"Audio Guy" wrote in message
news:LzkQa.48647$GL4.13222@rwcrnsc53...
In article ,
(S888Wheel) writes:
Now answer the part you so conveniently snipped (which you often
decry when others do it) "What I am trying to get you to acknowledge
is whether sound is the only possible mechanism for the delivery of
music. Is it or isn't it?"

I said


Definitely not. However that fact is not relevant to the issue of
sonic
differences between amps.


OK, sound isn't the only mechanism, nor is it relevant, please go on.



Watching a performance profoundly affects how we hear it. Music was
never an
audio only phenomenon before recording and playback. Like I said that
fact is
not relevant to the issue of "audible" differences in components.

OK, I guess I'll have to explain something I thought was implicit in
this discussion, that the discussion at hand is about audio
reproduction devices, and also add that Elmir, for one, feels that
that music reproduction is the only important factor in the
discussion. But I agree totally with you, music per se has no
relevance to the discussion of the audible differences in audio
amplifiers, only sound.


Wait a minute, wait a minute. Only sound? There is no music until the
brain has processed the sound and interpreted it as music. And that is the
primary reason music reproduction is not simply electrical and physical
engineering. Their is no way to measure *music*. Ultimately whether the
music strikes our brain as right, or the brain tells us something is amiss,
is not "objectively" measurable. The only way to objectify it is by
allowing humans to interpret it as music, and then to develop tests to try
to record that *subjective* response in ways that can generate some
*objective* results in the statistical sense. And there is the rub. It
demands context for the brain to interpret what is going on. Let me give
you a non-musical example that I use here before...about a year and a half
ago, I think.

Suppose you hear a split second of a car crash. That's all...half a second
of indecipherable noise. You wouldn't even know what it was. However, if
you heard a recording of street sounds, and auto approaching, a squeal of
tires, and then the crash, you would know what you were hearing. And if you
heard it through two different systems you could probably which one sounded
"most real". However, if all your heard were two snippets of sound of the
crash itself, my guess is your brain would be trying so hard to make sense
of what you were hearing you couldn't evaluate anything in the way of which
sounded most "real" because you didn't know what "real" was.

Something similar happens with music but even more complex. Because
scientist now know that the brain is hardwired to respond to this thing we
call "music", both rhythmically and emotionally. Further the work done by
Oohashi et al (The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 83 No. 6 June 2000, pp.
3548-3558) indicated that this emotional response took place over time, as
much as twenty seconds of time, from the time of the sound. Presumable this
is the time it takes the brain to recognize and interpret the music as
pleasurable, unpleasurable, rhythmically coherent or incoherent, etc.

This fundamental fact means that you cannot measure "sound" and determine
its impact as "music". The factors affecting how we respond to music are
apparently very subtle and "time-based" and "harmony-based" and not static.
But a short burst comparison without much in the way of context for
recognition, relaxation, and response (which is the way most short-interval
testing is done) tends to short-circuit the process. This is the objection
must "subjectivists" have to ABX'ng in practice and why they question "null
results" that seem so at odds with so many people's otherwise fairly clear
perceptions of differences.

Oohashi et al indicate in the quoted article that they have confirmed this
speculation. That is, they have used short-interval comparisons of music,
and found "no difference" in ratings in line with accepted believe. But
when using "long-intervals" using the same stimuli and sequentially monadic
ratings, the achieved statistically significant differences in response to
the two stimuli.

You "amps is amps" people seem to want to ignore this finding, which is
pretty earthshaking and has nothing to do with whether you think the
"ultrasonic" portion of this test was done correctly or not, since
presumable the same stimulus was used in the precursor test (although to be
fair this should have been better documented in the article rather than
treated as almost a passing reference). This finding alone, if
substantiated by others, would rule out much of the abx and possibly most of
the dbt's done to date.

And, Tom, before you say it, I know dbt'ng doesn't *have* to be done that
way, but the fact is most of it has been done that way.

Back to the main point; evaluating components is *not* hearing differences,
but evaluating how possible differences effect emotional and rhythmic
response from us as humans. There is a big difference. And the answer to
the "there have to be differences fist" response is....how do you not know
there aren't if the test itself tends to short circuit those responses.
This is why there have been requests for evidence of rigor in the testing
and for validation of the abx and abc/hr testing themselves versus other
forms of testing (for example the sequential proto-monadic used by Oohashi
et al which do purport to measure differences. it cannot just be assumed
away.