ASR Member Takes Offense At Real Science; Also Cries

SBAF Mr. Bean my ass @ChaChaRealSmooth. Too AZN for that. Try an Uncle Roger.

 

Imagine the only purpose of cooking is to sanitize the food.

 

The like is purely for shock value and to express my pity.

...but, seriously tho - you gotta be trollin' man? Right? Right!?

 

This.

Here's my rant.

I hung out with an old friend this weekend who is a music producer with several dozens of popular albums under his belt. He's always interested and amused by my gear cycling, interest in cables, DACs, and amps. I was describing to him my new ZMFs. He, of course, mixes with monitors, but he told me he's been using the same old imperfect Sennheisers as a reference for decades. He teaches production from time to time and tells his students there are no perfect headphones or audio chains - that the most important thing is to pick something and learn the f**k out of it. He said nothing sounds like the studio and mastering suite, everything is different. The point for his students is that it's about learning how things translate from the studio to the world. It's always a translation and always different in different ways.

Fact: technology, language included, always mediates. The thing I always find baffling is how the ASR folks are in search of some kind of "pure" unmediated experience of the sound. It. Does. Not. Exist. It is always a re-presentation. It makes me think about the member formally known as @dematted who said something to the effect that ASR was like a positivist revival tent. More than this, I am always baffled at how un-fun these people are and how unwilling they are to enjoy the hobby. They're always spouting off about how we should not trust our ears - we're talking about listening to music.

Something I have learned in my relatively short audiophile interest is how utterly, richly, deliciously complicated sound reproduction is. It's so much more complex than film/video displays where you work with calibrated displays and if that red is not the red you see on the calibrated display, then it's incorrect. While there are arguments and subtleties in there, it's more straightforward.

@rhythmdevils post resonates for me. There are always choices being made about how to represent the sound information. Looking at companies like Schiit, Geshelli, ZMF, there are opinions, interests, obsessions expressed in how the sound information is translated into actual sound. I always love @baldr 's idea of listening to music with a good sounding system as producing a feeling of carousing. Someone working with that idea as an operating theory is going to make gear I'm interested in. The information itself is a rich field of possibility. I think @rhythmdevils is right, there is an art as to how to translate this into the experience.

What I love about SBAF and you guys is the interest in figuring out why something sounds good to you - and maybe to others - using a combination of comparison, measurements, and your own enjoyment. Plus you're all crabby and hilarious.

While the OP cries about accuracy, problematic double-blind listening trials and calls us all fart smellers (takes one to know one), I will continue to have fun with the different ways I can enjoy listening to music and talking about it with my friends.

End rant.

 

OMG some of you guys needs to stop making ultra long posts in a thread like this. It's becoming autistic.

 

ultra long for extra enjoyment.

 

Gee whiz, what a reductive way of looking at things, guy. It's like saying we humans are born just to procreate, which I think you should hold off from for the time being. Judging by the use of "lmfao," I assume you're quite young, spry, and browse Reddit a lot. I'll give a few free life lessons: don't oversimplify things so much, and read what you wrote at least twice before sending because you contradicted yourself quite a bit. Also, stay off Reddit!

Jokes aside, whoever came up with the title deserves a prize.

 

I think this is a really interesting point and something I've been thinking about a lot since I finished reading Floyd Toole's sound reproduction book. The following is a theory based on Toole's view on speaker measurements extrapolated to headphone measurements.

Headphone frequency response measurements the way they are currently taken on a head and torso simulator seem to me to be analogous to a speaker's steady state in room measurements, which actually correlate poorly with perceived performance above the transition frequency. Because of this, Toole says that the steady state in room response (above the transition frequency) should not be used as the bases for equalization, and equalizing to a flat steady state in room response can actually make the perceived sound worse. Small changes in mic position will result in huge changes in the measured in room FR, similar to how minor changes in ear cup position can result in large changes in measured headphone FR.

Toole states that speaker equalization should be based on anechoic on and off axis measurements (the spinorama data), as this is the best prediction of the speakers will actually sound in typical room. The exception is for bass management below the transition frequency, where room modes dominate.

The consequence is that a good performing speaker (flat on axis with well behaved off axis performance) will have good in room measurements. The reverse is not necessarily true, good in room measurements does not guarantee a good performing speaker.

Taking the analogy from speakers to headphones one step further, it seems like we need to figure out what the analog of the "spinorama" measurements are for headphones. A method of measuring headphones that is not dependent on "the room" (ie the head and torso) and is therefore not subject to the high variability from minor positional changes and also more generalizable to all "typical rooms" (ie our actual head and torsos, which are all different just as listening rooms are). I have no idea what this would look like and it would also also require more research to determine what the preferred and ideal "headphone spinorama" target should be, but this theoretical measurement suite might correlate better to what headphones actually sound like. The information from the CSD and some other supplementary measurement may also be contained in the "headphone spinorama," as Toole argues that CSD measurements for speakers are redundant as any ringing or diffractions show up in the spin data.

I could be way off base here, and please let me know if so, but this is the type of stuff that has been on my mind after reading Toole's book when I read threads like this and thought I would share.

 

In the name of music, we shall fight! If a non-audiophile person reads this thread it would seem like a religious argument.

If one is "seeking" true music enjoyment; no numbers, figures or gear will satisfy. Such a person will have to continuously hone his listening skill and learn to listen to music without the mind meddling. Gears might be a stepping stone, but that is what all gears would be - a stepping stone. In the end, through music one is just seeking.

Graphs, charts, numbers can probably satisfy the mind, take sides, identify with one school of thought or the other. But there is no music here. Just vocabulary in an attempt to describe what cannot be described. How can I ever hope to describe impact of music that is my experiential reality? I may claim my headphone rig is the best in the world even better the Senheisser's 60K headphone system. People may bring pitch fork and all measurements to claim I'm a liar. But if its my experiential reality what else even matters?

Numbers do matter in checking production quality. Without objective measure how else would one know if a gear is working as intended.

But for a listener, it's a cycle. Where one is convinced what he/she knows or understands is the absolute correct thing. Only to later discover there is more to what they once knew. This cycle continues till the listeners gives in to the fact that they don't really know or understand much. That there is no other way than to just listen.

 

There is a little bit of truth behind this, but hey, open mouth, make noise, some of it might be right. And whilst I understand that blind tests are actually entirely about ears and the sound, and are, thus entirely subjective I've always been too lazy to even attempt a proper one. I respect those, here and elsewhere, that do.

The OP and I probably have just one thing in common: talking about the principle of blind tests but never doing them. Because I bet he hasn't either.

Good point. I'll skip the next two pages. With all due respect to those who will have posted good stuff.

When I first looked, there was only one reply, and I thought, @Lyander has said it all, there, no need for any more, thread over, I'll move along.

 

All audio is colored by your brain, which removes the room and bleed. All recorded audio is colored by the mic and then amplifying that signal 20 to 70 decibels with a mic preamp. Stack up 4 to 48 track of that and there is no transparent. Processing it to remove the things your brain would remove so the recorded audio sounds similar to how it does in reality adds distortion.

Converters? Well f**k me Jesus, good luck optimizing a filter at 44.1 or 48 khz, the common formats for digital audio because originally digital audio had to be stored on video tape. How much band rejection do you realistically need? How much ringing do you want? Is your recording acoustic, guitar speakers that cut out, or has it been processed with multiband limiters like FM so every frequency in the audible spectrum is filled with volume? Then all of the line stages have distortion. Every single one. If they sounded the same, Texas Instruments wouldn't have a web page entitled "Find An Audio Op Amp For You"

Then the evaluation boards of these converter ICs might cost a couple hundred bucks. Someone like Apogee, Lavry, or Weiss has a high price point to crush the reference designs because they sell 9000 dollar fully loaded converters. SMSL no f'ing way and they must cheap it out massively and use counterfeit parts, whatever is cheap and on hand, to make a profit.

 

There should be a "lol" button in the like bar.

 

I wonder what is the science or mental process behind the idea of someone decided to hold his fart for 3 years and had to purposely let it out in a public place...

 

Do people actually still believe stuff like this? I'm genuinely baffled. I mean it's like saying that a video camera's only purpose is to capture an image and any "colour" is a failure, except there are clear differences between say a RED Dragon camera and an Arri Alexa, before you even get into post processing and those differences are expected and even embraced. Videographers and cinematographers are going to interpret the image to get a desired result and they will use certain cameras because they know they capture the image in a certain way. Similarly, amp and DAC designers have a vision about the sound they are trying to impart, and will design the component in line with that vision.

I always imagine people who believe what the OP believes would rather jerk off to measurements than listen to music.

 

Some people are so frightened of the world around them that they need to flatten things to simple solutions and easy to digest answers. They take an “either/or” view instead of “yes, and”. They then have to aggressively defend their chosen stances because the solidity of their whole worldview rests upon them being true.

 

That is pretty on-brand for here though

 

Took that long to draft the post.