Do the best audio designers put their ears before the numbers.

I guess it would depend on the goal. If the goal of building an amplifier lies along the same lines as Peter Walker where "the perfect amplifier is a straight wire with gain" then I would think measurements would be more important since we can measure way beyond anything we can hear.  

Don't know. Haven't heard them all.
I don't even know the design flow for what I have. I know that it has mostly been voiced before offered for sale.

Audio Note is a company that  measures their components to meet certain specs and then they listen. The end result comes from what the designer hears.

There's a good interview with the owner, I'll try to find it.

Not since the days of Peter Walker would any designer say they don't even bother to listen to their design, but I doubt there's even a single one today that relies entirely upon their own hearing. 

Listening is usually only mentioned as a last minute check that some horrible miscalculation hasn't occurred, eg with crossover design etc. Measurement matters, it always did previously, and even more now. 

Advances in measurement techniques and our understanding of how to best apply them will eventually render listening whilst designing altogether superfluous, if it already hasn't done so.
Time is money and the days of designing exclusively by ear have long gone.

Products with serious anomalies will be ruthlessly exposed in today's market. No sane designer will risk that. Even Rega, reluctant as ever to publish data, have had to weather a few storms regarding turntable speed issues. 

Gradually there should be an increasing amount of homogeneity between different designs and products as measurements such as drive unit dispersion increasingly begin to coincide.

Hopefully one day similar loudspeakers will be used to make recordings all over world, thereby ensuring a degree of consistency as the BBC attempted with their designs. Until then some inconsistencies will unfortunately remain.

Audio design has always been a science and not an interpretive art form. The designer's primary task is to build a product which faithfully reproduces the signal fed to it all the way from the microphone to the finished audio file/pressing.

The decision to apply selective EQ/gain is usually up to the listener and not the designer.

In fact the only current exception I can think of is Russell Kaufman who also believes loudspeaker damping causes more harm than good. Apparently, although Kaufman still puts his listening impressions first he also relies upon hours and hours of measurement. 

'At Russell K, we’ve conducted thousands of hours of research into the effect that different crossover types have on the sound from 6db (gentle roll off) to 24db (very steep roll off). We’ve discovered that it’s the combination of drive units mechanical roll off and the crossover working in harmony that produces the best sound.'

http://www.russellk.co.uk/the_concept.php

there is a Nelson Pass interview on youtube, maybe with Steve Guttenberg, where he talks about the combination of measurements and listening...

Listening is usually only mentioned as a last minute check that some horrible miscalculation hasn’t occurred, eg with crossover design etc. Measurement matters, it always did previously, and even more now.

Unless I’m mis-understanding your context..:

No, no no, and no.
Measurement performed in the design and example stages, and in the pre production stages and in the production stages.

But the ear rules the roost. If it sounds bad it is re-assessed via the given electronic tools and so on.

The ear is king for the vast number of high end audio designers. I can’t even imagine the company that is an exception, but I’ll leave room for it.

It cannot be any other way. It would be unbelievably foolish and detrimental to the given audio company to try it any other way.

The ear is ’the decider’.

Ok, re reading your post, I think we are closer to being in a agreement than being apart from it. Listening is not less valuable than measurement. It’s like two identical but differently placed seals and ports on a pressure vessel. One is not more important or less important than the other. One cannot generally rule over the other. More like tasks and aspects that have to, or more should be in agreement - in order to move forward.

But it is possible to have a measurement fail, via the idea of the engineering mind, but still have a sound quality pass or exultation, and have the design move forward to the sales point.

The reason for this.. is we don’t know exactly how the ear works and thus we don’t know how to place what the ear hears across the engineering measurements as a form of comparison and weighting of each in the comparison.

Which is why a hearing positive can cause a product to go forward, even when there is still the idea of a engineering negative on the table. The reality being that we exist within... or shape we operate under or in.. where that comparative and weighting thing between measurement and hearing ----is still not a reality.

And the sensible part, is going for the listening and hearing being the final arbiter, if those considerations about what is heard, is deemed to be strong enough and the engineering 'imperfections' are not severe enough to warrant overriding that hearing based decision. 

Where each scenario is different so it requires human rumination on the entire package, done by individuals, whom are all different.

It is possible to have cable designers rely entirely upon their hearing as we still don’t know the fundamental of how measurement applies to hearing, especially with the minutia that appear to rule the comparative equation.

It’s the same problem that the electronics design end of the audio design pool has, but amplified to the extreme, as problems go.

which is why the linear measurement based mind has such problems with it. (cables and similars)

where that linear mind may additionally suffer from a lesser hearing capacity than some, and literally not even understand that the problem exists.

Like a psychological and hearing based blacked out glass ceiling that they can’t even realize existing within their own self. A problem they don’t realize exists, and they can’t relate.. and then they start screaming about unicorn pee, snake oil, and charlatans.

Where all they do at that point is advertise their inabilities to those who do not suffer said inabilities.

Ear-q, like intelligence or IQ, is a very very real thing. Eg, does anyone here, for even a second, think that all people possess the same hearing? that they hear the same way?

That all other aspects of humanity are all different and are variants, and individual, yet, somehow, hearing is an exception? So it cannot play into the situation?

How incredibly dense a thought/position that would be. Like, wow. Breathtaking in it’s ignorance. Staggering.

Those who don’t possess it and are arguing on forms, appear, to the overall talented, as a one legged one note dog. Not hated unless they persist in biting, but they are forgiven.



It’s an act of humanity to allow it to persist, along with the inability to get the message through to those who do not possess the language or the skill to understand given the existence of the problem itself.

@jl35

’there is a Nelson Pass interview on youtube, maybe with Steve Guttenberg, where he talks about the combination of measurements and listening...’


Yes, but I think everyone says that. They understand that the consumers want the assurance that the product has been listened to, at least once. What they don’t say is that they trust their ears more.



@teo_audio

’The ear is king for the vast number of high end audio designers.’

I seriously doubt that. How many of them can still hear flat up til 16kHz? I doubt whether I can.

How many of them can identify cables, amplifiers, digital sources etc whilst simply blindfolded, nevermind abx controlled?

You know the answer to that as well as I do, none. Not a single one of them.

You also know that testing equipment can. Every time. Obviously.

Would you like to test yourself against something like the Klippel analyser system?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.teufelaudio.com/the-klippel-analyser-system/amp/


It’s also worth bearing in mind when Edison conducted his live versus recorded tone tests a century ago the sighted audience could not tell the difference between a vocalist and a shellac recording!

https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2015/05/is-it-live-or-is-it-edison/


’The reason for this.. is we don’t know exactly how the ear works and thus we don’t know how to place what the ear hears across the engineering measurements as a form of comparison and weighting of each in the comparison.’

Or if everyone hears the same. No, we don’t, but that’s just another good reason to carefully examine all the data, isn’t it?

The goal is to create accuracy of playback. How it’s later interpreted is beyond the control of the designer and isn’t the issue here.


As far as I can see the only excuse for not replying upon the technology available is if you don’t have access to it.

Thankfully the software is gradually becoming more readily available and sometimes alternatives can be found.

The sheer cost of an anechoic chamber prohibits access and means many designers will test and measure their loudspeakers suspended outdoors.

It’s an act of humanity to present the consumer with the best chance to experience whatever was on the recording. The rest (setup, room, hearing etc) is under the control of the listener.

You’d want to, at the least, give them a fair chance, wouldn’t you?

Subjectively speaking, most of our hearing can’t be measured in a way that tells us how something will sound. So if we can’t measure our hearing to correlate with the numbers ( measurements) used by manufacturer’s of audio components, why are they so important? Assuming I’m right?

Actually we know quite a lot about how human hearing works, but a lot of it has only be discerned in the last 40 years or so. The spec sheets are based on tradition and are taking a while to catch up.

So if the designer is aware of research into human hearing perceptual rules its not that hard to take those rules into consideration when working on a specific circuit- and it is possible that such a circuit might not measure all that well (which usually means that harmonic distortion might be fairly high) based on what is considered 'good' by tradition.


Here is an example- the ear is relatively insensitive to lower ordered harmonic distortion (2nd, 3rd and 4th) but is keenly sensitive to the higher ordered harmonics. So if an amplifier has fairly high 2nd harmonic, but is very low in the higher orders, it will sound smooth and easy going to the human ear. If the amp is low in the lower orders, and also low in the higher orders such that it might have only 0.01% of THD, its very likely that it will sound harsh, as that is the property that the ear assigns to higher ordered harmonics. You really have to get those harmonics much lower in order for them to be considered 'inaudible'- 0.001 **might** be acceptable if 'bright' and 'harsh' are the subjective experience that you are trying to avoid.  But it seems that you have to be even lower than that.

Now there is an old saw that if you have high THD you will also have high IMD (intermodulation distortion) and that is often true, but not always! The ear is sensitive to IMD and it is arguable that if getting low distortion is a goal, that keeping IMD down is really where you want to concentrate your efforts.


So this is sort of the tip of the iceberg about why I feel that the quote above is a false assumption.

High-fidelity is a concept born with electronical, tubes and solid state design long ago...

Audiophile acoustic was born with the Greek theaters... :)


These 2 concepts are linked, they must be distinguished but not separated in modern audio...

If i was an amplifier designer or dac designer, i will use sound and electronics measures technics first... I will listen at night at the end my own design to have a feed back tough.... :)

If i was an audiophile i will trust my ears over numbers....Because embeddings mechanically, electrically and acoustically an audio system does work with the 2 ears that will be living in the house....Not with an A.I. (for the moment tough).


If i was an audio seller, producer, designer, etc i will read numbers and i will listen with my ears de-waxed....

Sometimes people argue and look hard for some angles where their arguments can go on and on like the roots of a tree or the canopy system........

I cannot throw any stones tough, liking arguments myself....

But at the root this is simple.... I think..... :)

« The roots are not more simpler than the canopy.» - Groucho Marx