Some thoughts on ASR and the reviews

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 :

https://physicsworld.com/a/human-hearing-is-highly-nonlinear/

«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. 

A few measurements are insufficient perhaps, but very useful.

Only ignorants will contradict that...😊

But only ignorant will use this to dismiss any listeners impressions.. As some objectivist do systematically ...

Photography indeed is an art too, it is the eye of human who do the job and the negative treatment or DSP used artistically by the users...

And yes painting is very hard. This is why i admired painters as much as musicians...

I like Vinci and Turner... And i am very fond of naive and primitive art....

As Amir stated earlier, it’s really only when specific measurement claims are made and not met that there is any real problem. Nobody is doubting anyone’s subjective impressions and preferences, although we may doubt the stories told about what causes those preferences.

I like that kind of art too. I mentioned the photograph’s effect because at one time I was looking at paintings made through the centuries and noticed a sudden ability towards incredible realism around the late 1800s. It then occurred to me that it happened about when photography hit the scene, and then I learned that a lot of art focused people consider that kind of art to be not very good art. It would have been an incredible feat if someone had done it without seeing photography. And there were some who did it at least somewhat by using camera obscuras.

Art is wed to science

but nobody will ever know which one is the mother

and which one the  father here

because they reincarnate together for eternity

and change sex... 😊

We are their children though....