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Tests for proof of Audibility

tonerei

tonerei

pfm Member
Quote 'I'm an easy kind of guy. Just show me the proof of audibility of all these supposed improvement in USB and I'll shut my mouth.

Sure it can't hurt to have cleaner power supplies and better technical specification and superlative build quality. But if best measured performance is the goal, the best way to check this is to measure it.'

Quote pulled from a thread on this forum. Can somebody please show me the links or supply the equipment to conduct proof of audibility improvements?

Lots of folk when they don't like the look of a thread ask for these tests to be conducted. If they have been done before and are easily available please let me know?

If double blind abx is all that is to offer please don't bother posting a reply.

Like wigwam I had a good look around posts on this forum and with the exception of CA very few threads ever question anybody's view on something they have heard or used. No special audibility tests are required or requested. Even hifi racks seem to get past:rolleyes:
 
Asking people on the forum is pointless, I really don't know why people bother asking anyone but the designer or company involved. Then again it's just a ruse anyway but I do my best to help people.
 
Sure I know Clive but it is demanded by some people so they should be able to provide the equipment or methodology that is used in these widely used and requested tests.
Examples of how they have used those tests. Have they bought their own equipment based on these audibility and sound quality tests etc.
 
tonerei said:
If double blind abx is all that is to offer please don't bother posting a reply.
Click to expand...
"Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me".
Gordon Holt, founder of Stereophile.
 
Losing the will to live reading this already. Go listen to some bloody music and stop worrying about it.
 
Colourful - but I see no evidence that 'the real world' cares in the slightest about the measurement of audio gear.
 
Not sure I fall into 'the real world' but seeing as it's me quoted by the OP let me respond to him.

I care about how my gear measures, when I replaced the tweeters in my current speakers with better ones I did so because I knew the tweeters had a steep falloff in the low teens. My current Raal tweeters improved this, in fact they seriously flattened the measured response. The same is true of alterations to my turntable PSU, to the entire reiterative build process around my phonostage and pretty much anything else I 'modify'.

I expect the same from people who try to sell me stuff. I expect honesty, integrity and the application of science and design rigour. Sure I don't mind a house curve here and there, but what I don't appreciate is someone pissing on my shoes and telling me it's 'magic rain'.

When I swap components as best as possible I look to blind AB them, usually with the help of a friend. If that's not possible then sometimes an application, or multiple audio sources can be used to the same ends. Sure there's some people out there who aren't looking for measured fidelity in their playback system, that's fine, they can buy whatever they want. But just preferring the sound of one thing over another when you can see what is being played doesn't mean dick, it doesn't mean you do genuinely prefer one to the other, it doesn't even ensure a difference exists, it just means you have had an opportunity to communicate your feelings, no more no less.

So if a trade member wants to tell us that 'new usb' is better than old usb, then said trade member surely has to back that up with facts? Or keep their stupid ideas to themselves and in the trade section where they belong- just my opinion. There's a reason people don't question the views of others on say valves, turntables or speakers, that's because there's a huge evidence base that differences are real and measurable. The reason CA gets picked up is because the same rigour does not exist and there's no large evidence base to back up the audibility of fancy usb cables, usb power supplies, sata cables, software players and so forth.

Did you ever stop to wonder why manufacturers of these items don't choose to undertake these tests? Just imagine how much better than all their competitors their product would sell could they 'prove' it worked?
 
Ah, is this all about that 'the age of USB' twaddle?

I rather took 'the real world' to be those existing outside of forums such as this - I doubt many are losing sleep over the question of USB development - perhaps if they are intending to buy a new memory stick...

As you say, it probably does belong in the trade discussion section of the forum but it's such a dull premise I haven't actually read any of it.
 
YNWOAN said:
Colourful - but I see no evidence that 'the real world' cares in the slightest about the measurement of audio gear.
Click to expand...

If you define the real world as "those who do not care about audio" then sure. But you have twisted the question slightly. If you revise it to "care in the slightest that the audio gear delivers the benefits claimed by the industry" then it is a larger group.

Consider: Sony says on the one hand (complete with stair-stepped graph) that hi-res sounds much closer to the original than CD. Yet when it comes to a demo, CD vs hi-res is never compared, only CD vs MP3, and that for the shortest time with dubious attention to source and matching:

http://gadgets.itwriting.com/2933-e...1es-player-at-the-audio-lounge-in-london.html

What does this tell us about the audiophile industry?

Tim
 
In the world of science, new technology or the improvement of knowledge occurs using accepted methods. Simply, come up with a theory, suggest a rational explanation and then test, rigorously the cause and effect.

What many audio "experts" seem use is the following method. Pick up a slight understanding of a system, suggest a new theory and then affirm the "truth" in the face of any requests for rationality. Many of these experts are self taught. They cannot show any qualifications or experience of the technologies involved.
 
tonerei said:
Can somebody please show me the links or supply the equipment to conduct proof of audibility improvements?
...

If double blind abx is all that is to offer please don't bother posting a reply.
Click to expand...

Can you make up your mind, please? :)
 
mudlark said:
What many audio "experts" seem use is the following method. Pick up a slight understanding of a system, suggest a new theory and then affirm the "truth" in the face of any requests for rationality. Many of these experts are self taught. They cannot show any qualifications or experience of the technologies involved.
Click to expand...

But that is the beauty of it. We can all escape from the crushing domination by faceless technocrats producing complex technology that nobody understands, and instead enjoy a simple and beautiful world where magic is possible and anyone with enough passion and faith can come up with wonderful things...
 
Julf said:
But that is the beauty of it. We can all escape from the crushing domination by faceless technocrats producing complex technology that nobody understands, and instead enjoy a simple and beautiful world where magic is possible and anyone with enough passion and faith can come up with wonderful things...
Click to expand...
There a different spin I can offer here. If a technically good designer produces a good sounding piece of kit they really don't want to be show the detail of what they've done as it will be copied or at least allow people to home in on what they've done so well - industry (not just hifi) is rife with copycats. A good strategy is to do the technical work well, gain good reputation for SQ and sell the products well. This may involve some marketing which doesn't please the technical purists but the point was made by ynwoan, "the market" doesn't care about detailed measurements.

BTW, I don't believe the thread is about USB but the OP can clarify.
 
clivem2 said:
Asking people on the forum is pointless, I really don't know why people bother asking anyone but the designer or company involved. Then again it's just a ruse anyway but I do my best to help people.
Click to expand...

Exactly, the whole basis of the thread is specious.

First: define audibility. Consult the relevant research.

Here is an example of WHY the question is effectively unanswerable:
For 20 years my best friend was a Japanese woman, she was ardent in her desire to learn English, both as a written and spoken language.
As with the vast majority of Japanese, of her age group, she was unable to pronounce L and R as different sounds (phonoms), I was curious as to why this was (is) and as I worked at a major post grad college I had access to the sort of library that most would consider a luxury. I discovered some research that had been carried out by some linguistics scientists who had discovered that the reason that i.e. Japanese could not pronounce the different L and R sounds was because they cannot hear them, basically the research concluded that when born a Human baby can hear All the possible sounds that a Human can make, but by approximately 6 months old it becomes unable to HEAR any sound (phonom) to which it has not been exposed during those 6 months.
The research they had carried out focussed on 2 European languages one of which had a smaller number of sounds and the other of which had a larger number. They discovered that a speaker of the first was unable to HEAR the extra sounds of the second (and therefore reproduce them) whereas the speaker of the second was able to HEAR all the sounds in both languages and reproduce them.

From this you should have surmised that audibility is not simply a function of acuity, but is also culturally based.

I'm British, I grew up having been exposed only to English until the age of 12, I'm completely unable to pronounce many Polish words, I know why but that doesn't make it any less amusing for my many Polish friends.

There would be only one way for me to overcome this problem, that would be to use a learning system such as Rosetta where I taught myself to hear a sound by comparing a visual trace of my attempt against that of a native speaker.

It is inevitable that a recording engineer from, say, Lithuania or Poland will hear artefacts that will be inaudible to an English counterpart.
 
pcutter seems to have made a useful point here.

The experts will take this a s evidence that their hearing is better trained to hear digital and other artifacts when the scum like me hear little difference.

That's fine with me, I enjoy my music greatly.

As I have said before I seem to prefer the Quad 303 to the 405 and there's just no obvious reason for this.

I enjoy my cyrus power amps believing the sound to be largely free of that horrible mess when hifrequency speakers distort the sound.
 
Very interesting points pcutter1. This links into (but is not the same as) how dyslexics often don't and can't follow lyrics. This is because the phonological processing part of their brain becomes overloaded and can't process the sounds fast enough to enable them to decode the sounds into words.
 
pcutter1 said:
Exactly, the whole basis of the thread is specious.

First: define audibility. Consult the relevant research.

Here is an example of WHY the question is effectively unanswerable
Click to expand...

Interesting research, but this seems to me another argument for the value of blind testing, rather than showing that audibility is unprovable (of course it is unprovable in the most general case but we should be able to get results for "most humans").

It shows that you cannot separate hearing from the way our brains are trained/evolved which is why sighted tests for audibility cannot work.

It does raise the possibility that one group might hear things another group does not - whether that's Japanese, trained listeners, hi-fi nuts or whatever. However that in itself is not hard to test.

Tim
 
pcutter1 said:
Exactly, the whole basis of the thread is specious.

First: define audibility. Consult the relevant research.

Here is an example of WHY the question is effectively unanswerable:
For 20 years my best friend was a Japanese woman, she was ardent in her desire to learn English, both as a written and spoken language.
As with the vast majority of Japanese, of her age group, she was unable to pronounce L and R as different sounds (phonoms), I was curious as to why this was (is) and as I worked at a major post grad college I had access to the sort of library that most would consider a luxury. I discovered some research that had been carried out by some linguistics scientists who had discovered that the reason that i.e. Japanese could not pronounce the different L and R sounds was because they cannot hear them, basically the research concluded that when born a Human baby can hear All the possible sounds that a Human can make, but by approximately 6 months old it becomes unable to HEAR any sound (phonom) to which it has not been exposed during those 6 months.
The research they had carried out focussed on 2 European languages one of which had a smaller number of sounds and the other of which had a larger number. They discovered that a speaker of the first was unable to HEAR the extra sounds of the second (and therefore reproduce them) whereas the speaker of the second was able to HEAR all the sounds in both languages and reproduce them.

From this you should have surmised that audibility is not simply a function of acuity, but is also culturally based.

I'm British, I grew up having been exposed only to English until the age of 12, I'm completely unable to pronounce many Polish words, I know why but that doesn't make it any less amusing for my many Polish friends.

There would be only one way for me to overcome this problem, that would be to use a learning system such as Rosetta where I taught myself to hear a sound by comparing a visual trace of my attempt against that of a native speaker.

It is inevitable that a recording engineer from, say, Lithuania or Poland will hear artefacts that will be inaudible to an English counterpart.[/QUOTE]

Why?

You have made a series of assumptions about how we learn & perceive language and then applied your conclusions as to how we perceive music.

Completely different parts of the brain are involved. Ther is no link between the two types of perception.

Chris
Click to expand...
 
Mescalito said:
Why?

Completely different parts of the brain are involved. Ther is no link between the two types of perception.
Click to expand...
Well, there's a grain of truth in it, in that the ability to perceive certain kinds of sonic distortions and artefacts in music reproduction can be acquired - I think that's the take-home message. Hearing the effects of MP3 compression is easier when you know what kinds of sounds the codec chokes on, for e.g. Fundamental audibility thresholds are another matter, however - you can't learn to hear sound waves of 25 kHz for e.g.

Alex
 
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