You see the power of measurements to quantify audible issues? You see how the theory you read in that one paper does not at all related to any of this? You see how you should challenge the one designer to produce proper measurements of his amplifier and controlled listening tests showing some benefit in his design approach?
I have read the papers you keep quoting. I will say once again, they have no bearing whatsoever on the topic we are discussion. Go ahead and quote where Oppenheim and Magnasco say anything about audio measurements being obsoleted by that experiment. You won’t find it.
You dont understand what i spoke about relating theory of hearing with the elemental elements linked to Acoustic historical analysis in the frequency domain...( frequencies, amplitude, phase, duration... These primitive of sound measured in the linear and time independant context of the Fourier paradigm CANNOT define what musicality is in life and in gear design... because human hearings hyperacuity live and move in an ecological real environment not in a laboratory...
tHe most important factor you did not understand at all is the time dependant nature of hearing... The way we recognize TIMBRE by his attack first and his decay and not only the spectral envelope but the time envelope, this recognition is a real WHOLE irreductible information which RECOGNIZED by the human ears cannot be reduced to primitive as frequencies, amplitude, phase, duration... Why ? because the ears recognize the soud source vibrating as an information wholeness a QUALITY which say something about the sounding sources , a drum, a speech part, a flowing river or a bird... All this event cannot be recognized by analysis and reduction to , frequencies, phase, duration amplitude etc...
It is why the musical qualities related to a musical instrument or to a recorded sound are whole without separated parts, QUALITIES...
I never doubt your good faith...
Then i will remind you that if always thank you MULTIPLE TIMES for your FALSIFICATION of mass market product gear, it is because the set of measures you used made this VERIFICATION and make possible to begin with some predictions about the excellence or not of the basic design... I never contested that... Then you cannot put in my mouth a falsehood : i never say that your measures set is meaningless ... IS IT CLEAR ?
The only thing i criticized is this extension of your set of measures to the level where supposedly ALL MUSICAL QUALITATIVE CHARACTERISTIC of the audio system and his design , and not only of separate component would be all there is to do to and to know to create OPTIMAL high end DESIGN...Some zealots around you use this modest fact, the analysing of mass market product by the numbers, to bash all Audiophiles listening...
Now i will explain my point about hearing theories , accordingly to Magnasco and Oppenheim and the opinion of Van Maanen about NEW MORE MUSICAL AMPLIFIER OR SPEAKER DESIGN... or how to apply Magnasco And Oppenheim experiments which is only confirmation of facts well known by others scientists already as you know...
first a liitle bit of history about J. J. Gibson ECOLOGICAL theory of visual perception : "Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing." ..
Before Gibson the visual creation of images was imagined more as an algorythmic computing way ( which computing is not excluded by Gibson ) not as the way the seeing DYNAMICALLY MOVING body insert himself in his environment , where what is there around him , THE AFFORDANCES , determine, conditione, constraint, limit and motivate his possible behaviour ... my quotes are from Wiki because the resume is useful for me:
"The question driving Gibson’s research on perception was "how do we see the world as we do?". This instigated his empirical research, the environment, and how the individual experiences said environment.[10] There were two primary ways in which James J. Gibson reformed the way psychology views perception. The first is that the templates of our stimulation are affected by a moving organism. This was shown through his research on optic arrays. Secondly, he formulated the idea of three-dimensional space being conceptual. To Gibson, perception is a compilation of the person’s environment and how the person interacts with it.
Much of Gibson’s work on perception derives from his time spent in the U.S. Army Air Force. Here, he delved into thoughts on how imperative perception is on daily functions.[10] His work may be the first to show a distinct difference between types of perception. Form perception, on one hand, is a display of two static displays, whereas object perception, involves one of the displays to be in motion.... His basic work rejected the perspective that perception in and of itself is meaningless, he instead argued meaning is independent of the perceiver. He claimed that the environment decides perception, and that meaning is in what the environment "affords" the observer...
In his later work (such as, for example, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)), Gibson became more philosophical and criticised cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before. Gibson argued strongly in favour of direct perception and direct realism (as pioneered by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid), as opposed to cognitivist indirect realism. He termed his new approach ecological psychology. He also rejected the information processing view of cognition. Gibson is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in psychology, particularly those considered to be post-cognitivist.[11] One of the most important statements in this book is that Gibson maintains that the optical information of an image is not an impression of form and color, but rather of invariants. A fixated form of an object only specifies certain invariants of the object, not its solid form...
i think you have enough about Gibson to have a GIST of his approach...
now think about what Magnasco And Oppenheim has said :
""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).
My point for an ecological theory of hearing based on NON linear structure of the ears/brain and the TIME DEPENDANT domain where the hearing body MOVES...my point is this one :
" Studies of audition have been constrainted by sensation based theory of perception and the supposed PRIMITIVES of sound they suggest.physical description of sounds are those suggested by the Fourier transform : frequencies, amplitude, phase duration.. Traditional explanations from psycho-physics takes these primitives physical dimensions as their primitive elemental stimulis and used them to motivated the identification of elemental sensations.From this perspective more complex perceptions must depend on the integration of elemental sensations, but often sensations seems inadequate to simulate complex events ( whole qualitative perceived recognized event ) Thus traditional approaches argue that there is often a paucity of information in available stimulis and then that veridical perception must depend on REPRESENTATIONs of the world based largely on memory, unconscious inference or problem solving ( Fourier computations etc ) ... »
Then as described Manasco and Oppenheim and many acousticians before them Hearing theory cannot be based on the frequency domain inspired by Fourier Linear method where
because the ears brain non linearly insert the moving hearing body in his time dependant domain where the WHOLE sound event, with all his perceived qualities not the separated abstracted parts, (his amplitude, his frequencies , his phase and his duration) are the REAL INVARIANTS... Then in natural sounds environment, with speech and musical sounds, the Sound sources in vibration are related to the hearing by sensible holistic invariants very different than those in the Fourier time indepedant and linear domain... These holistic invariants are qualities of the vibrating soud sources, another individuals or a drum or a flowing river etc... these holistic invariants expressing qualities are in the time dependant domain of the ears perceptive way ...
How this apply to amplifier design ?
This is explained in Van Maanen articles i will not repeat here... Suffice to say that the human hearing must not be conditioned by the way we measure linear design of circuits, but we must use these circuits by improving them to approximate by more sophisticated design in the time dependant domain , by feedback control and by using distortion levels control in the harmonic scale to please the human ears .... The design must serve the listening ears... Not the reverse, the design must not be considered "perfect" on the basis only of his numbers... Van Maanen here explaint it all ...But i cannot resume all his articles...
Now you know why if your set of measures is welcome and helpful , your claims that we are able to predict with these set of measures AS IT IS NOW IN YOUR TOOL BOX all there is to say about gear "musicality" qualities , it is WRONG... ( your tools are linear tool in the time independant domain, and remember that if you go in the time domain in your analysis , you go there LINEARLY as Fourier theory make it possible, not as the ears goes non linearly in his OWN time dependant domain )