Audio Science Review Review

The worst thing he takes credit for a MS, by far, is wma. I was a test listener for an open source MP3 encoder project at the time wma dropped and we all thought it was a giant joke.

 

Yeah @ultrabike I can show that no rme is transparent at all due to the dsp and Totalmix. But they would say that doesn’t matter because that’s what rme says but unlike RME, they believe it to be truly transparent. TotalMix is undithered 24 bit fixed pcm. Open truncation distortion. Lynx and Metric Halo are fixed but but dither so the math actually works. Motu is 32 bit floating point mixer no need for dither (dithering it is impossible) until it hits the daw and gets outputted back out of the computer as 24 bit fixed point pcm. I could easily conceive of a processing chain and speaker system that would make anything run through RME’s Totalmix, not even converted, sound much worse than other brands. Yet RME doesn’t care. It’s for monitoring on headphones, not for daw mixing. Only the audiophiles and cheap people without preamps or monitor controllers are listening to the distortion by misusing the onboard digital mixer.

it may be good enough for that but transparent it is not. They are arguing for the transparency of much greater dirtboxes like metal tweeters, bad class d, old mark levinson gear (when it goes wrong slightly, it’s going wrong horribly and can’t be fixed), the opamps in the firefaces, and Amir’s garage.

 

I remember when they claimed wasapi could replace asio and Amir claims he fixed directsound. Uh what? The AD side of Wasapi still doesn’t work a decade later. The DA side is much less efficient than proper ASIO. Less efficiency = more potential for buffer weirdness = more potential for worse sound. Direct Sound still pulls the same garbage it did in 1995. ASIO is lighter weight than ALSA and CoreAudio, and the best one out of the box for those companies that actually write drivers. And it was all Steinberg. Hamburg not Redmond. Microsoft finally optimized their kernel (It’s more efficient for audio processing than MacOS and Linux) but Amir had nothing to do with that. Who wrote efficient low level code to work on the clusterfuck? Justin Frankel, Steinberg (Yamaha), Eastern European Avid contractors, and DSP programming gods. Apple shooting themselves in the face in the last 10 years with thermals, f'ing up the kernel, and the Arm switch didn’t hurt. Expect most DAWs to run like shit out of the box on early Arm macs. Pro Tools, Reaper, and Cubase are already much less efficient on MacOS on the same computers. Logic is a joke and still has the same bugs it had when Apple bought emagic. It will be due to Steinberg, RME, and Lynx for writing killer drivers.

I can’t say Microsoft did anything but not f**k up the Windows kernel. That’s a bold claim to be involved in for a guy who’s biggest deal was helping to buy Pacific Microsonics to get royalties from decoders nobody was buying of a dead on arrival format that sounded worse. What a corporate achievement in write offs.

 

This is what I am getting at! I’m not suggesting that ASR is truly scientific, nor that SBAF is 100% subjective. The greater community could be helped by an example of what proper studies smell like.

Regardless of ASR, I think there are many relatively new audio enthusiasts who would appreciate the option to view the results of double blind tests using human ears alongside measurements. I get that friends who have been around the block don’t care, because they have had personal experiences.

A coworker of mine, new to headphones, recently asked for my opinion of what he was planning to buy after he had done some research. He didn’t mention any sites, but he had been convinced by what he read that a THX amp was definitively proven to be the best, so there was no need to even try anything else. The conversation has been rattling around in my head.

 

Same as it ever was. Whatever the result, the other side will dismiss the test as flawed. It's hard to turn someone's opinion around after they decided what they want to believe.

 

Mmmm... that's always a bugger for me, too. And then on top of that, if they were to buy it, chances are it would sound like the best thing ever to them. And maybe it's the last thing they buy.

For them, that might not be a bad thing. I think maybe they don't care about it in the same way that people like us do. They don't want to do the footwork or put in inordinate time/money to actually determining what's best for them. So they take a cursory look and stop short. And chances are it still works out good enough for government work.

Most of use here are pickier because we have had that experience of picking up on things we don't like about the gear we've tried. Because of that we hone-in and try to rack up more experiences. We have an incentive to do so because notions of things sounding the same, or even just a general 'best' that's within reach literally do not align with our reality. It's not good enough. For those whom it IS good enough, it will never make sense for them to think differently.

That's also why I think time is the only cure. If you keep going with that mindset, you're eventually either going to hit snags you can't ignore, or have that experience that opens up a whole new world to you. Or you never do and stop pursuing it, in a stasis where you feel good about the setup you have and just kind of enjoy it.

I usually just tell people to buy something in their price range that's reputable and generally goes over well. And if they like it... stick with it until they don't anymore. Because you can't really develop a sense that there's more than there may seem to be, until you're actually at a point where you can't get away from it... the point where it's no longer a theory, but something you actually have to deal with one way or another.

I actually kind of envy that. I only wish I could get away from knowing and experiencing all of the differences in upstream gear. Things are forever more complicated from that point on. I think most people aren't really up for it, and that's probably good for them. Sometimes I really do wish I could have that easy stopping point where I could just read about something, buy it, and be satisfied enough with my experience to believe that it's the best.

 

Is it part of the audiophool thing that good sound has to be hard to achieve?

Very apt description. Just what I recall from my encounter with this man.

Thankfully, not too much big-corporate experience in my working life, but there was enough to see how well bullshit flies. And once the environment has been infected, bullshit promotes bullshit.

 

Amir figured out you can cut review time by 50% by only listening to single speaker

 

The conclusion my coworker reached after doing his research was that audio gear is now a “solved problem,” with $200 getting irrefutable perfection, and that it’s proven indistinguishable to the human ear. He thought that if this were not the case, someone somewhere would have posted evidence. It’s not difficult to understand how so many inexperienced people have reached the same conclusion.

I don’t expect that new information is going to sway anyone who already has a strong opinion. A few well-documented tests could help a lot of people who are just getting interested in audio.

As many have said before, it’s not that one product is better than the other, but that they are different. That measurements help, but the measurements we have today don’t tell us everything. Even when we have proof that gear measuring similarly can sound different to human ears, it isn’t enough to tell a reader what they’ll enjoy the most. It can be worthwhile to try various devices, even when we’re happy with what we have, and the perceived differences are not inevitably placebo induced delusions.

 

I think this is one of those, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink," kind of things. My hunch is that if you invited your buddy over to listen to your Starlett, he wouldn't be so rigid/dogmatic about his $200 setup anymore. Like @ultrabike and others have said, no amount of blind testing is going to change an ASR true believer's mind. As in @Hands' religion analogy, they aren't open to those possibilities. They prefer the comfort of absolute certainty. The real world where there is no absolute truth freaks some people out. Also, as an aside, who the heck wants to spend their time conducting blind tests? Life is short. I certainly wouldn't want to put that pressure on any of the senior members. Most have kids and a long list of better things to do. I will say that the existence of SBAF as a counterpoint to measurement extremism is vital. If SBAF hadn't existed and provided an alternative point of view, I could have been lured by the nwavguy bullshit (Amir wasn't around then). Like a lot of people first getting into audio and not having much money to spend, I read everything I could, from a wide array of different sources. At the time reddit was staunchly pro-nwavguy, and throwing dirt on Schiit was commonplace (this was before they extended an olive branch to the hardcore objectivists). But somehow I stumbled onto SBAF (likely from Tyll's comments), and I saw that there was this whole other ecosystem and way of thinking about/approaching audio. Slowly after hanging out here I picked up an HD600 and a Vali 2 and never looked back. There's not much more that SBAF can do besides provide an alternative point of view for those who seek it. We're not missionaries, and it's not our job to convert people from the ASR way of thinking (or not thinking). They have to choose not to drink the kool-aid.

 

yeah but APx555 has numbers on it!

I had exactly this experience with a good friend, too. Super smart guy, and legitimately is well read in psychoacoustics, tech, and stays abreast of current science across major disciplines. Easily MENSA/180+ IQ type.

Friend decides to put together a headphone rig and a stereo rig. Asks my opinion, so I say, try some Schiit - cheap, measures okay, sounds pretty good, and offer to let him borrow some of my gear. Immediately I get hit with "Oh! Audiosciencereview doesn't like that Schiit stuff - it's all marketing - no science."

What sucks even worse, is I offered up my Lyr3 for him to borrow - and it went into oscillation and popped something on the board while he was auditioning. He's now a fully devoted ASR/Topping guy because 0.000. C'est la vie.

I'm tempted to "force" him to try out the Elekit TU8600 I'm putting together, just to see if I can make any inroads in the "this can't sound as good as it does" given "poor" measurements.

 

Point him to an ASR 'review' & measurements and to an atomicbob measurement suite of the same item. Then ask him his opinion of the relative thoroughness of the technical assessments from that forum vs this one, and suggest he might benefit from some of the reviews at this one, too.

 

This is the key point for me and a big reason it took me a while to find an audio community online that I enjoy.

I understand that the nature of audio and associated technologies has a strong scientific basis. That's fine! I mean hell, so does my morning coffee. My issue is the dogmatic approach taken by many who have decided that the measurements reveal all.

For me, I can't imagine many things more personal that how each of us enjoys their music - or how our ears and brains interpret what our speakers, headphones, DACs and amps produce.

So many people are looking for something objective - I want the best XXX for YYY - that measurements and a community like ASR become incredibly appealing. I have just found that as I get older I have more confidence in what I like and don't like - while at the same time I'm a lot more relaxed about what other people do and don't do, as long as they are kind and respectful about it.

My big concern is that people who enter this hobby via sources like ASR are really missing out on the full spectrum of what they could be enjoying - and that's a shame.

 

There are lots of blind tests out there and a few in here too. The blind tests that get the publicity are the ones that show up the audiophool bullshit, like some expensive wire being no different to coathangers, or the guy who can absolutely, definitely-for-sure tell his super-expensive system from another, but, when it comes down to it... can't.

Now, all that is often real and perfectly valid, but just as one never sees the headline "Nobody dies in minor accident," one also seldom sees "Blind test shows there is a difference." Such tests are also for real and perfectly valid.

It's all part of the straw-man straw-argument obj/subj hifi-world straw-fist punch-up scene. You can't educate people in that scene. Most of them are false-premising each to death, and are too busy doing that to listen. Even their definitions of subjective and objective are often nonsense. It's best to not even go there (but most of us got sucked in at some time in our lives) but we can try to inject some sanity into the world to counteract the madness.