Did Amir change my mind? Maybe not Amir on his own, but ASR as a resource. I learned more about what was important for speakers, positioning, and acoustic treatment than I learned from all other sources combined. Not just some useful or useless rules of thumbs or calculators, but the how and the why. It is nice for once not to hope, guess, and randomly achieve success but to work towards it.
Reading through the many pages here, I lost interest at about 8, I also have learned a lot about audiophiles. I did not like what I learned.
I even went down a rabbit hole scientific paper after reading a tremendous claim.
"«Claims that differences in upstream components
(e.g., source or amplifier) can be heard even when the
system is bottle-necked by a mediocre downstream
component (e.g., speaker) shouldn’t seem surprising—
given that the NEP ( neurals excitation pattern) can resolve 1 part in 10 at the 40 power » Millind N. Kunchur"
This sounded very impressive. 10^40. An incredible amount of resolving power. Then it clicked in my brain and I related it to something I know well, images, and sight. Using the same reasoning as the author of that paper, the eye has 6,000,000 photo sites, connected to nerves, and each is able to easily resolve 256 levels. Using the authors own reasoning, the eye can then resolve not just 1 part in 10 at the 40th power, but 1 part in 256, to the 6 millions power. 10^40 compared to 256^6000000. Remarkable! "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".
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I want to publicly thank @mahgister for serving as the defacto and perhaps accidental Audiogon gatekeeper.
As a new user, I was looking for a mute or block button to eliminate what I cannot interpret as anything but spam, with the same thing repeated over and over, that 5-10 minutes of Google would inform is much ado about nothing: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,99371.0.html If I can quickly figure out a few repeated points are much ado about nothing, I consider pages and pages of it spam. I regret now falling down the rabbit hole when I just wanted to buy some stuff.
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@amir_asr ,
The LRS was both measured by me and by Workwyn for AudioExpress with the same results. Speaker beams heavily creating a very narrow listing spot. In addition, it has little to no bass. These are facts enforced by physics of speaker design and there is nothing you can do about it:
Did you post the correct graph? I went and looked at the review. This is the vertical directivity graph. I think it should be narrow because it is a line speaker. This would be a feature not a fault. On your website, the horizontal directivity seems wide, but I may be reading it wrong.
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@mahgister . Is there value in repeating the same arguments with just different wording? I posted a link that addresses this fourier limit that you raised. I am on holidays and it is too hot to be outside, so the rabbit hole was a good chance to cool off. The people in that link obviously know this topic very well. It turns out this was not an earth shattering discovery but something that was already known. This is not the forum for a long dissertation on sampling theory and fourier analysis, and I am probably too rusty for it, but some obvious flaws in your though process are evident, even one as simple as a song, recorded in digital has an analog filter to limit bandwidth and a window function to ensure it conforms to the requirement of Nyquist not unlike I am 100’s of other applications where similar processing is used and everything works just fine.
Appreciate you are trying to discover flaws in measurements, but a humble approach says that very smart people came up with these processes and they are unlikely to have missed, for many decades, obvious issues. If there is any consensus on higher bandwidth being audible? I can’t find it. Maybe I am wrong, but that seems to put a truck sized hole in an argument about "missed transients".
We can simplify it. It does not require a full dissertation that is above the heads of everyone here nor does it require a PhD. While down the rabbit hole, I discovered these experiments were done with basic audio DACs. Not only that, but I found someone did a similar experiment (fourier limit) and used MP3 files. If you can do the experiment with MP3 files, I think any claim you are trying to make is wrong.
I am climbing out of the rabbit hole, but I think this horse has been beat enough. It is dead and beyond reviving.
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@mahgister ,
You exude much hostility when being challenged. I will take my leave of you now and return to my previous belief of spam.
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@hayas,
I am perhaps not surprised, but also disappointed in the animosity towards audio science review. As I stated earlier in this thread, I learned more there than every other site combined. There are blowhards there like everywhere else, and I got the odd abuse for asking a question some thought was dumb, but I took my lumps, pushed back as appropriate and moved on. Many were helpful even putting what I could tell was significant time into their replies. I had picked up a lot of bad audio habits over the years (decades), and i was fully loaded with all kinds of information but no way to put it all together into something useful. Whether from dealers, audio sites, etc. any time I had asked for recommendation or ideas, I was always inundated with what, but rarely why. Like a kid in a candy shop, perhaps my fault I did not asked enough why questions, I bought all kinds of stuff based on recommendations and professional reviews. Frankly, I was mainly wasting my money. I didn't get a lot of what recommendations at ASR, other than this is probably good enough, but I got a lot of why discussions and why questions and why explanations. I had to sort through the chafe as the aforementioned blowhards like to be heard, but there were enough people who really knew their subject.
Perhaps the best case in point would be speaker setup. I could point to 3 or 4 guides on how to set up speakers in a room. I am sure they all have some correct aspects. I am also sure that they are all fundamentally wrong enough or too simple to result in anything but barely acceptable results. Not one of them beyond some rough discussion of bass response explains much about why, and if you don't know why, then how do you adapt?
I think I have posted enough on this subject, people will think what they want to think, but I will repeat something someone else said earlier. I think the attitudes demonstrated are hiding a lot insecurity. I was probably there at one point. Takes a big person to admit they were wrong.
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@daveyf, of course I listen. I guess I gave the impression I did not. I listened at stores, I listened to what other people said, I even did in home trials. Funny thing the brain though, it often tells you what you want to hear, and I think in a strange joke of mother nature on audiophiles, the harder you listen, the more your brain tells you what you want to hear. Looking back on my journey, I think I convinced myself of a lot of stuff that was not true. That is why I was always looking for the next upgrade. I was not doing a lot of anything though I thought I was.
No one can tell you whether/how your system, room and/or ears will respond to some new addition. There are simply too many variables.
When I thought I knew everything but really knew nothing, this is what I believed too. Now that I have a good foundation of how things work, including the metaphorical me, and by me I mean our hearing, I have a pretty good idea, if I can get enough information, to know how the system (including all the pieces) will respond and what that means for the sound I will hear. I no longer feel I am on the merry-go-round, lots of movement but always ending up in the same place. Now I am walking a line to where I want to go. It is not always straight, but I keep moving forward, not in a circle.
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It is incredible that almost nobody from ASR can read the articles i put and understand them...Why ? Because the idea that qualities perceived by human hearings can help designing better audio will destruct the techno babble ideology of reducing any sound qualities perceived by a trained ears to some imagined ghosts...
I don't claim to be from anywhere, but I can tell you lump me in as I showed that two of your claims were flawed. Sometimes we are the only people that are right. Sometimes we are the one that is wrong. If you assume you are the former, then you will always be the latter.
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@mahgister ,
I will be honest with you. I find your attitude appalling. Your anger because Amir (and others) refuse to bend to your way of thinking, that you are not presenting in a coherent manner, is off-putting and if there was a mute button I would have long ago used it. You are not trying to communicate or discuss, you are trying to impose.
So our hearing has non-linear processing. So what. No one appears to dispute that. It appears to be quite common where our senses are concerned. Seems pretty common in industry too.
You are screaming at Amir, but I have you provided a concrete example of how what he is doing is wrong or will lead to improper conclusions? Not screaming at him this is wrong, but exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and very important, how wrong he is. Is he off by 5%? 10? 75%? You are very confident what he is doing is wrong, so you should be able to confidently tell him, how inaccurate the work he is doing is. To put it colloquially, put your money where your mouth is.
I went back and read those papers and some of the links I searched. Do you know what frequencies they were measuring and what times they were using? I assumed based on your dissertation that the times would be very small, and the frequencies high. The frequencies were small, 100's of Hz, and the times were large, many milliseconds. I don't know all the math, but if we are testing to 20KHz, I don't think timing of milliseconds is going to be an issue even if there are small technical problems.
I said I was done with this and I should be, but you are determined to dominate this thread.
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Posting the same things over and over ad-nauseum is not facts. Answering my question about what Amir's tests do that is wrong, why it is wrong, and very important how wrong it is would be a fact. My comment about the testing bandwidth used for audio and the testing frequencies and times for the hearing test has factual underpinning.
That human hearing must respond to a threat quickly but audio tests equipment can take it's jolly old time doing analysis is also a fact.
I guessed that Radar probably uses non-linear processing. Look at that it does.
Here is a simple question for you @mahgister . Answer it in a paragraph. If all the tests that Amir does measure how accurately a signal passes through a system using a defined metric, and he uses the same metric for all equipment, and that metric provides an accurate, repeatable, and valid data point about the integrity of the signal, and Amir is only using that metric as a relative comparison while at times relating it roughly to experimentally established limits of hearing using the same metric, how is that wrong?
Here is another question for you. Armed with your knowledge of how human hearing using non linear processing (experiment done at low frequency), exactly what is wrong with the stereo equipment that is being developing and importantly how wrong is it?
It's all just a bunch of words unless you can concisely state what is wrong with the stereo equipment being developed and how Amir's tests do not catch these perceived errors.
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@mapman ,
For the truth to lie in the middle they would need to be answering the same question 😀. Quite obviously they are not.
One of my profs once said , "The problem with philosophers is they are enamoured with thinking but have no interest in knowing.'. He went on to discuss how many philosophers love to discuss a problem philosophically but don't like to be encumbered by the often very real and very hard facts and limits associated with the problem.
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You are wise, @mapman ,
I can only speak for myself but the problem at hand for most here on this thread I think is how to best choose what to buy. Measurements are very useful for that. Explaining why human hearing is so complex is totally useless towards that end. It is useful to understand how human hearing works to help better understand why we hear what we do. But these are two totally different use cases.
I used to believe a lot of things that I now accept are not true. I used to think I knew a lot of things that I really did not, especially how we hear. That was an eye opener, and helped a lot with my first problem. The final piece in the puzzle was much harder to put in place because both ASR and the people that use it, and sites like Audiogon and the people that use it are both somewhat wrong at least in my opinion for putting that last piece of the puzzle in. Both ASR and Audiogon users think they are trying to extract every last bit of musical information they can get from a recording, and here is the important point, and nothing else. ASR users approach this very literally and analytically. Audiogon user's think they are doing the same, but are often adding things that were not on the recording, but have convinced themselves they are getting more of the information out.
That last piece of the puzzle was accepting that enjoyable sound from speakers is not just about hearing what is on the recording, but using your system to create a simulation of what a live event may have sounded like. Not did sound like, but may have sounded like. Amir often says, look, these two things sound exactly the same. I accept those conclusions. Amir often says this level of distortion is unacceptable. If you are only trying to extract exactly what information is on the recording, he is correct. If you are trying to simulate a live environment which I think many audiophiles are doing without realizing it or accepting how they are doing it, then I don't think this conclusion is correct.
It is my understanding, albeit limited, that because much of today's pop music is mixed for headphones, that this totally screws up this paradigm.
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More petty egomania BS. JA needs a NFS as much as Kevin Voecks did when he designed your Salon 2s.
Would that be because Kevin had access to world class anechoic chambers?
Three-dimensional modeling, 4-pi anechoic chambers, and laser inteferometry were but a few of the industrial marvels revealed in early March to a group of Stereophile and Stereophile Guide to Home Theater scribes. ... Stereophile in 2000
@yodogyodog , "All of you who are hating, it is clear he is doing something right if you guys are hating."
Agreed. Rather ugly isn't it.
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