I’ve briefly taken a look at some online reviews for budget Tekton speakers from ASR and Youtube. Both are based on Klippel quasi-anechoic measurements to achieve "in-room" simulations.
As an amateur speaker designer, and lover of graphs and data I have some thoughts. I mostly hope this helps the entire A’gon community get a little more perspective into how a speaker builder would think about the data.
Of course, I’ve only skimmed the data I’ve seen, I’m no expert, and have no eyes or ears on actual Tekton speakers. Please take this as purely an academic exercise based on limited and incomplete knowledge.
The standard practice for analyzing speakers is called "quasi-anechoic." That is, we pretend to do so in a room free of reflections or boundaries. You do this with very close measurements (within 1/2") of the components, blended together. There are a couple of ways this can be incomplete though.
a - Midwoofers measure much worse this way than in a truly anechoic room. The 7" Scanspeak Revelators are good examples of this. The close mic response is deceptively bad but the 1m in-room measurements smooth out a lot of problems. If you took the close-mic measurements (as seen in the spec sheet) as correct you’d make the wrong crossover.
b - Baffle step - As popularized and researched by the late, great Jeff Bagby, the effects of the baffle on the output need to be included in any whole speaker/room simulation, which of course also means the speaker should have this built in when it is not a near-wall speaker. I don’t know enough about the Klippel simulation, but if this is not included you’ll get a bass-lite expereinced compared to real life. The effects of baffle compensation is to have more bass, but an overall lower sensitivity rating.
For both of those reasons, an actual in-room measurement is critical to assessing actual speaker behavior. We may not all have the same room, but this is a great way to see the actual mid-woofer response as well as the effects of any baffle step compensation.
Looking at the quasi anechoic measurements done by ASR and Erin it _seems_ that these speakers are not compensated, which may be OK if close-wall placement is expected.
In either event, you really want to see the actual in-room response, not just the simulated response before passing judgement. If I had to critique based strictly on the measurements and simulations, I’d 100% wonder if a better design wouldn’t be to trade sensitivity for more bass, and the in-room response would tell me that.
3. Crossover point and dispersion
One of the most important choices a speaker designer has is picking the -3 or -6 dB point for the high and low pass filters. A lot of things have to be balanced and traded off, including cost of crossover parts.
Both of the reviews, above, seem to imply a crossover point that is too high for a smooth transition from the woofer to the tweeters. No speaker can avoid rolling off the treble as you go off-axis, but the best at this do so very evenly. This gives the best off-axis performance and offers up great imaging and wide sweet spots. You’d think this was a budget speaker problem, but it is not. Look at reviews for B&W’s D series speakers, and many Focal models as examples of expensive, well received speakers that don’t excel at this.
Speakers which DO typically excel here include Revel and Magico. This is by no means a story that you should buy Revel because B&W sucks, at all. Buy what you like. I’m just pointing out that this limited dispersion problem is not at all unique to Tekton. And in fact many other Tekton speakers don’t suffer this particular set of challenges.
In the case of the M-Lore, the tweeter has really amazingly good dynamic range. If I was the designer I’d definitely want to ask if I could lower the crossover 1 kHz, which would give up a little power handling but improve the off-axis response. One big reason not to is crossover costs. I may have to add more parts to flatten the tweeter response well enough to extend it's useful range. In other words, a higher crossover point may hide tweeter deficiencies. Again, Tekton is NOT alone if they did this calculus.
I’ve probably made a lot of omissions here, but I hope this helps readers think about speaker performance and costs in a more complete manner. The listening tests always matter more than the measurements, so finding reviewers with trustworthy ears is really more important than taste-makers who let the tools, which may not be properly used, judge the experience.
Also, what's with all the piling on Tekton. The guy has built a business in a very difficult market, from nothing. Businesses like his hang by a thread. He has a right to feel insecure. And responsible reviewers should be sensitive to that. I did not see the blog. But the Internet has some people thinking that they can empower themselves with negativity at the expense of the people who are taking real chances. They deserve to feel the heat of litigation. Tekton makes a budget product with specific goals that cannot be judged by a Klipel. I want them and every company like them to thrive. Because is gives us all more options in whatever direction we want to grow.
Amir actually believes that all things coming out of your stereo can be measured and even subtle differences will show up in testing. So I am done with this guy and ASR. What he does has merit but only goes so far. To me he represents a radical stance whose basic premise taints everything that follows.
And about Amir, i must add that to evaluate really a piece of gear we must do it also by listening for sure but listening in the same acoustic under control conditions and with the same other pieces of gear we already know for a long time because precisely "Golden ears" dont exist save as an insult by ignorant ..
If not evaluated in perfectly well known acoustic conditions, how do you for the first time evaluate a piece of gear in unknown acoustic environment resulting from other pieces of gear you do know know much either ?... The music/sound must be evaluated with a dedicated acoustic room, a system we know and a music we know...
Amir actually believes that all things coming out of your stereo can be measured and even subtle differences will show up in testing.
Why wouldn't that be the case?
Remember why we usually create tools, especially measuring tools? Because of the limitations of our own senses! That's why we build telescopes to see things we can't with our naked eye, microscopes because our vision is limited in acuity, and we have all manner of instruments that can detect differences we ourselves can not. That goes for measuring audio gear with devices that can detect "subtle changes" in the signal that our ears can not detect. And we know enough about human hearing to look at measurements of amps, or speakers, and note which ACTUAL sonic phenomenon our ears are sensitive to or not.
All this suggests that of course measurements are a good tool for detecting "subtle differences."
So I am done with this guy and ASR. What he does has merit but only goes so far. To me he represents a radical stance whose basic premise taints everything that follows.
How about the "radical stance" that you can hear things our most sensitive instruments can not?
And that no matter how any test fails to demonstrate your claim, we are supposed to just accept that "If You Think You Hear It, It's True" which is a radical rejection of what we know scientifically.
Amir actually believes that all things coming out of your stereo can be measured and even subtle differences will show up in testing.
Why wouldn’t that be the case?
Remember why we usually create tools, especially measuring tools? Because of the limitations of our own senses! That’s why we build telescopes to see things we can’t with our naked eye, microscopes because our vision is limited in acuity, and we have all manner of instruments that can detect differences we ourselves can not. That goes for measuring audio gear with devices that can detect "subtle changes" in the signal that our ears can not detect. And we know enough about human hearing to look at measurements of amps, or speakers, and note which ACTUAL sonic phenomenon our ears are sensitive to or not.
All this suggests that of course measurements are a good tool for detecting "subtle differences."
You are so wrong here ... ( i dont deny the informative value of measurements here but the ideology and ignorance that is implied by what you claimed dogmatically)
But i had already a discussion for 7 days here with Amir and he did not understood anything...😁 And i used physicists and acoustician articles...
In a nutshell hearing theories actually pointed toward ecological theory of perception...
Why ?
Because bits are not meanings for a consciousness... And perceived sound experience is not identical with a Fourier map in the Fourier linear time domain.. The ears/brain create his own meanings in his own non linear time domain...
Read about acoustics and replace your electrical techno-cultism tool fetichism with real science ...
There is actually a revolution in acoustics science ..
Go to the thread of Bolong "sound is a mystic experience " where i posted in the last few pages all articles describing this acoustic revolution and his meanings ...
😊
No one commented anything there save two idiots trolling me ...
Am i the only one interested by real science ?
Most confuse tools user manual with science ...it is the actual new techno cultic religion...promoted by corporate powers over Nations... Read about Blackrock total control of money flows by the way and you will understand why Trudeau and Biden or Trump are toys in higher hands ...
Myself contrary to subjectivist or objectivist sellers of gear i invite people to read science and experiment ... 😎
By the way it is evident that it is impossible to take into account all variables parameters at play in the system/room/ears-brain-body experience of sound , they are electrical (electrical grid noise floor of the house system room etc) Mechanical (resonances vibrations) acoustical and psychoacoustical... Then to analyse the S.Q. of a piece of gear few electrical measurements are not enough at all ...
The ideological claim that a few measures of a certain types are enough is only that : a seller ideology... Amir sell something ...
It's analogous to 'sufficient statistic'. A sufficient statistic is a number, or vector, or tensor, which is adequate to perfectly describe a probability distribution. For example, the vector (mean, variance) is sufficient to perfectly describe a normal distribution, therefore, if a sample is taken from a normal distribution, only the mean and variance need to be considered.
In matters of science it's more complex, because not all aspects of reality are known. Physics is the study of what is easy - things like acceleration in response to a field of force, like gravity. Even this is so complex that, four centuries after Galileo, we are still devising new instruments to point at the stars,
But psychology is hard. So the measurements are crude and insufficient. Which is why an empiricist should listen first and devise measuring tools second, not the other way around. IMO
@prof A real world example might help. I use Bryston amps for woofers and subs, because I can’t make better for low frequency. Brystons from the early 1980’s measure almost as well as the SST3 series, 4 generations later..
But the sound !!! My new 7BSST3 momoblocks sound clearly better than the 4BSST which they replaced, and the 4BSST was no contest better than the 3B it replaced. Measurements of THD and IM simply don’t capture everything - how could they, when you can hear a clear difference between polypropylene caps and styrene caps in an RIAA circuit, or nude Vishay resistors from anything else in a gain circuit, when you use a breakout box?
We have a hobby in which subtlety plays a major role, and the measuring technology is far behind the state of the art. IMO.
You miss the point. Everything you wrote is moot unless it is the case, for any example, that we really are able to detect a sonic difference. The most reliable method of doing this is listening tests controlling for biases. And we have learned a lot about thresholds in human hearing. There are measurable levels of differences and distortions that you will not detect, just as you will not detect with your senses X-rays.
In scientific terms you are putting the cart before the horse: assuming your sighted impressions to have delivered The Truth, and then inferring from that, well if it's not showing up in measurements then it's the measurements that are inaccurate or incomplete...rather than the possibility it is your perception that is inaccurate.
@prof No, I don’t think so. Single blind tends to not lie, and I’ve done enough of those.to convince me. And, of course, THD captured everything in distortion - until IM and TIM were discovered.
Also, you might recall that observation informs hypothesis just as much as theory informs observation. It’s not heresy to question your assumptions - or your instruments.
You miss the point. Everything you wrote is moot unless it is the case, for any example, that we really are able to detect a sonic difference. The most reliable method of doing this is listening tests controlling for biases. And we have learned a lot about thresholds in human hearing. There are measurable levels of differences and distortions that you will not detect, just as you will not detect with your senses X-rays.
In scientific terms you are putting the cart before the horse: assuming your sighted impressions to have delivered The Truth, and then inferring from that, well if it’s not showing up in measurements then it’s the measurements that are inaccurate or incomplete...rather than the possibility it is your perception that is inaccurate.
You are so enthralled with your techno-cultist ideology that you dont even see my point...
Sounds are acoustics meanings not bits. ( the set of bits only CONVEY acoustics meanings from a recording room to another listening room)
The ears-brain is tuned to recognize concrete acoustics meanings..In speech and in my room listening music..
The numbers of factors implied is huge... You cannot predict with few electrical measurements what i will hear...
You then call what i will hear "illusions" forgetting that the acoustics meanings perceived vary much with the training...
You can fool someone blind about a bit of sound taken out of his usual acoustic environment and calling all human perceptions delusion if something is not measured BEFORE and AFTER...
But here it is you who put the sophism and put the cart before the horse... In acoustics we trust hearing and measure it to refine hearing aids for example. To do so we need to trust that musicians for example are able to detect really a piece of information that Fourier uncertainty principle will deem impossible to perceive...
( This trust is born not from a debunking circus of ASR but from real statistical studies to probe the limits of hearing and acousticians were astounded by our own ability)
Then instead of suspecting any individual to be deluded, acousticians discovered the opposite of your ideological watchword guru selling point about ASR ideology : namely human hearing has his own non linear way to extract meaningful acoustic information in his own time domain ... Have you even read the article above ? it is not about astrology or ASR ideology and cultist tool debunking, by the way , but about pure science ...
You are in a techno-cultist religion it seems... I prefer science... 😊
You make me smile because i remember you can have opinion about what you had never studied (astrology) ...
To resume my acoustics opinion: i am not a subjectivist because i believe in acoustic training and measurements and i am not an objectivist because accusing people of being deluded if they dont put all their faith in few electrical measures, is not my business as ASR Amir... ( i dont do business i set my room😁 )
«I am always between you brothers because science exist between fields too »-- Groucho Marx christian epistemology 🤓
@prof No, I don’t think so. Single blind tends to not lie,
I agree that properly done single blind tests CAN be informative.
and I’ve done enough of those.to convince me.
Ok. That's fine. But unless you produce results for others to analyze, you understand why one needn't take your claims on faith, right?
And, of course, THD captured everything in distortion - until IM and TIM were discovered.
Which doesn't remotely validate all the things audiophiles claim to hear...any more than the discovery that certain "traditional" medicines have some effect validates all the claims of traditional medicines. Therefore, the mere fact someone perceives something doesn't entail "this is something true that one day we'll validate scientifically."
Also, you might recall that observation informs hypothesis just as much as theory informs observation. It’s not heresy to question your assumptions - or your instruments.
Of course not. But it has to be done in a coherent, cogent manner.
If you don't acknowledge that various bias effects influence our perception, then you aren't grappling with well known scientifically validated phenomena.
But if you DO acknowledge the variable of bias, then it makes sense to account for this in your method of investigating a claim. Otherwise you are being irresponsible in your conclusions. You can't just drop the bar to let your pet beliefs or perceptions step over.
The perception of timbre is not a deluded perception of some subjective coloration or the extraction of a ratio from a pure Fourier map... It is the recognition of a physical set of invariants in the vibrating sound source or affecting it ... ( Pythagorean purely mathematical description of acoustic information as ratio is debunked by late science and the new ecological theory of acoustic)
A qualia it is was we detected...Something Galilee exclude from science 5 centuries ago because it is not easily reducible to the primary qualities..But science progress.. 😊
For the simplest example of a perceived physical invariant from the vibrating sound source : you tap a fruit to inform yourself if this vibrating source will communicate to you one of these two information by some physical invariant : is the fruit ripe or not ...
Then now suppose in an experiment where i put quartz piece on a cable...
And suppose that i put a shungite piece after on this cable in a second experiment ...
Is it possible that my Ears/brain could detect something affecting one of the vibrating sound source (the cables with or without the minerals on it ) ? 😋
As you can see i can propose one of the hundred of experiments i devised for myself ...
I can predict that the shungite will compress the sound and the quartz will not... 😊
Is it measurable? Probably but not by Amir tools...With your ears you could do it ...
Agree with everything you say in the immediately preceding post. If I wanted to write a scientific paper for publication, I would proceed differently. As it is, I am retired and interested in how my friends and I hear music, and design and fabricate accordingly. I’m willing to share, but not to go to Herculean lengths to convince. YMMV
Agreed. I've often argued that to point out the relevance of measurements and controlled listening test is NOT to entail that audiophiles are required to do any such thing in enjoying the hobby.
I also have perceptions that I just role with in my set up, which I haven't rigorously validated. For instance, I seem to perceive sonic differences in tube rolling with my CJ amp. Have I double checked this rigorously with blind testing and can I demonstrate this to someone else over the internet? Nope. But that's ok, I'll enjoy the ride anyway.
By the way "distortion" is not just a defect... ( measured in THD ) 😁
It may be a quality...
Some musician use it for expression and poetic diction too ...
Then distortion as in speech transmission index (STI) which predicts speech intelligibility based on reverberation, background noise, and signal distortion refer to many things not one . Then distortion means a lot of things...
But mainly distortion is not only and merely a negative impediment or a deformation of an electric signals it is also an acoustic phenomenon related among other factors to the reverberation time in a room ..It can be also an added musical effect....
In my experience above, the right balance between quartz and shungite on the cables increase the auditory perception of the signals as, if i may borrow a metaphor, like a more thicker and refined line in a drawing improve the visual (acoustic) meanings perception ...
Here too in my definition of distortion, which is more than just the signals/noise ratio, it is about a POSITIVE qualia, a physical invariant linked to speech detection or to musicality ...A surplus of information that cannot be always disqualified as an impediment...
I am a bit far from ASR ideology here ...😊
Science is complex, techno cultism is simplistic... It is a faith based on the idolatry of tools instead of the wholeness of the phenomenon which include the subjective perception not just as a mere impediment but also as a trustful interpreter because there is always two sides on the acoustic coin...
Because bits are not meanings for a consciousness... And perceived sound experience is not identical with a Fourier map in the Fourier linear time domain.. The ears/brain create his own meanings in his own non linear time domain...
Read about acoustics and replace your electrical techno-cultism tool fetichism with real science ...
Behind the ’apparently scientific’ facade some of these guys are posing under, it is largely a utilitarian life for these ASR types (eat, plug cables into audio precision kit, garbage in/garbage out, look at graph, go to sleep, think about Sean Olive for more street cred, etc). Don’t waste your breath trying to talk about anything that flows into the "metaphysical" realms with this utilitarian crew... 😁
Behind the ’apparently scientific’ facade some of these guys are posing under, it is largely a utilitarian life for these ASR types (eat, plug cables into audio precision kit, garbage in/garbage out, look at graph, go to sleep, think about Sean Olive for more street cred, etc). Don’t waste your breath trying to talk about anything that flows into the "metaphysical" realms with this utilitarian crew... 😁
I only spoke about science, acoustics science with them...
And they dont understand acoustics at all ...
many ASR people act as someone who sees nails everywhere because they own a hammer...
ASR sell this little set of measures as the ONLY solution to qualitative audio experience...
This techno-cultism has then anything to do about science...it is an ideology...They are not even conscious that we need an hearing theory background to define concepts...
For example what is "timbre" and what are we perceiving when we perceive a "timbre"... The subject is so complex i discovered only one book , a doctorate thesis, about this phenomenon... And i read this book and used it when i argued with another engineer here 3 or 4 years ago...
In an extraordinary set of events i just read two scientific papers few weeks ago that confirmed the ecological theory of hearing i begun to understand reading this book ... It is an acoustic revolution ...
i spoke about that in the thread "sound as a mystical experience" ...It is pure acoustics i spoke about not mystics experience even if sound has healing and spiritual effect...
I never dare to speak "metaphysics" as you said with them, if they dont understand what timbre is and the acoustics primacy in audio how will you begin to understand metaphysics ?
Prof once said to me that the astrology Kepler and Newton studied all their life is bogus matter for deluded people... I asked him what studies he has done of astrology ... he answered none... I myself bought near 100 books and studied Indian as western astrology as a hobby and i know what is meaningful and what is meaningless in astrology ...
I did the same in linguistic...I read my first linguistic book 40 years ago ( a doctorate thesis about the greatest linguist since Panini a french , Gustave Guillaume)
I did the same in mathematics... ( i studied Logic and Set theory and number theory )
As for acoustics...( i wanted to set my system/ room, it takes me 2 years full time and some narrow mind dare to claim that i need a double blind test with ABX , this is comical because when you tune a room you use simple blind test all the time, it is a tool not an ideological circus )
Now i did the same for economy... ( the root of the market idea is not from Adam Smith nor the classes concept from Marx )
Most people think for example that Capitalism and Marxism are economic theory... They are not... They are techno cultist specific way to allocate products and services in an open centralized way (Marxism) or in relation to market price and money supply control ( hidden centralization controls as with Blackrock nowadays) ... Capitalism and Marxism are ideology not economical science ... As Nazism theory of race is a techno cultist ideology not biological science.... Those who think that these 2 techno cultists ideologies are part and center of the real economy which is an ethical science are like our friend for which owning a hammer means that all is nails...
By the way i learned about the originator of the market idea , Bernard Mandeville from an Hayek conference 70 years ago where he called Mandeville genius "our master to us all" Guess why ? He knows a bit about economy with 8 Nobel prize among his disciples...
@rankaudio That is nice. Have anything CONSTRUCTIVE to say?
No. I had a very bad experience with him and his henchman in their forum. I'm amazed he hasn't been sued into oblivion by several companies. He's really an oddball and I wouldn't want to bore anyone with the story.
Well I dont think anyone is suggesting, except Amir, what you propose. The crux of this entire thing comes down to the fact that most measurements do not tell you how a device will sound. How else then could it be that an amplifier with identical specifications doesnt sound exactly like another amp that measures the same? This is where Amir is so completely wrong. We do not know how to measure the things in the audio chain which some of our ears perceive as the most vital in reproduction. Why listen to Amir in the first place? Compared to those that make and create he is, on his best day, a tourist.
I base my decisions for audio gear only by how they connect me to the music emotionally. I realize this is just flowery nonsense for tech-heads. I don’t care how a product measures as long as it connects me to the music. I envy a person who sits in a car, listening to what many may consider a substandard car stereo but is enjoying the heck out of the song. The car stereo is connecting the listener to the emotion of the music. It’s that emotional connection I want. I could care less about measurements. Let qualified engineers do that. I am NOT qualified nor do I pretend to be. Amir is just black&white on audio. He doesn't have or express any emotion to connect himself to any music. He reminds me of a robot or AI who has zero emotional connection to gear. He probably has a serious case of alexithymia.
BTW, can someone explain to me how you evaluate the sound of a product you don't even listen to?
Well, take the example of cables. Any decent cable should, used within spec, be audibly transparent.
Take claims about, say, an expensive USB cable like the Nordost Tyr, which Amir reviewed and measured. The company makes all sorts of claims about the sonic enhancements you will hear over a regular USB cable. But Amir showed in his review, with measurements, that it did not change the signal in any possibly audible way, vs a cheaper USB cable.
So...by measurements you can tell certain sonic claims are false, and also that if you replace a cheap cable with the Nordost cable, it won't have any sonic consequences. You can know it will SOUND the same...from the measurements.
I base my decisions for audio gear only by how they connect me to the music emotionally. I realize this is just flowery nonsense for tech-heads. I don’t care how a product measures as long as it connects me to the music. I envy a person who sits in a car, listening to what many may consider a substandard car stereo but is enjoying the heck out of the song. The car stereo is connecting the listener to the emotion of the music. It’s that emotional connection I want. I could care less about measurements. Let qualified engineers do that. I am NOT qualified nor do I pretend to be. Amir is just black&white on audio. He doesn’t have or express any emotion to connect himself to any music. He reminds me of a robot or AI who has zero emotional connection to gear. He probably has a serious case of alexithymia.
When you say that what matter is your own connection on an emotional level to music, an ASR member or Amir can then criticize your subjective listening experience as pure deluded subjective arbitrary sensations...
They do it regularly...
They dont understand acoustics at all ...😁
They promote a techno-cultic ideology centered around few tools for verifying a small set of specs.. Thats all... It is useful but thats all ...
Their ideology though is meaningless ...
They then will dismiss your emotional Bodily sensations as hallucinations, placebo effects, and at the end completely meaningless..
They can do this because they are stupendously ignorant about hearing theory and specifically ecological hearing theory...
If they had read philosophy of science and psychology the name J. J. Gibson will ring a bell in their head...😁
Now read this FREE article a very serious study in acoustics science demonstrating the universal meaning in the human emotional body of music...
«Our main finding was that the topographies of music-induced
bodily sensations vary according to the emotional and structural
features of music while being consistent across participants and musical exemplars from Western and East Asian cultures. We
observed close correspondence between music-induced subjective
emotions and bodily sensations, suggesting that bodily responses
might be a key pathway in the elicitation and differentiation of
music-induced emotions (27). Given the cultural consistency of
these effects, the results suggest similar embodiment of musical
emotions across distant cultures and point toward a biological
component in music- induced bodily sensations.»
«We conclude that music induces consistent bodily sensations and
emotions across the studied Western and East Asian cultures.
These subjective feelings were similarly associated with acoustic
and structural features of music in both cultures. These results
demonstrate similar embodiment of music-induced emotions in
geographically distant cultures and suggest that music-induced
emotions transcend cultural boundaries due to cross-culturally
shared emotional connotations of specific musical cues. We argue
that bodily experience, which may arise from skeletomuscular
activity and changes in the physiological state of the body, plays a critical role in the elicitation and differentiation of music-induced emotions.»
«Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet,it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent.We addressed these questions in a cross- cultural study with Western (European andNorth American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps
(BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions. Music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and cluster structures were similar for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music were consistently associated with the emotion ratings and music-induced bodily sensations across cultures. These results highlight the importance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrate consistent associations between musical features, music-induced
emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures.»
The crux of this entire thing comes down to the fact that most measurements do not tell you how a device will sound.
This is a "speak for yourself" moment ;-)
People who actually understand measurements can tell quite a bit about how a product will sound. The fact you can’t doesn’t change that.
After all, what in the world do you think audio measurements arose for in the first place? Just some utterly abstract academic project? No. Measurements and measuring equipment grew out of the need to quantify and correlate measurements to how something sounds. That’s the whole point of developing and using measurements! How else do you think audio engineering works? Guesswork? Deliverance from dreams?
How else then could it be that an amplifier with identical specifications doesnt sound exactly like another amp that measures the same?
The answer is: Your imagination.
This is what many audiophiles just seem to be utterly ignorant about: the power of bias. It isn’t just easy to imaging sonic differences that aren’t there: it’s almost guaranteed - we tend to "hear differences" when comparing things, whether they are there or not. That’s why science controls for those variables.
This is where Amir is so completely wrong. We do not know how to measure the things in the audio chain which some of our ears perceive as the most vital in reproduction.
Again, sorry for being blunt, but when you say "We" I think you mean "you." You seem unaware of the breadth and detail science has gained about our senses and perception. I work in film sound production, using synths, samples and tons of plug ins. The only reason all these are possible is because of how much we know about "what causes something to sound this or that way" and have codified it technically.
So...by measurements you can tell certain sonic claims are false, and also that if you replace a cheap cable with the Nordost cable, it won't have any sonic consequences. You can know it will SOUND the same...from the measurements.
Prof are you a sophist?
For sure we can tell by measurements that certain sonic claims MAY BE false ( not are always false as you wrote) this does not means that all audible characteristics of sounds perceived meanings are measurable by few electrical tool ...
Are you unable to read the two0 scientific article i just put here?
I had three other one to close the door behind your techno cultist electrical tool sophism put as science in replacement of acoustics ...
Are you nearsighted? You seem to have misread my post.
For sure we can tell by measurements that certain sonic claims MAY BE false ( not are always false as you wrote) this does not means that all audible characteristics of sounds perceived meanings are measurable by few electrical tool ...
I wrote about a specific cable to illustrate how measurements can speak to how something "sounds." Please read more carefully.
And sorry, beyond that I'm not too inclined to follow you down your rabbit holes. Been there, done that.
People who actually understand measurements can tell quite a bit about how a product will sound. The fact you can't doesn't change that.
You dont understand that a piece of gear with good specs does not means that this piece will worl the same coupled to other pieces of gear and in different room...
This is why claiming that we can judge completely the sound quality of a piece of gear ONLY with few electrical measures to verify his design on some aspects (not all of them ) is non sense or marketing publicity for an ideology or for a site who need badly some specific way to describe audio experience and reduce it to electrical design ...
A spec of light here :
This is where Amir is so completely wrong. We do not know how to measure the things in the audio chain which some of our ears perceive as the most vital in reproduction.
It is simple read a book about acoustics you will discover some or like me tune your own room .. 😊
Then if you do that you will discover the power of your own techno-cultism bias ...😉
This is what many audiophiles just seem to be utterly ignorant about: the power of bias.
Amir did not do anything revolutionary by measuring cables to debunk the cable myth. That has been done since the 90s. There are some things that can be done with cables with regard to capacitance and materials like silver vs copper, etc. That Amir took the time to measure is no great feat.
But if people want to decorate their stereos with beautiful cables. Then why not, if it makes them happy. I have a few fancy cables. I love the way they look. I can afford them.
I do know this. Brick and Mortar stores have become few and far between. And they are an important resource. They move the goods and keep the industry alive. They educate. And they are a source for having a chance to listen before you buy. If selling fancy cables to their well heeled clients helps keep the doors open, then bring it on.
I wrote about a specific cable to illustrate how measurements can speak to how something "sounds." Please read more carefully.
And yourself when you quoted me have you understand what i had written?
this is what i said, «For sure we can tell by measurements that certain sonic claims MAY BE false ( not are always false as you wrote) this does not means that all audible characteristics of sounds perceived meanings are measurable by few electrical tool ...» Do you get it ?
i did not contradict the usefulness of measure, i discarded your claim about their dogmatic use in all case as meaning that what is audible is always measured or measurable..
You accuse me of what you did : you misread my answer...😊
And sorry, beyond that I’m not too inclined to follow you down your rabbit holes. Been there, done that.
You are not ashamed to describe as "rabbit hole" my arguments which are grounded in many acoustics research papers and a book you had not even read ?
You think repeating mantra as biases, double blind test, measures of electrical specs of gear, etc is enough to hide your ignorance about acoustics experience ?
@botrytisI have no problem with Tekton. I wish them great success. I empathize with his complaint that a few people are making a name for themselves with petty and poorly informed reviews at the expense of a cottage industry that hangs by a thread. It's too easy to take down a company. If they are going to play that game, then they should be willing to accept the heat of the inevitable push back.
Abstract
The definition of sound in physics as vibrations in an elastic medium establishes a link between the sound source and the organism. Thus, it satisfies an essential psychophysical prerequisite for a theory of perception. However,
over the past 170 years since Ohm’s law (1843), and some 137 years since Helmholtz’s resonance theory (1877),psychoacoustic procedures founded on air vibration have shrouded music and speech in mystery. Ecological
theories have fallen short, not only of Gestalt invariance, but also of the link between the distal object and the organism. This paper approaches auditory analysis from the standpoint of sound production. It argues that
although air vibration produces sound, sound is not air vibration; and that exploitation of features of air vibration can hardly (if ever) lead to accurate understanding of the principle of the auditory mechanism in speech or music
perception. Evidence is provided in support of the definition of sound as the vibratory image of the sonorous body. It establishes isomorphism between characteristics of a sonorous body and auditory attributes of sound.
Wherefore, a body is different from the sound it produces in much the same way as steam is different from ice ─ two different forms of the same entity. The data under consideration offer succinct insights into the way the
auditory mechanism extracts from sound wave invariants for use in speech or music regardless of chaotic production and acoustic variability. Implications for future research in speech, music and all aspects of auditory analysis are discussed
Prove me you are able to read a 2 pages scientific article and answer my question : why the human hearing is able to beat the Fourier uncertainty, explain me why, and i will conclude that you are able to read a simple scientific article...
It seems the "rabbit hole" where you disapear suddenly is your techno-cultist simplistic ideology about hearing ...😊
@mahgister My friend. Why are you still arguing with people who clearly don't want to share your opinions? I'm sure you've jeard that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Do yourself a favor and let it go. Listen to some music. Cheers.
Well I am almost done with this conversation. Prof you probably think you are proving a point but you are doing nothing more than showing your biases. Sorry that you appear to not have the confidence in your own senses to judge equipment by sound and need a bit of help with your measurement blue pill. Do you think you could tell the difference between a soft dome, aluminum done, compression and ribbon tweeter? I hope you could. Now which tools would allow you to tell the tweeter type by measurement?
I think that instead of a double blind for with my inclinations, you and Amir should do a double blind of gear that measures well vs. gear that doesnt.
These tools you so revere were developed only to assist in the design process. The sonic difference between most tube and solid state amps has very little to do with how they measure. The very best designers, I think, used measurements as a basic stepping stone and out of curiosity regarding the effect of design changes and probably materials. If what you believe is true, then measurements would always win out and poorer measuring designs would always be abandoned.
Thank you. When I was a grad student we use to joke about the linearity assumption - which is where quite a lot of mathematics lives, because it's far easier. Didn't know about this research, which is important for our hobby.
I know they cannot understand because they are in a cult or brainwashed. They dont want to read and study and debate about the articles i put here..
They dont want to understand, some defend their site ideology and they sell their services doing so then they had no interest to look farther than their ideology ...
But ad hominem arguments are useless it is why we must used articles of research and their conclusion to make a point ...
i posted my articles to help those who may be interested in astounding facts about acoustics ...If i can help one person this will be useful.
i did not posted all i could it will be too long...😊
By the way i want to be clear... For me ASR is useful site...It is the ideology behind their measurements which is simplistic...
I thank Amir for his measures verification but the ideology is useless and childish...
Double blind test is a circus, everybody had biases, trained positive one and negative one so what? Placebo effect as invoked by ASR people is ridiculous to debunk the claim of trained acoustician as the claim of an ignorant audiophile... Etc ...
I am not against double blind test they are regularly used in acoustics experiments...but when used to debunk what someone say in regular life it is contemptuous and come from an ideology not from acoustic science specific research in specific context...
@mahgister My friend. Why are you still arguing with people who clearly don’t want to share your opinions? I’m sure you’ve jeard that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Do yourself a favor and let it go. Listen to some music. Cheers.
Measures are used to increase the design process quality. But i must add that they may and must incorporate some psychoacoustics facts to improve the design too.
Anyway it is psychoacoustics and acoustics research who drive audio first and last, improvement in other field as DSP for example will help a lot but must be coupled to psychoacoustics to mark a revolution as done by Dr, Choueiri with his BACCH filters...
Remember that human hearing dont decode sound qualia and information ONLY and MERELY by computing air waves and the waves signals but also and mainly "read" the physical invariant behind any vibrating sound sources as a qualia belonging to the vibrating sound sources physical invariant ( like in the design of a drum ) and touching also our physical and emotional body, as demonstrated in the book of Essien and the two independent research articles above :
an ecological theory of sound needs also a body-image theory of sound..
«The definition of sound in physics as vibrations in an elastic medium establishes a link between the sound source and the organism. Thus, it satisfies an essential psychophysical prerequisite for a theory of perception. However,
over the past 170 years since Ohm’s law (1843), and some 137 years since Helmholtz’s resonance theory (1877), psychoacoustic procedures founded on air vibration have shrouded music and speech in mystery. Ecological theories have fallen short, not only of Gestalt invariance, but also of the link between the distal object and the organism. This paper approaches auditory analysis from the standpoint of sound production. It argues that although air vibration produces sound, sound is not air vibration; and that exploitation of features of air vibration
can hardly (if ever) lead to accurate understanding of the principle of the auditory mechanism in speech or music perception. Evidence is provided in support of the definition of sound as the vibratory image of the sonorous body.
It establishes isomorphism between characteristics of a sonorous body and auditory attributes of sound. Wherefore, a body is different from the sound it produces in much the same way as steam is different from ice ─
two different forms of the same entity. The data under consideration offer succinct insights into the way the auditory mechanism extracts from sound wave invariants for use in speech or music regardless of chaotic production and acoustic variability.»
This comes from this acoustician article and book :
Now if you want to know how much information can be read in the vibrating sound sources immediate environment read this and you will fall of your chair :
Extracting audio from visual information
Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass.
«“When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate,” says Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper. “The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that’s usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn’t realize that this information was there.”»................
«“We’re recovering sounds from objects,” he says. “That gives us a lot of information about the sound that’s going on around the object, but it also gives us a lot of information about the object itself, because different objects are going to respond to sound in different ways.” In ongoing work, the researchers have begun trying to determine material and structural properties of objects from their visible response to short bursts of sound.»
Then people contemptuously bragging about a few electrical measures of some pieces of design claiming that it is all we need to know if a system will sound good it will sound good for them in ALL specific environment for ALL ears and ALL brain/body, this is pure ideology to market and sell some tools . Thats all ... A good design for sure will stay a good design in all conditions for all owner but it will need an optimization process to make it shine. All audiophiles interested by "tweaks" in mechanical, electrical and acoustical conditions know what i means.
The ears/brain decode vibrating sound source Qualias associated with physical invariant properties of the vibrating sound source in acoustic environmental conditions in very specific and competent way and these acoustic content of an environment , being Nature or a listening room matter a lot for the optimization of any design.
A system/room cannot be evaluated by a mere subjectively selected choice of small set of electrical measures among all the electrical measures possible, among all the mechanical measures possibles, among all the acoustical measures possible and even with all the psychoacousticals measures possible, it will lack the qualia experience by a conscious feeling body associated with the physical invariant of the vibrating sound sources.
Then we must create a system/room for a listener characteristics, few electrical measures of the design pieces will not do and measuring speakers will not be enough to complete the optimization process.
Ok enough said... Read the articles... 😁
English is not my language. I apologize for my clumsy sentences. I never spoke english where i live and read in english only philosophy or science. 😊
( There is no concrete vocabulary in these books, no humor, no popular or slang expression and most scientists and philosophers are not great writers then if i can wrote top poetry in french, in english i am lagging a lot 😉😊 but you are lucky i wrote the shortest possible posts here in English because of that , imagine what it could be if my english was top litterature, my posts will be unbearable as short novel)
For sure what i call a vibrating sound source may be the "timbre" of a musical instrument for example. A musician hear perfectly well and can classify immediately the different qualias and qualities pertaining to the physical invariants behind any of these vibrating sound sources (violin) ... He can detect the wood qualities the strings qualities and the micro dynamic gestures of the players too .
A system/room vibrate as a whole any listener can detect the quality of it ... If i put diverse acoustics content in this room even a single straw located at the right place a difference will be audible... I know because when i tuned my 100 resonators the length and size of ONE neck matter and make a difference ...
Ignorant who know nothing about acoustics and who never design a Helmholtz resonators will call me a liar and will ask for a double blind test,...😊
It is why to evaluate a system the room conditions matter a lot more than the THD of the amplifier for the final perceived exam ...😊
I read about human hearing beating Fourier Transform and thought it was an exciting thing. That’s why the company I work for started analyzing rooms using short tone bursts of known frequency so we could see time domain information in bass notes to a greater accuracy since the frequency doesn’t have to be calculated out of a sine sweep. This works well, but there are more methods than Fourier Transform to separate time and frequency. Wavelet analysis can closely approximate human hearing and vision. I was surprised to find out that I could take a sweep of a room and then make an impulse file out of that. With that impulse I could simulate any acoustic environment through wavelet convolution and get the same pulsed tone results as I got from actually recording them. As I’m sure you’ll agree, human hearing doesn’t violate laws of physics so there is still time required for our ears to distinguish tones, and we have limited accuracy for detecting the start and stop times of tones. We’re much better at detecting the difference in timing between each ear than the absolute timing.
Our hearing definitely doesn’t beat the microphone and the digital recording electronics, which pick up far more than our hearing mechanism. It wasn’t designed for that. The telescope analogy is a good one. The analysis of the sound is what we do that’s so impressive. We can make sense of it.
We’ve got a bunch of resonators in our ears, so we can pick up on a tone as soon as a resonance differential between them is physically established, and that takes at least a half wave cycle to get started. A wavelet transform does something very similar, by running little wavelets through the signal at many different frequencies to see when in the signal a resonance occurs at that frequency. It’s an ear simulator of sorts. And it’s about as precise as you’re going to get in biology or electro mechanics.
Picking up differences between two signals is very easy for measuring equipment. A null test can reveal the slightest difference deep down into the noise floor.
I haven’t seen a single case yet of signals that could be audibly distinguished as different by the human ear but showed up as identical in reasonably competent measurements.
Now to be fair we know very well how "halo effect" in psychology really works...
If a product as a stradivarius is surrounded by an aura of holy S. Q. because of his price tag and historical meaning, acousticians will use blind test to study the relation between perception evaluation and the biases associated with it for example in a study of the stradivarius materials composition compared to modern violins.....
This does not means that human hearing is not faithful this means that he must be supervised when the "Holy value and price tag" play a role and put under controls and trained anyway...
This in no way can be used as an argument to devaluate all hearing abilities and mocking them as "golden ears" and militate to replace listenings evaluation by electrical small set of measures of the gear design and systematic double blind test in regular day to day audiophiles decisions and optimization process ...
Thanks very much Amir for your measures service review indeed ... But we dont need the ideology which some ASR people stick to ...
Now if i was wrong here stating that Human hearing is generally very trustful this article will be wrong relating to this discovery explained very well here :
«People can simultaneously identify the pitch and timing of a sound signal much more precisely than allowed by conventional linear analysis. That is the conclusion of a study of human subjects done by physicists in the US. The findings are not just of theoretical interest but could potentially lead to better software for speech recognition and sonar.
Human hearing is remarkably good at isolating sounds, allowing us to pick out individual voices in a crowded room, for example. However, the neural algorithms that our brains use to analyse sound are still not properly understood. Most researchers had assumed that the brain decomposes the signals and treats them as the sum of their parts – a process that can be likened to Fourier analysis, which decomposes an arbitrary waveform into pure sine waves.
However, the information available from Fourier analysis is bound by an uncertainty relation called the Gabor limit. This says that you cannot know the timing of a sound and its frequency – or pitch – beyond a certain degree of accuracy. The more accurate the measurement of the timing of a sound, the less accurate the measurement of its pitch and vice versa......
Oppenheim and Magnasco discovered that the accuracy with which the volunteers determined pitch and timing simultaneously was usually much better, on average, than the Gabor limit. In one case, subjects beat the Gabor limit for the product of frequency and time uncertainty by a factor of 50, clearly implying their brains were using a nonlinear algorithm.»
This means that the eras/brain work in his own time domain and in a non linear way. The Fourier maps are not enough to understand human hearings. They are only a part of the complete unknown process which is mysterious in all his ramifications.
«My ears lie sometimes and my wife too but they are trainable and truthful at the end of my day»--Groucho Marx 🤓
" few electrical measures of the design pieces will not do and measuring speakers will not be enough to complete the optimization process."
A few measurements are insufficient perhaps, but very useful. Ears don’t lie. They just do what they do. Brains come up with stories about what the ears did. Brains try to tell a useful story. Hence we don’t evaluate colors for precisely what hit our retinas in one particular area, but interpret the color that hit there in relation to what hit in other areas. This is why painting is so hard. The photograph changed painting because it just happened mechanistically, directly, without judgement, without having to pass in and out of a human perceptual filter, and allowed us for the first time to see what a picture looked like when our filters got out of the way. I should include the camera obscura as step in that direction too.
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