It is 2021 Gentlemen,
When the piano tuner shows up, especially if they are near the top of their game and called on to tune concert pianos, then the first thing they will pull out is a modern electronic tuning device. Humans are too inconsistent, and too slow to be trusted to tune the most critical instruments. The main point in the debate is not what A.I. could do for you..... But what can you do without it.... A piano tuner can discuss with the demand of the pianist in a way a computer specialized tuner cannot.... Save if the electronically tuning piano computer is coupled to an ACOUSTICAL A.I. analyser able to analyse the sound of this specific piano for this specific hall or room.... No great pianist will use a mechanical tuning.... But perhaps they will use the A. I. i just described.... But ask yourself a question : what will become of humans if they BELIEVE that A. I. are more intelligent than them ? By the way i dont believe that a.I. are more "intelligent" than us in a general way of speaking one second... Giulio Tononi one of the great neuroscentist point out that the scale of "intelligence" intersect the scale of consciouness but they do not confuse in one another... Then it is easy to predict the future like did Ray Kurzweil with is "singularity" myth... This myth is very potent and A.I will be very "intelligent".... Then the question is : what are we? By the way i dont live in this 2021 year you speak about....Time is very overvalued... 😊 |
Mahgister, I am a realist, you are a mysticist and that is why Howard Johnson’s made 28 flavors. I cannot contradict you here.... But even if you are right and you are about our 2 characters, acoustic is acoustic and all my points made sense.... By the way a good mystic MUST also be a realist but the inverse is less frequent... My deepest regards.... |
The placebo effect is definitely a thing and it most definitely applies to a lot of the decision making applied to high end audio. Every perception is constituted by the brain with habit and bias, with an history, with fear and hope, then placebo is creative part of any perception... But those who oppose placebo effect to explain any audible experience in audio remind me of those who explain walking by the different types of shoes, sandals,boots..... Hearing is not placebo mainly, and walking is not shoes mainly ... But nobody walk the same in big boot and loose sandal.... Nobody hear the same looking at a 100000 bucks system and before a 1000 bucks one... Same Ears not the same hearing.... Same feet but not the same walking... placebo and look and style count for much in the 2 cases.... 😊😁 Then opposing placebo against any audible experience is not even wrong.... Most of the times it is simply beside the point... It is only a weapon for the children in the "skeptic scientism boy club" to use against audiophiles....it explain nothing most of the times save very small borderline audible difference.... You cannot create a top audio experience or experiment with placebo effect ONLY.....Save if you use market hypnosis method for sure but it is another story.... I never bought upgrade anyway.... I prefer homemade embeddings controls.... My best to you.... |
Mahgister, the first thing a piano tuner pulls out is a tuning fork. The tuning fork is his reference and yes, from there the rest is by ear. The room is tuned unlike the piano with the feedback of a large bandwith MARKED OUT by asymmetrical Helmholtz resonators near the tweeter and bass driver and coming from tweeters of one speaker and bass driver of the other speaker to marked out each wavefront for each ear respectively.... This relatively large bandwith is not a frequency tone like with a fork but a PITCH PLAYING TIMBRE when music play for my ears.....
Perhaps the problem we have is that we have no reference to compare our systems to and never will. What does a band sound like in your living room?
I do know how a guitar a piano or a voice must sound like.... If you get this right the rest comes like beads on a string....Aynway we cannot have perfection but an optimal reasult is very possible... I did it...
An image in our brains, a quasi electrical event which varies from one of us to the next and changes based on the emotional state of that individual. I have noticed in myself that the same system can sound different based on god knows what, my emotional state maybe?
I lived through the same experience than you but in the period of time BEFORE my system was optimally set.... I go from a mood swing where things were upgraded and i was pleased, but nothing being optimal, i depressed again, and the cycles goes on... TILL an optimal S.Q. was reached with the audio system limitations i own.... Now i am not depressed at all dor many months because i have reach the optimal limit of my system using acoustic.... i had controlled for the better ALL acoustic features till they are in place like a puzzles pieces fitting together... It is fun and ask only for listening experiments....
After working for hours everything just sounded worse. I had to put it away, give myself a break. After three weeks and another $500 I think I can get back to enjoying music again. But, true audiophiles are never happy with their systems because in their imagination they can always sound better.
It is not imagination that play games on you, it is acoustic problem: How to create a natural timbre experience, a very precise imaging, a large soundstage, a listener envelopment experience coupled with good sound width ? I will never try that playing with a set of frequencies on a computer to adjust all these factors one frequency at a times and in a linear way... It is impossible task for most ears if not all... Like i said electronic equalization is useful to fine tune the speakers in relation to the room, but i will try it now AFTER my room is already optimally passively treated and activelly controlled.... Now if i use the electronic equalizer i dont doubt that my relation speakers/room will be upgraded a bit...And i will only have to correct my resonators after that to adjust to the new situation.... But the huge improvement cannot come from an electronic equalizer it is only the cherry on the cake, it is not and could not be the acoustical cake.... Simple: two ears feedback dont work like a SINGLE microphone feedback.... I apologize for my rude answers sometimes... No personal grunt against you.... My best to you.... |
this fundamental point about the animal origins and coloration of all possible avenues of conscious thought, is what gave the renaissance men of the early 1700’s the great idea of creating the vocational slot of engineering.
where rote training methods came into being along with formalized academia in all that... and poof!...engineering came into being (over some 20-40 years).
This is the only way they found they could create an army of useful people out of the complexities that physics was unfolding to them. As the bulk of humanity wasn’t going to be getting into the weeds of the objectivity/subjectivity problem --any time soon. Literally not wired for it. Such folks invariably have no idea what the question of consciousness means, and generally have to look it up in a book ....and then make a mess out of the analysis anyway. The separation and after that the content assigned to be "objective" and the content assigned to be "subjective" is the result in the history of consciousness of a distantiation from the cosmos, a less inclusive animal participation to the cosmos... What human called objective reality is a designed and very PLASTIC successful construction.... Like the web designed by a spider...BUT the spider know that his web is ONLY a design to catch something ; human dont know like the spider, his design is so powerful compared to the spider one that it can erase its own participation in the cosmos and made it completely unconscious or forgotten.... What transhumanist cultist called A.I. and virtual reality would be the manifestation of a complete forgetfullness of human origin and destiny....Dont call me luddite , i am not against technology at all here... Men could become a spider enveloped by his web and unable to walk and even think.... This will ressemble to the cocoon caterpillar BUT with never any possible metamorphose nor actual transformation... Momification of human life and intelligence in a static artefact that some deluded men will call the greatest human achievement....Evolution replaced by death...Love replaced by the illusion of power.... The fear of death illusion by a greatest deception : an artificial immortality.... Nothing qualified to be objective/ subjective exist which does not come out first of consciousness...The distinction itself come to being from an evolution and emergence of the conscious thought process and the separation implicated by this distinction could erase the power of thought itself so powerful this creation and design is when let unsupervised and to itself....... Science is not technology....Religion is not magic.... Rationality could become irrational, and all that are not by themselves and separately conscious spirituality... We are at a fork-road of destiny....
I do not know who engender and beget humanity anyway, but i know that after these symbolic 9 months with are millions years, humanity gives birth to itself or not, NOW.... |
Nobody tune a piano with placebo effect....the tuning is a series of small incremental additive changes...
I have tuned my room in hundreds of change in a 2 months period and explaining everything with placebo is only possible by those who dont have developed any hearing experiments to help them...
They are like a boat without a rudder? Am i here or there? Why the ocean currents put me here and not there? Where did i travel ? Is my destination an illusion?
And because they are lost in the sea they think all boats they crossed are without rudder....
We are all susceptible to be lost at sea but not always without a compass, mine is acoustic control , control of vibration and control of the noise floor electrical level...No unreal change can fool you and stay long beside the real changes.... The two types of change exist at different level of existence and magnitude...
But changing arbitrarily what we think is a bad piece of gear and UPGRADING it, is often an illusion and a placebo effect at work.... Especially if we dont know how to embed our system in machanical, electrical and acoustical dimensions by ourself....When we are not ourself at the SOURCE of the change experimenting, we fool ourself with ready made costly sometimes illusory placebo change...
Stay away from cables or fuses upgrades especially in the first 7 years of your listening experiments.... 😁😊 They can induce the disease: placeno effect and chasing the tail or worst the moon...
Real change dont need test.... Because when the listener ITSELF is changed this is real most of the times.... When the listener interrogate himself this is unreal....He is not changed at all at this time but look and EXPECT for an external change that is unable and powerless to change him first, than this change is unable to exist by itself....
When the change is real, the sound affect the body by emotion and objective EXPLANABLE cause most of the times, coming from basic science; when it is an unreal change it trick the mind to doubt but is unable to fool the body.... It is the reason why most people upgrade without satisfaction.... They dont know where they go.....Listen not the ears of your mind, but to the body ears.... Experiment....Being in active experiment is very different than being a passive consumers....This is the way to determine how to learn where you must go.... Acoustic basic science can help here and could guide us...
Then, save for exceptional experiment unexplanable but very rare in usual audio life , appealing to unknown science fact is often illusory.... Most change are explanable....But not all for sure.... But the main one are simple based science fact.... Easy to verify....The unexplainable also exist and it is very stupid to think that none exist...It is very simple to EXPERIMENT....At no cost....
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Tell the scientists the brain measurements mean nothing, not me, djones do you read my post? you distorted my sentence to fill your (.....) fill the blank with what you want..... This is my COMPLETE sentence: « Brain measurements means nothing without a CORRELATION with a perception if we speak about hearing...» Then i expect apology from you for your mistake in citation, or perhaps it is not a mistake but a tactic ? After that "mistake" citing my post, you go on repeating what i just said like if i was not saying it in the first place.... i called this a CORRELATION and for sure a correlation must be between brain measure and hearing phenomenon ... The main point was the ability to image the brain in order to understand the regions associated with the phenomenon. Finally you ended with the strawman usual fallacy of saying a common place evident fact erroneously SUGGESTING that i was refusing it....NOBODY REFUSE MEASUREMENTS....NOBODY REFUSE USEFUL TOOL.... IT IS NOT THE POINT... THE POINT IS MEASUREMENTS ARE NOT ENOUGH.....they must be interpreted and they cannot be interpreted without a model but they cannot be used to successfully reduce hearing phenomenon to only one temporary model.... Map is not reality.... Psychoacoustic cannot be reduced to physical acoustic.... Even with an A.I. simulation.... Save for transhumanist cultist.... Is it more clear with big letters? |
Most of it was a rant. The rest wasn’t really all that new but more information on the cocktail party problem. I did find the article interesting mainly because the way they moved a step closer was a focus on brain MEASUREMENTS from fMRIs where speech is localized in the brain. What that has to do with the placebo effect I have no idea. Brain measurements means nothing without a CORRELATION with a perception if we speak about hearing... And placebo effect is constitutive of perception, it is not only a deception like skeptic club scientism use it for a political agenda...Our brain wait with his own bias for a sound to be like he wanted it to be for specific need...Then the word "placebo" refer to complex phenomenon... For example placebo must be eliminated ONLY for objective statistical testing by company which want to test a drug; BUT only a fool would want to eliminate placebo effects from the therapeutic.... It is the same thing for hearing evaluation by the brain.... It is called a learned bias....Like in speech recognition where the brain will correct reality or an unclear sets of soundspeech, some words spoken in some room for example, to deliver a better perception.... |
Uh, that was a very nice rant but this isn’t about measurements and observations are often deceiving. dear djones this post was not a rant, like my post is with you now, this was about new hearing discovery....An informative post, different than my ranting post with you or your ranting post against "hearing confidence".... And no, you are right it was not about measurements because all in audio is not about these necessary and promising but sometimes "deceiving" or successful mesurements .... And sorry, but saying that "observations are often deceiving" is like saying erection are not always successful....Or saying that the ketchup bottle is often not tightly closed.... It is not a good punchline....It is plain common place in a boring conversation.... |
Good post indeed like usual....Thanks...
Refreshing to listen a brain unplugged instead of parrots.... |
The film on Gore Vidal (The United States Of Amnesia) is fantastic! I was a watcher of Firing Line, the PBS show hosted by William F. Buckley. Bill and Gore---a regular guest---really got into it, usually on an intellectual level, sometimes more personal. Both brilliant and very educated, but polar opposites in political philosophy. Thanks from my soul i just begin to watch it.... I read 2 novels of Vidal....Great mind....I never catch anything he say being stupid, or even completely wrong... i invite you to listen to his discussion without compromise with "the repulsive dark Vador brain" of Roy Cohn, the "grey matter" behind Trump void and behind McCarthism communist paranoia .... It is on youtube and you will understand Trump methods completely... He has a heart behind his mind....And he was too singular to be a sheep in any crowds....Peace to him and he loved his country enough to criticize it.... |
It’s funny, I was thinking arguments denying the effect of bias in hearing reminds me of creationists denying evolution and low and behold as if sent from heaven here’s C. S Lewis tossed into the fray. I retreat to my trench. Like usual superficial thinker equate Darwin with the late Darwinian materialist interpretation and they equate C.S. Lewis with the late cultist bible belt interpretation... But sorry one cannot ever look for science in a comic book.... And today confirming the prescient criticism about "scientism" of Lewis, now we are there, with transhumanism cult and tyranny in Google and behind some big corporations more powerful than states... There is no "SCIENCE" at the singular, except for cultist , like there is no WORD of GOD at the singular except for cultist.... There is sciences in the plural, and many inspired spiritual texts coming from all cultures in the plural ... Sciences are not reason, only a part of it....Religions are not completely irrational, only a part of them in each one of them.... Read Cassirer to know what science is and what other cultural forms are..... After that try Goethe....This will correct Newtonian view of science without being obliged to immerse yourself in quantum mechanics interpretations... By the way Newton was too much intelligent to be a newtonian only.... |
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Maybe Gore Vidal was right when he called this country the United States of Amnesia. i dont think he was wrong often.... 😊
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We all know audio reproduction is outside known physics and human audibility limits. To think silly things like placebo effect or confirmation bias could remotely apply to humans in their den of audio tweaks is outlandish not to mention those crazy ABX or DB tests being relevant for anything other than testing mayonnaise. You always miss the point and then sarcastingly accuse all set of audiophiles to refuse to play the game of blindtest and refuse placebo effect...easy strawman argument.... Do you think that i think that placebo dont play for me in all my listening experiments? They do, saying otherwise and putting your words in my mouth is the perpetual strawman argument where you confine yourself in a false STATIC dichotomy between what is subjective and what is not.... But placebo live at the borderline frontier between audible and inaudible.... Only fool can explain with placebo, most effects "sustained", very audible change, in time tough.... Are you one? And are you like those wo dont trust their own ears to the point refusing ANY listening experiments of their own in case they could be deluded by placebo ? Are you afraid of your own mother? Because placebo is the MOTHER of all perception by the way.... Science is not something from a comic book resembling a war between subjectivist and objectivist, it is a bit more complex and less stupid than these "cultist" distinction like in scientology between those who are "clear" and those who are not....With a "blindtest" two separate the to in an "audit".... Dont need blindtest for my culinary experiment either , and for my contemplation of the "illusive" rainbow..... |
The same superficial mind ask for blindtest and allege for placebo about anything....Then accuse audiophiles to refuse blindtest... i love blindtest, organize one near my city i will go..... It is an educational show.... Nothing less, nothing more, save for superficial brain....i dont need blindtest in my assessing experiments amounting to hundred CUMULATIVE small changes....."blackbox" single experiments are enough.... No piano tuner need blindtest....With your own audio system you are the tuner....Let some idiot figure it out with scientism... Great post teo_audio |
