What are we objectivists missing?


I have been following (with much amusement) various threads about cables and tweaks where some claim "game changing improvements" and other claim "no difference".  My take is that if you can hear a difference, there must be some difference.  If a device or cable or whatever measures exactly the same it should sound exactly the same.  So what are your opinions on what those differences might be and what are we NOT measuring that would define those differences?

jtucker

What are objectivists miss? A soul? 😂 Nah that's mean sorry however I miss the point of this post entirely unless you're just trolling.

blah blah blah blah...  its a hobby... do what you want, believe what you want...

I'm the one who posted Game Changing Tweak first in August of 2020 and in this forum titled Part 2. I consult with people whose knowledge in the audio field is towering. The audiophile who suggested I get an isolation transformer began his electronic career at age 16 and is now 78 years old. He solved a speaker problem for his friend, Dave Wilson, of Wilson Audio. He was also a friend of Walter Jung, author of Audio Ic Op-Amp Applications. He takes apart audio cartridges to modify them wearing magnifying goggles. Of course he can measure signal, but the final arbiter is his ears. 

As is often suggested on these type of threads, measurements don't tell the whole story. This should be obvious, as if they did, every designer would base their designs on the best possible measurements, yet many don't.

That's not to say that they ignore distortion, etc., but rather that the best measurements don't necessarily equate to the most compelling listening experiences.

There are many examples, but Nelson Pass has shared more than a few interesting, related anecdotes and opinions. Here's a quote from an interview:

I like measurements, and I use them all the time, but they don’t get the last word. Generally, there isn’t much conflict between what we measure and what we like to hear. I’ve spent decades working to correlate good sound with measurements, and we have a reasonable picture of what works, and you see that in our products. These represent our own listening tastes, and appeal to a large enough portion of customers to keep us in business.

With low-order harmonics, there is agreement that low-order distortion is much less offensive than high-order harmonics and IM (Inter modulated) sidebands, and this drove the development of the Threshold 800A back in 1975, where the nature of the distortion was considered as important as the size of the “single number.”

By 1991 when I started Pass Labs, I began to focus more on the specific character of second and third harmonics, and slowly settled into a character where negative-phase second harmonic dominates at low levels, segueing into symmetric third harmonic at higher power. The second fosters an illusion of expanded space and localization, and the third seems to improve dynamics. The distortion of these amplifiers is still quite low, but they are not sterile.

Another incident related to this was when an audio technician with 50 years of experience told me that the hiss being produced by a pre-amp didn't register on his oscilloscope.