to get probability of guessing down to 0.0%, not the usual 5%.
I not only passed this test, but I created a video on how I managed to do that. It required knowledge of signal processing of what you lose when going from 24 bit to 16 bit, and of course, training required to be able to hear such small differences. Here is the video which again, I post earlier:
https://youtu.be/0KX2yk-9ygk
In there, I show results of other difficult double blind tests I have passed -- again with appropriate documentation.
As a bonus, here is another public test created by my friend, Mark Waldrep of AIX records. The challenge was put on AVS Forum and I managed to pass it while no audiophile dared to even try:
foo_abx 1.3.4 report
foobar2000 v1.3.2
2014/07/10 21:01:16
File A: C:\Users\Amir\Music\AIX AVS Test files\Just_My_Imagination_A2.wav
File B: C:\Users\Amir\Music\AIX AVS Test files\Just_My_Imagination_B2.wav
21:01:16 : Test started.
21:02:11 : 01/01 50.0%
21:02:20 : 02/02 25.0%
21:02:28 : 03/03 12.5%
21:02:38 : 04/04 6.3%
21:02:47 : 05/05 3.1%
21:02:56 : 06/06 1.6%
21:03:06 : 07/07 0.8%
21:03:16 : 08/08 0.4%
21:03:26 : 09/09 0.2%
21:03:45 : 10/10 0.1%
21:03:54 : 11/11 0.0%
21:04:11 : 12/12 0.0%
21:04:24 : Test finished.
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Total: 12/12 (0.0%)
So please don't imply you can pass such tests and I can't. Facts speak clearly state otherwise.
In friendship - kevin.
Right back at you my friend.....
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@ossicle2brain
And just to repeat, Amir has made me realize how little measurements actually matter.
So you are saying that you learn nothing from measurements of these two speakers?
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@soundfield
Would you do a proctored one at PAF 2024? Or only doctored?
I would *love* for you to set up such a blind test for everyone who comes to your room there. Are you going to do that and publish the results at the end?
Or is it that you don't want to alienate potential buyers of your speakers so that is the last thing you would want to do?
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