The invention of measurements and perception

That kind of sounds like the moment we truly realize what we are, we'll cease to exist. (Or more like Arther C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Name of God). I'll take a double dose of delusion please as I've got a ways to go. 😄  Ignorance, bliss, and all that.

All the best,
Nonoise

Stereophile has a trend / fashion to sell. Their version of "neutral" is not really neutral

Stereophile understands that people hear differently and desire different things.
So they have the people, reviewers in this case... who like certain directions in sonics, - review the items that exist in that direction.

Simple enough.

kosst_amojan

Brains are vastly more similar than they are different. It’s the individual’s delusional inventions of self that tend to differ more radically.

Will you please explain this? Are you actually suggesting that most people are delusional?

It is every brain is not the same .

You can forget about ears. The rooms are all different right off the bat. Even a given room sounds different depending on where you sit. Too many variables. Nobody said it was going to be easy. As Dylan says on the trailing wax of all his albums, good luck to you all.

mapman"none have anything remotely resembling flat response like a good microphone"

Ears are not supposed to have flat response each ear is different.

Right and none have anything remotely resembling flat response like a good microphone used for measurements.

Ears are like fingerprints in that each one is unique.

To Hayakawa's maxims-
The word is not the thing
The map is not the territory
The flag is not the nation
Let us add:
The measurement is not the music.
It's correlation as a visually rendered reference so we can see deduce and predict what and how we think sound will behave.
It doesn't explain everything.

All the best,
Nonoise

@erik_squires

If you can find a copy of the Radiotron Designer's Handbook, 3rd Edition (published in the 1930s) its pretty evident that we've known for the last 80 years that the various harmonics are treated very differently by the human ear. Yet somehow after all this time, THD is all we get.

I was going to leave this subject alone, feeling we had covered it well enough, but then this appeared in my feed:

https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2019/01/06/border-patrol-dac-revisited-audio-fur/


Lots there I agree with, and I have barely started reading. In particular:

- Perception and a specific measurement are not correlated until they are correlated

- Stereophile has a trend / fashion to sell. Their version of "neutral" is not really neutral.

Oopsy, Daisy, it was brucenitroxpro!

@brucenitroxpro - the questions I asked of erik_squires were intended for you. Can you please respond.

Since you are a teacher of experimental psychology and you do not see that background too much I thought I would ask you, by any chance are you familiar with the now defunct group PEAR 🍐 Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research? Also, how about Rupert Shekdrake, author of Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home? 🐩

By the way, I used to work in submarines and heard some good stories.

@erik_squires, since you are a teacher of experimental psychology

Ahem ... no no no, that was not me! :)

@edstrelow This is attempted, but the measurement is not standardized. I routinely see Stereophile publish measurements from an accelerometer taped to the sides of a speaker cabinet.

Best,
E

@edstrelow - for that you will have to become a member of AES and read up on their publications.    Once in while, they do have a good paper that correlates cabinet movement to tweeter movement.  

I am more struck by the absence of  basic measurements of physics in this field.  One problem that I have been working on is the extent of vibration especially in headphone cases and speaker enclosures.  I have never seen one measurement reported as to how much there is, even though there is more than a passing interest in reducing this problem.  Grado have a proprietary plastic they use with their phones to reduce vibrations, Sennheiser uses a polymer (probably sorbothane or something related) in some of its high end phones, we use spike under speakers and sorbothane footers and yet I have never seen a single measurement showing how much such things actually reduce vibration, let alone the more difficult measurement of whether people hear the effects.  

It is not enough to merely wave around some theoretical explanation of a phenomenon, that is only speculation.  You need evidence as to how these things actually work and as many here note that usually translates to measuring something. 

"Foundations of Measurement" in 3 volumes, Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky. Academic Press.

You might know the last author as a Nobel Laureate."

This I believe refers to Amos Tversky who did not win a Nobel Prize.

@erik_squires, since you are a teacher of experimental psychology and you do not see that background too much I thought I would ask you, by any chance are you familiar with the now defunct group PEAR 🍐 Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research? Also, how about Rupert Shekdrake, author of Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home? 🐩

erik_squires
My point is, we perceive something, then we find a way to measure it, then we use that measurement to tell us something. That doesn’t mean all perception has been measured.

>>>>PWB Electronics (The Belts) in UK spent thirty years or so developing audiophile products that do exactly that - change your perception of sound (hearing) but cannot be measured. Some of my products operate via mind-matter interaction and information fields, changing the way you hear sound. I’ve been involved in this sort of thing, things that go bump in the night, for twenty years. The sound you want is in the room the whole time, you just can’t hear it properly. Things are much worse than people realize.

I taught statistics and experimental psychology...

This is a field in which measures are constantly evolving and being added to. I'm afraid that in audio our measures are decades old and have not been updated, just cheaper to collect.

What I mean is, we can do better, but the will and effort isn't universally taken very far.

I'll give you an example. I once replaced tweeter caps in a Focal speaker. The sound was really good, but for the first 48 hours I was having weird surround sound effects. I thought I could hear things happening behind me and to the right.

Eventually the problem went away. Could I express this as a measure of standard measures like uF, ESR or something else? Probably not. But with some effort and time and money I might have been able to come up with a time / phase based explanation for the effects I was hearing.

I didn't have any of it.

My point is, we perceive something, then we find a way to measure it, then we use that measurement to tell us something. That doesn't mean all perception has been measured.

Best,
E

I must agree that the supposed aim of this whole site is what drives a person to like something, sometimes more than another option.
I taught statistics and experimental psychology... and nothing irks me more than someone who quotes chapter and verse about something which has to be experienced to be appreciated. As an EE, I designed test equipment, which was usually limited to 50 KHz in the specs. Much of the time, it was not the sound which was being measured, but noise patterns (atomic submarine prop noise, for example). The equipment was "state of the art" and cost more than most high end systems... yet, as an audio source for listening to music, would fail most miserably. Yup. Because it wasn't designed to PLEASE the user, just generate data for decision making. I must say your post was a breath of fresh air, Erik!

Hi Geoff, no offense taken at all, its all in good fun. In fact, seriously, I would like to make an offer on the NASA junior astronaut watch they gave you when you left/retired.

Hey, jitter, no offense but maybe you should consider not being a goofball for 2019. Good luck.

Hello folks. I am an E-engineer and audio tech who ran a well respected audio shop (Audio Clinic) in upper NYS for several years back in the 80s. I had several 'golden ears' friends back then who taught me a lot about the 'other side'. It became a challenge to understand how our 'instruments'/ears could detect the subtle issues that I could not measure with many several thousand dollar instruments. What I found was that most of the really well respected (great sounding) equipment measured very well, but much of the gear that measured great didn't pass the listening tests. I learned how to repair the equipment to maintain the measurements and return and improve the sound quality too.
The recent round of measurement equipment has narrowed that gap but haven't eliminated it. I actually learned to discern much of that sound difference myself. Now that I am much older and my hearing sensitivity has diminished I can still hear the clarity advantage of certain gear. I have found and now own a system that is quite satisfactory and am sticking with it. I have always preferred the sound of 'E-stats and love my Martin Logan's and have found electronics that are worthy of them. My retirement does not support the constant 'upgrade' march I observe.
One thing I also learned about is the limitation imposed on us humans driven by variations in perception because of our emotions and preconceived notions. Various listening test methods have attempted to get around this with some success. Kudos to the engineering folks who have learned some of the real causes and advanced the technology of electronics to minimize the aforementioned gap.
To those who can afford that march to better sound, enjoy the voyage.

Whew, thank goodness Geoff.  I was afraid that Santa had disappointed me and there would not be another whole year of the "fuses and directionality" shtick.

He ought to practice what he preaches. If he can understand resistance and conductivity why in the world he would be so backsliding regarding fuses and directionality? One assumes he believes in the old addage, do as I do, not as I say.

“Never get behind anybody 100%.” - Bob Beatty, my boss at NASA

A separate issue, but very related: I knew a lot of musicians in High School who were very surprised by how difficult college-level music theory was to grasp. Music theory is on the same level of intellectual difficulty as both advanced mathematics and electrical engineering, sharing with both their completely objective truth and seemly-abstract principles. Abstract in the sense that, as Roger Modjeski (my "hero" ;-) put it, you can’t see electricity (or music). A circuit can be expressed in a schematic, however (and music can be notated). In his course on hi-fi design and engineering, Roger therefore uses analogies to help his students grasp the concepts of current, voltage, etc. (the rate of flow of water out of a tap, the water pressure, etc.).

jitter checks in with a whole lotta nothin’, his forte. All the lonely trolls, where do they all come from?

kosst "@geoffkait, How can you use so many words yet say nothing that makes any sense?"  

Practice, practice, practice.  

Why you can’t understand simple English is anybody’s guess. Have you considered going back to school? Maybe even picking up that GED?

kosst_amojan
As far as audio systems go....
If the speakers produce mathematically perfect output, and if the source provides a perfect signal to an amplifier that perfectly amplifies it, and the sound is heard in a mathematically perfect environment, then the result will be indistinguishable from the live event. There’s very little guess work in this. We make art out of the compromises actual parts and materials force us to make. The best we can hope to accomplish is to creatively juxtapose failings in such a way as to mitigate their obvious nature. To understand those failings we must measure them and quantify them. Only then can we understand them and manipulate them. That’s how engineering works.

>>>>>Actually that’s NOT (rpt not) how engineering works. The input is not perfect to begin with and the output is always a distorted and noisy facsimile of the input, at least to some degree. Not to mention sometimes the *best sounding* device has the highest degree of distortion. How can that be?! 😛

It’s a BIG mistake to think of an audio system as a closed system. It’s a mistake to think that a device must be in the audio signal path to affect the sound. We know there are many independent variables that affect the sound we hear. Some of those variables can be controlled but many can’t. If the weather interferes with your listening experience you can wait until the sun comes out or if you don’t like the sound during the day you can wait until nighttime. You have to know what all the variables are to have a chance of controlling them. I do not even have to broach the touchy subject of things that go bump in the night. It’s a mistake to think for audio systems we are ruled by mathematics or engineering. Beauty is not created by mathematicians or engineers. Beauty is not objective. It’s subjective. Beauty is in the eye 👁 of the beholder.

@clearthink: Your pathetic comments intended to besmirch my intellience and character belies the irony of your handle.

Your mother did.

"Likened to an extra long perfect kinda stick for getting the ants at the bottom of a deeper hole (on the Savannah) but, to remember that is all it is."

That was a perfectly respectable viewpoint until the work of Hilbert, Russell, Godel. The nature of mathematics is rather deeper than you suggest. As for it's relation to psycho-physics, or any other science done right, you might consult "Foundations of Measurement."

"Foundations of Measurement" in 3 volumes, Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky. Academic Press.

You might know the last author as a Nobel Laureate.

Basically, the work answers the question, "How to use mathematics without screwing up." Should be required reading for all of the sciences. But the mathematics is rigorous, and that puts it beyond nearly every science Ph.D.

You're being entirely arbitrary in your definition of what constitutes a measurement device. You seem to be hung up on intent.

What I'm trying to focus on is that a measurement (i.e. measure, number) has to be invented. They get invented when an experimenter needs a new way of thinking about a problem. Volts, Watts, Amperes. Even those don't really exist in nature.

Volta, Watts and Ampere all started from not having a number, to having a number. Those numbers made math and engineering possible. I love numbers, but just because I have a number, does not mean I have a quality associated with it.

That's the next step, and that's where I think we fumble.

Erik - how do you figure 1 Ampere at 1 watt has a S/N of 90dB?   There is no S/N correlation between Amperes and Watts.  

Sorry for the confusion, I meant Amplifier. :)

For instance, one amp at 1 watt has a S/N ratio of 90 dB.

Though I think when these are taken, it really should be at 2.83V, not 1 Watt.

Best,
E

Erik - how do you figure 1 Ampere at 1 watt has a S/N of 90dB?   There is no S/N correlation between Amperes and Watts.  

@jea48 - Actually, if one were to measure the linearity of the amplifier without loop feedback from min to max, there is a very good correlation to the timbre of sound.  However, in order to do that, you have to be the designer of the amp and have it gutted on the test bench.   Not very practical....

Apparently, on the inner sleeve of Famous Blue Raincoat it states, Recorded on Sony Digital Equipment. To me it makes a difference as I *perceive* analog tape as better than digital, in terms of fullness, timbre, air and musicality.

You're being entirely arbitrary in your definition of what constitutes a measurement device.  You seem to be hung up on intent.  By that rationale a tree is not a measurement device, but to those who understand how information is encoded, it certainly can be.  Climatologist routinely use tree's growth ring as a record of past climate conditions.

The fact that we don't have a comprehensive model (and accompanying measurements) of some of the finer points of audiophile oriented music reproduction, does not mean such a model cannot exist.  You would really be hard pressed to come up with areas that are not capable of being studied via the scientific method.  Possibly the single greatest achievement of humans is to understand that the physical world is systematically understandable.

jea48, aren't microphones and tape recorders essentially measurement devices/test equipment? If it wasn't for these measurement devices would you even know what the timbre of a performance were?

At least for the intentions of this thread, no. They are recording devices.

A measure is a number. So what I meant to talk about here is that a number, like signal to noise (S/N) by itself has no real meaning in terms of desirability.
We, humans, use these to tell us a little about the equipment and signal quality, and we must give that number meaning.

For instance, one amp at 1 watt has a S/N ratio of 90 dB.

How much better is it than 900 dB? I mean, yes,we can do math and express this in volts, but is it now at the point of ridiculous? Would you pay 10x as much? Could you hear it?

Numbers are great for automating testing, and creating manufacturing standards. They also validate whether or not we are making a meaningful change, but ultimately there's a separate step where we must ascribe value and perception to it.

Best,
E

Nope.