Golden Earring wrote: > Hi Stephen! > > Accepting that "alternative facts" appear to be much in vogue these > days, would you mind clarifying which particular facts I have cited you > believe to be incorrect? > > I'm happy to stand corrected if I have made an error. It is not my > intention to promulgate any kind of propaganda. > >
Been there, done that and the public record of this forum shows that you replaced the hoped for polite, rational answers with personal attacks and obfuscation. Here they are again: False claim: > > As in many fields, once you manage to penetrate the bs, there is an > 80/20 rule at work which means that to achieve any meaningful/audible > improvement will require an ever-increasing level of design > sophistication & quality control effort in production meaning £££'s > being spent in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. > Description of error: There is a law of diminishing returns that is particularly applicable to audio, but it is far more harsh than 80/20. At this time other than loudspeakers and rooms no further meaningful improvements in audible performance are possible at all. One about a dollar or less is spent on most major audio component parts (ICs like op amp and digital converters), no further audible improvements can be obtained because the existing ones already cause no audible degradation of the signals they process. False claim: > > Having said all that, I wish my music system to operate in order to > suspend my disbelief that I am listening to sophisticated electronics > and fancy transducers when I want to think that I am listening to music. > Ultimately there must be a subjective element to this, and indeed a > personal one, depending upon which aspects of a real musical performance > one feels most important: enjoying music is after all an emotional > experience. > An interesting question that can be answered is how much satisfaction can be obtained when most forms of subjective gratification are held constant, such as in blind tests. Explained: Your apparent error is the claim that the only means for determining the value of an audio system are purely subjective. Accuracy is a widespread standard that is used for evaluating sound quality and is not subjective, it is an measurable property that can be ranked on an objective scale. You seem to have used the words "Blind test" as some sort of an incantation without really understanding what that involves. That I think you may have even admitted this. I see no evidence that you know what one involves or how to do one, or supervise others to them. Some alleged engineer that you found on the street is not a suitable authority, and there is no necessary connection between the ownership of technical gear and knowledge of how to properly use it. > > I myself consider that I'm getting close when a reproduction makes the > hairs on the back of my neck stand up - I most commonly get this > response listening to exceptional vocalists, although solo piano is a > good test of system too because 1. it's a difficult signal to reproduce > accurately because of the initial transients to each note, from the > variable hammer action of the internal mechanism of the instrument, and > 2. because most of us have a pretty good idea of what a real piano > played live sounds like. > I have witnessed and even been part of literally thousands of public musical performances, and rarely if ever do the hairs on any part of my body stand up. I know of no reliable connection between the condition of one's hair and sonic accuracy. While the above may be romantic, I don't think it has any kind of widely accepted meaning. Given how little live music is actually listened to and how much of that is actually an electronic fiction, I serious doubt the above statement. Furthermore, every live venue puts its own sonic imprint on the music listened to in it. This means that you may know what a flute sounds like played by a certain artist playing a certain work in a certain musical context in a certain room if you are sitting at a certain place in that room, but change any of those variables and you are only speculating. > > I usually buy components for my system second-hand whenever possible, or > look for ex-demo bargains when something I want cannot easily be > acquired s/h. A major reason for this is of course that I am a > skin-flint, but joking aside, until you hook a piece of kit up with your > other gear in your own listening room and then listen to the result > intensively for a couple of weeks at least, you will not know if it > improves your musical enjoyment. > While that is true to an extent, reality is that if I did a blind listening test in your room with your last 3 amplifiers, or DACs, or digital players, odds are extremely good that you would be reduced to random guessing. The strongest variable controlling the sound of your audio system is the room, and lots of changes usually happen in other areas for every significant change in the room. > > There are plenty of combinations of kit which don't work well together, > and a rare few that have a synergistic effect. > There are specific technical features that put into place in just about all audio gear to falsify that idea, and most of them are highly effective. As long as you stay clear of junk or tubed amplifiers, most components interface very well, thank you. > > And also something that sounds good initially may induce "listening > fatigue" after a longer audition. > That can happen, but again if you avoid sheerest junk or the darlings of the high end press like analog tape, vinyl and tubed gear, it is pretty rare. > > Like others on this site, I have an enquiring mind and am interested in > how the "magic" of producing music from a bunch of boxes can be achieved > and I thoroughly endorse the scientific method as the only rational way > to proceed. I would note though that "science" is not actually a body of > knowledge but rather a set of working hypotheses each of which can never > be definitely proved but can only be definitively disproved by readily > repeatable experiments the results of which disagree with the prediction > of the theory. So we always need to be careful making definitive > statements of the nature of "science says x, so you must be wrong" > unless the specific matter in question has already been subjected to > those repeated experiments which have confirmed the validity of our > current hypothesis to this situation, and someone is claiming a result > contrary to those experimental findings. > Sounds to me like you have invented a science of your own, based on hypothesis that are fairly easy to prove false with bias controlled listening tests. I'll baldly say, science falsifies a lot of your claims here, as I have already suggested. > > Some working hypotheses even after being shown to be incorrect in > certain aspects can still be of use in other circumstances: I believe > that the USA put their men on the moon using Newton's Laws of Motion, > even though they had already been long supplanted by Einstein's Theory > Of Relativity. > That's false. Relativity was well known at the time of the moon landings, and adjustments to account for it had to be made in certain critical areas, even back then. Computers were used to work out the flight plans and there were relativistic adjustments that were at least examined to see if they were relevant. You seem to have no clue about this sort of thing or many other areas of technology. Relativistic adjustments have to be made in common implementations of modern technology such as cell phones and GPS or they just don't work. > > Einstein's theories themselves remain unproved - they simply have not > yet been disproved. > Actually some of Einstein's theories or obvious applications of them are held in serious question. OTOH very many of them are as good as 100% true in many common modern applications, some already mentioned. I don't think you appreciate a fundamental principle of Science which is: "All findings of Science are provisional, just until we find something better." That's as true of everything as well las anything. Water flows down hill, and the earth is round, right? Well, sorta and surely if given that... The earth is actually pear shaped, for example! > > Equally, our latest theories about digital music reproduction are not > definitively proven, and we may later reach a greater depth of > understanding. Just saying... > I don't know what you are talking about. What part of digital music technology is questionable? IME, it all works, and more closely in accordance with its theories than many of its predecessors. Wanna see a theoretical mess? Let's talk about analog! Now there is a second chance. If you choose to dishonor my attempts to communicate with you a second time, then any pretense of logic, reason or even mere politeness is on your part is proven false. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ arnyk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64365 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914
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