Psychoacoustics... where does it start and stop, whats the proof?
- Thread starter Cereal Killer
- Start date
rockingdoc
pfm Member
I like making up new cables, experimenting with materials, configuration, shielding etc. I diy; interconnects for sources, between pre and power amps, digital co-ax, speaker leads, TT arm cables etc. I can't help it, it may be an illness, but it keeps me amused and costs little money.
The most important thing is my test equipment, also known as my music loving, hi-Fi clueless wife. I subject her to regular single-blind trials, with which she is compliant, so long as she chooses the music.
Her results are usually restricted to; better, worse, or most often, makes no difference. She has no knowledge which cable may have taken hours of research and construction, compared with a simple length of B&Q's cheapest, and her reports of "makes no difference" can hurt. But I know she is right, despite my psychoacoustic mind wanting to tell me different.
Tell you what though, she saved us a fortune buying speakers. I just made sure she didn't know the cost of any that we demoed, and she went for a pair that cost less than a third of others I was interested in. So we ended up with Harbeth C7s, which I now love, but bear in mind that without my now trusted tester, I once shelled out for Wilson Watt/Puppies in the past on reviews alone, and ended up hating them in my system and room. I can't trust my own ears, because they are connected to my brain, which is full of other data about specification, reviews and cost which always clouds my judgement.
The most important thing is my test equipment, also known as my music loving, hi-Fi clueless wife. I subject her to regular single-blind trials, with which she is compliant, so long as she chooses the music.
Her results are usually restricted to; better, worse, or most often, makes no difference. She has no knowledge which cable may have taken hours of research and construction, compared with a simple length of B&Q's cheapest, and her reports of "makes no difference" can hurt. But I know she is right, despite my psychoacoustic mind wanting to tell me different.
Tell you what though, she saved us a fortune buying speakers. I just made sure she didn't know the cost of any that we demoed, and she went for a pair that cost less than a third of others I was interested in. So we ended up with Harbeth C7s, which I now love, but bear in mind that without my now trusted tester, I once shelled out for Wilson Watt/Puppies in the past on reviews alone, and ended up hating them in my system and room. I can't trust my own ears, because they are connected to my brain, which is full of other data about specification, reviews and cost which always clouds my judgement.
Mr Perceptive
Perceptive Member
Mark (I'm in a more civil mood today!), with the USB transfer the data is effectively being transferred from one block of memory (in a host computer) to another block of memory within a DAC, where it is then locally clocked out. There is no real time element to the USB transfer, so are you saying that the data is altered in some way (because it isn't otherwise the principles of digital electronics would fall apart). How can it be altered in such a way that it is different within the DAC.
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
How so? If 'USB is USB', ergo the cable doesn't matter, then surely the choice of port can matter even less?
Psychoacoustics is not psychology applied to acoustics.
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
But often the term is used in that way on forums such as this. I suspect the OP intended something along those lines. Whether or not the term has been used correctly, the context gives a fair degree of meaning to the term.
Alan Sircom
I dü werds, me
I'm not convinced psychoacoustics is in any danger of disappearing up its own fundament. Hopefully, when(!) the economic dust cloud has settled, psychoacoustics will be further developed by the work carried out in auditory neuroscience, but this shouldn't massively alter the existing psychoacoustics 'model'. The field of psychoacoustics is mature, but it is not 'done' and the next stages in the process almost all point to investigating the wetware.
If you examine the counter to the 'bits is bits' argument, in most cases the issues raised by audiophiles are not about the bits, but if you like what's happening 'around' the bits. So, it's whether any potential noise on the computer side makes it across to the audio side. Or, it's whether the ripping, encoding or decoding or data reduction processes are transparent. This is the root cause of the heated debates between 'audiophiles' (who often appear pathologically unable to parse the concept of "that doesn't matter") and 'objectivists' (who often appear pathologically unable to parse the concept of "that does matter").
When it comes to ultrasonics in audio, Ooashi aside there has been no robust evidence to show signals beyond 20kHz has any influence on the human condition. Although Ooashi's test was peer reviewed at the time, it is widely dismissed, because it was not corroborated. AFAIK, it has never been retested, so that corroboration is not likely to arrive soon.
I suspect companies sell 'high resolution' files because the words 'high quality' are so nebulous. I would happily pay a premium for a recording untainted by heavy-handed 'loudness war' signal compression and most of the high-rez data files give you precisely that; a file that presumes the system is capable of coping with wide dynamic range and full-range frequency response. An even better system would be a metadata tag that applies signal compression relative to the equipment the music is played on, but that would involve a recall of pretty much every music playing device on the planet to function properly.
Alan Sircom
I dü werds, me
Yes, but the naive usage is incorrect, and you shouldn't blur the lines this close to the subject matter.
Journalists use the term 'begging the question' when they mean 'inviting the question'. Begging the question really means using a thing as if self-evident: A must be true, because A is true. It's impossible to restore the original form of the statement in the public domain now, and it means those who want to use the term 'begging the question' now have to resort to the Latin form petitio principii, which inevitably weakens the flow of the argument because you have to explain what you are talking about, and why it's fallacious reasoning.
Psychoacoustics is the science of what happens to sound after it's done all the transmitting through the medium of air. It should perhaps be called Neurophysioacoustics, but it isn't. It is not the psychology of perception, and especially not the psychology of influence upon perception. These are different subjects. Please keep them that way.
Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
Well said. There's a fine line to tread between recognising that language changes and evolves, and keeping meanings precise when precision is necessary or useful in a particular context.
Alan Sircom
I dü werds, me
You used to pay a heck of a lot more than £2.50 for a gender changer, at least according to my late uncle Julie.
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Alan Sircom said:
An entirely fair point, which I take completely.
But, and this is my observation, Blzebub's dismissive response fails to engage with the OP, while also failing to explain why it is not engaging with the OP. That's not helpful.
A curt explanation as to why the term psychoacoustics was being applied incorrectly, would have sufficed, and avoided a half-page of discussion.
johnfromnorwich
even my wife noticed the dif..
As usual with the audio forum, there is more heat than light and much half understood opinion dressed up as concrete fact. Psychoacoustics should not be called 'Neurophysioacoustics' since the corpus of data and the focus of research is not overwhelmingly neurophysiological, but computational and behavioural. This is why it conventionally falls under he remit of Psychology and more recently, Cognitive Neuroscience. It's also a large part of what I do professionally.
Anyone genuinely interested in the subject should avail themselves of a copy of this book:
Bregman, A. S. (1990) Auditory scene analysis. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA
It's a corker and it lays out the variables underpinning the construction of auditory percepts (and why they are so labile) very clearly. It never leaves my desk.
Why waste time on people who don't know what words mean, and are too lazy to google?
Warren Day
pfm Member
"It is 1890, almost everything that can be invented has been invented."
sq225917
Bit of this, bit of that
Spacey, the likely truth obscured by marketing is thus.
It's silver plated copper wire. Silver plated because it has an extruded teflon dielectric- end of story. Any more flowery a description is marketing prose.
If it makes a reasonably broad difference you should be able to AB it blind. If you can't then 'maybe' there is no difference.
It's silver plated copper wire. Silver plated because it has an extruded teflon dielectric- end of story. Any more flowery a description is marketing prose.
If it makes a reasonably broad difference you should be able to AB it blind. If you can't then 'maybe' there is no difference.
Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
I think you over-did it when putting your clocks back.
Cereal Killer
432
Sue, you're being condescending. The reason for me to include the USB debate and trial is to put it in the context of the hobby and give it relevance. You fail to understand that this is intertwined.
Alan Sircom
I dü werds, me
I agree, I was overcorrecting. I apologise.
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Well, not posting at all would have wasted even less time, and would have saved you the time spent responding to the inevitable replies to your post.
Your post, and the reply quoted above, makes it look as though you simply intended to express your contempt for the OP. Your prerogative, but it would have advanced the debate, and possibly the OP's understanding, if you'd chosen to explain why it deserved that contempt.