"Joe Sensor" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:
What is needed ... is long-term blind listening tests


I have to agree with Arny. I can't see why listening long term increases
someone's ability to discern small differences.


I guess I'm not explaining things clearly enough to overcome your
preconceptions.

The problem is Arny thinks people's auditory memory is about 1/10 of a
second. I dunno, maybe his is. I can remember things I heard 40 years ago.

I can remember things 20 years ago, or 10, that are much better than they
were.

geoff

"SSJVCmag" wrote in message
...
On 5/12/05 1:28 AM, in article , "Steven
Sullivan" wrote:

This 'trust your ears' business that audiophiles tend to use as a mantra,
reflects a fundamental overestimation of how 'trustworthy' your ears
are,

Not so, if we want to keep this a working discussion (and leave no
loopholes
to wilgle throuhj semantically!) then it's about letting
'Trust Your Ears'

Please stiop cross-posting this stuff. We really are not remotely
interested in it.

geoff

Geoff Wood wrote:
"Chel van Gennip" wrote

Theoretically it is possible for a component in your audio chain to be
sensitive for differences in power cables. The solution is to remove that
component and destroy it because it is an inferiour component. Replacing
the power cable is not a sensible option.

Which component would this be ?

Here's a suitably contrived example:

An unbalanced unscreened mic cable with a hi-z mic on the end of it,
running close to a normal unshielded power cable, so it picks up hum.
You could replace the power cable with a shielded one, and it might be
that there was no significant other source of interference in the room
so the hum goes away in that case - but of course the correct cure would
be to replace the mic cable with a screened one.

I said it was contrived :-)

--
Anahata
-+- http://www.treewind.co.uk
Home: 01638 720444 Mob: 07976 263827

What is needed -- and I could name several well-known people who
agree with
me -- is long-term blind listening tests in which people simply sit
down and
listen for pleasure. Properly conducted, such testing would would
provide useful
information about "how" people listen, what they think they hear, and
establish
a baseline for judging "subjective" and "objective" testing.

I think this is an important point. DBTs are great, and inarguably
valid from a certain point of view. But testers in these settings tend
to listen "hard", with the analytical part of their minds and their
sensory aparatus, and much less so with their intuitive, subjective,
emotional side. It's arguable that since music in particular is
generally consumed by listeners in the latter state, a rigidly
"objective" analysis may miss something.

It reminds me of some of my bad gear decisions through my life as a
music/audio enthusiast. Back in the 70s, I conducted a serious search
for better speakers to replace my very enjoyable but somewhat limited
KLH 17s (these were relatively affordable 60s era 2 way acoustic
suspension bookshelf speakers, well regarded but nothing particularly
special or expensive). After exhaustive research including many, many
hours of critical listening tests, dozens of magazine reviews and so
on, I chose the Advent "Large" speakers (their first product). They
sounded really wonderful to me, better than any of my other candidates,
and had received unanimously glowing reviews in the audio press. I
brought them home, set them up in place of the KLHs and prepared to be
very pleased. Initially, as I "evaluated" my choice, they proved to be
every bit as good as I had hoped; very wide frequency response, low
distortion, excellent dispersion and so on. I was rockin!

Or was I...

After passing my post-purchase evaluation process with flying colors,
of course the next thing was to just relax and enjoy music on them, and
that's where it all started to go wrong. No sooner had I switched off
my "objective", analytical mind when I began to realize I was no longer
enjoying my favorite music as much. Something was interfering with the
connection between the emotional intent of the musical performance and
my sense of it. Very disturbingly, the magic was somehow gone from my
favorite albums. I immediately isolated the speakers as the problem of
course, because they were the only element that had changed. The
curious thing though was that every time I put my analytical "hat" back
on. the Advents simply blew the KLHs away in every single way, and were
clearly excellent performers, as everyone else seemed to agree. Forget
the analysis though, put the "enjoy music" hat back on and...big
problem.

I never got past it, and ultimately sold the Advents and went back to
the KLHs. The magic came right back, and once again my favorite music
could take me to the joyous, transcendant places it had before. Similar
experiences happened other times with speakers and other hi-fi gear,
enough to make me painfully aware of the pitfalls of "critical"
listening.

There may also be an element in DBTs that, as a side effect of their
"objectivity", doesn't incorporate a level of sensory experience that
*transcends* the objective, and could thereby have significant
consequences in terms of judgements thus made.

Offerered respectfully for your consideration...

Ted Spencer, NYC

William,

The purpose of long-term blind listening is ... to simply see how we
listen, and how we react to a particular system.

Okay, fine. But long term, like a month, includes effects such as:

* Your spouse is in a bad mood lately and bugs you all the time with petty
complaints.

* The restaurant where you eat lunch every day hired a new chef who uses
more garlic than the last chef.

* One of your kids just got admitted to the college she wanted, but it's
going to cost you twice as much as the college *you* wanted her to go to.

And so forth. And Yes, I am dead serious with these examples, and I'm sure
there are many more in that vein. For balance you can also add a few
"positive" life changes to the negative ones I listed. Like you finally got
the big promotion you've worked so hard for, and it comes with a $10k salary
increase. Yep, those new speaker cables are starting to sound mighty good
now that they've finally "broken in."

if the system remains unchanged, but people report differences

Yes, I'm sure this is the biggest factor. It's why so many otherwise
intelligent people think a new power cord made a difference. It's why even a
pro mix engineer can sometimes tweak a kick drum EQ to perfection, only to
discover later he was adjusting the rhythm guitar track.

I've made this point before, and it needs to be made repeatedly: One of the
things that astounds me is how audiophiles - and especially magazine
reviewers - claim to be able to discern tiny changes while listening in a
room where fully half of the SPL is dominated by ambience and early
reflections. When I read a reviewer comment on a particular loudspeaker's
imaging, and I *know for a fact* that the reviewer has no acoustic treatment
at all, I have to dismiss everything else from that reviewer. And a lack of
even minimal acoustic treatment probably dismisses 95 percent of all audio
reviewers, no?

--Ethan

On Sat, 14 May 2005 01:25:10 +1200, "Geoff Wood"
wrote:


"SSJVCmag" wrote in message
...

...

'Trust Your Ears'

Please stiop cross-posting this stuff.

Huh? As far as I see, there's no crossposting, the original and all
followups are only on rec.audio.pro.

We really are not remotely
interested in it.

Oh, it's just the CONTENT you're objecting to. Well, "we" could go
back to talking politics...

geoff

-----
http://mindspring.com/~benbradley

Ted:
I never got past it, and ultimately sold the Advents and went back to
the KLHs. The magic came right back, and once again my favorite music
could take me to the joyous, transcendant places it had before.

You found your happy place. You were tuned to those speakers over time
and they became your reference. Nothing wrong with that. My Genesis 22s
have become my reference. There are better speakers out there I assume
but they're pretty darn good and make me happy. I'm just glad there's a
former Genesis employee out there still making and reconing the drivers
or I'd have to change them.

wrote:
What is needed -- and I could name several well-known people who
agree with
me -- is long-term blind listening tests in which people simply sit
down and
listen for pleasure. Properly conducted, such testing would would
provide useful
information about "how" people listen, what they think they hear, and
establish
a baseline for judging "subjective" and "objective" testing.

I think this is an important point. DBTs are great, and inarguably
valid from a certain point of view. But testers in these settings tend
to listen "hard", with the analytical part of their minds and their
sensory aparatus, and much less so with their intuitive, subjective,
emotional side. It's arguable that since music in particular is
generally consumed by listeners in the latter state, a rigidly
"objective" analysis may miss something.

It reminds me of some of my bad gear decisions through my life as a
music/audio enthusiast. Back in the 70s, I conducted a serious search
for better speakers to replace my very enjoyable but somewhat limited
KLH 17s (these were relatively affordable 60s era 2 way acoustic
suspension bookshelf speakers, well regarded but nothing particularly
special or expensive). After exhaustive research including many, many
hours of critical listening tests, dozens of magazine reviews and so
on, I chose the Advent "Large" speakers (their first product). They
sounded really wonderful to me, better than any of my other
candidates, and had received unanimously glowing reviews in the audio
press. I brought them home, set them up in place of the KLHs and
prepared to be very pleased. Initially, as I "evaluated" my choice,
they proved to be every bit as good as I had hoped; very wide
frequency response, low distortion, excellent dispersion and so on. I
was rockin!

Or was I...

After passing my post-purchase evaluation process with flying colors,
of course the next thing was to just relax and enjoy music on them,
and that's where it all started to go wrong. No sooner had I switched
off my "objective", analytical mind when I began to realize I was no
longer enjoying my favorite music as much. Something was interfering
with the connection between the emotional intent of the musical
performance and my sense of it. Very disturbingly, the magic was
somehow gone from my favorite albums. I immediately isolated the
speakers as the problem of course, because they were the only element
that had changed. The curious thing though was that every time I put
my analytical "hat" back on. the Advents simply blew the KLHs away in
every single way, and were clearly excellent performers, as everyone
else seemed to agree. Forget the analysis though, put the "enjoy
music" hat back on and...big problem.

I never got past it, and ultimately sold the Advents and went back to
the KLHs. The magic came right back, and once again my favorite music
could take me to the joyous, transcendant places it had before.
Similar experiences happened other times with speakers and other
hi-fi gear, enough to make me painfully aware of the pitfalls of
"critical" listening.

There may also be an element in DBTs that, as a side effect of their
"objectivity", doesn't incorporate a level of sensory experience that
*transcends* the objective, and could thereby have significant
consequences in terms of judgements thus made.

Offerered respectfully for your consideration...


I'l repost here what is relevent to this point

***********************
Taste. What tastes bad?

Suppose, when one is young, one eats something, but very shortly
afterwards, gets ill. What can happen is that that it can trigger a
dislike for that food. The body processing may attempt to link that food
taste with "bad", even if the correlation was incorrect, it may still do
this. There reason for this is that it is very difficult to have
hardware, i.e. genes, deal with all possible variations in the
environment. How does one know in advance that a certain taste should be
perceived as good or bad? evolution solves this problem by making all
perceptions and emotions, software programmable by the environment, i.e.
memes.
*****************

You have already been programmed as to what sounds "good" i.e. the KLHs.
If you had gotten your first shag while listening to the Advents rather
than the KLHs, things would have been different.:-)


Kevin Aylward

http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

You have already been programmed as to what sounds "good" i.e. the
KLHs.
If you had gotten your first shag while listening to the Advents
rather
than the KLHs, things would have been different.:-)


Kevin Aylward



Nah. I've spent my entire adult life as an audio professional. I've
encountered many "new and different" pieces of gear that *do* rock my
world musically, immediately, and only a few (thankfully) that fit the
description I made earlier. It's not a matter of what I'm "programmed"
to like. I appreciate a very wide spectrum of audio gear, and of music
for that matter, and I know how to qualify what I hear and feel.

Another case: there was a certain brand of very high end mic
pre/eq/compressor I was invited to evaluate a couple of years ago, and
it measured and "objectively analyzed" sensationally. It also got rave
reviews in the pro audio press and by many here. It just never passed
audio in a musical way to my ears. I was offered a *really* great price
on this $3000 piece, which had been sent to me brand new, and I turned
it down. It always made me feel like I was listening to *equipment*,
not music. That's the best way I know how to put it. Trust me on
this...please...

Ted Spencer, NYC

It also got rave reviews in the pro audio press and by many here. It
just never passed
audio in a musical way to my ears.

So you didn't like it but many others did. It's all about personal
taste and preference then isn't it? Would you say all those who loved
it were wrong? Or just had a different set of likes and dislikes?

wrote:
You have already been programmed as to what sounds "good" i.e. the
KLHs. If you had gotten your first shag while listening to the
Advents rather than the KLHs, things would have been different.:-)


Kevin Aylward



Nah. I've spent my entire adult life as an audio professional. I've
encountered many "new and different" pieces of gear that *do* rock my
world musically, immediately, and only a few (thankfully) that fit the
description I made earlier. It's not a matter of what I'm "programmed"
to like.

Of course it is. It can't be any other way. We are a Darwinian Machine.

I appreciate a very wide spectrum of audio gear, and of music
for that matter, and I know how to qualify what I hear and feel.

Another case: there was a certain brand of very high end mic
pre/eq/compressor I was invited to evaluate a couple of years ago, and
it measured and "objectively analyzed" sensationally. It also got rave
reviews in the pro audio press and by many here. It just never passed
audio in a musical way to my ears. I was offered a *really* great
price on this $3000 piece, which had been sent to me brand new, and I
turned it down. It always made me feel like I was listening to
*equipment*, not music. That's the best way I know how to put it.
Trust me on this...please...

Ted Spencer, NYC


None of this changes anything. Ones meme programming begins when one is
born. Ones gene programming begane billions of years ago.

Trust me on this.

http://www.anasoft.co.uk/replicators/index.html


Kevin Aylward

http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

I think we're approaching this all from the wrong end. Once the brain is
involved, we're not dealing with a cut-and-dried physical system. The brain is
extremely plastic, even in adults. The stability of the electronic systems over
time may be fine, but the system that's doing the perception is altering itself
continuously.

I have thought about controlled experiments with a cognitive psychologist friend
in an attempt to pin some of this down, but the experimental design needed to do
so convincingly seems impossible. The f-MRI is giving us a (somewhat crude)
look at the brain's function in auditory perception, but it's currently not
possible to provide high-quality audio stimuli in that environment. Without
monitoring brain activity, there are uncontrolled variables in the perception
system that rule out solid scientific exposition of the underlying "truth" of
how we perceive what we hear as sound.

The plastic nature of our auditory perception apparatus confounds attempts to
fully characterize what we can "hear" as differences in what would otherwise be
controlled listening trials. Statistical methods may give some idea of what a
population can discriminate, but it doesn't tell us what a particular listener
"hears" for a given stimulus.

-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x

Arny Krueger wrote:

Joe, thanks for showing that you don't really get what
auditory memory is.

Oh but I most certainly do. I may have exagerated a bit, but I do get it.

Geoff Wood wrote:


I can remember things 20 years ago, or 10, that are much better than they
were.


Sure. And plenty of things that aren't, of even worse than they were.

Ethan Winer wrote:

It's why even a pro mix engineer can sometimes tweak a kick drum EQ
to perfection, only to discover later he was adjusting the rhythm
guitar track.

I've never understood this kind of stuff. I have done that, and been
frustrated because nothing was happening. And then discovered it was the
wrong control or the eq bypass was engaged and gone "D'oh".

Ben Bradley wrote:

On Sat, 14 May 2005 01:25:10 +1200, "Geoff Wood"
wrote:


"SSJVCmag" wrote in message
.. .


...


'Trust Your Ears'

Please stiop cross-posting this stuff.


Huh? As far as I see, there's no crossposting, the original and all
followups are only on rec.audio.pro.


We really are not remotely
interested in it.


Oh, it's just the CONTENT you're objecting to. Well, "we" could go
back to talking politics...


Yeah, I wondered what THAT was about. I guess Geoff is not interested in
opinions that disagree with his?

Chris Hornbeck wrote:
On Thu, 12 May 2005 05:28:46 +0000 (UTC), Steven Sullivan
wrote:

This 'trust your ears' business that audiophiles tend to use as a mantra,
reflects a fundamental overestimation of how 'trustworthy' your ears
are, when they aren't allowed to be the *only* arbiters of what you are
hearing. What you 'actually' perceive when you sit down and listen in casual
evulation, is an amalgam of truly audible plus other non-audible 'confounding'
factors. Science may not be foolproof, but the existnce of such factors
has been proved about as well as *anthing* has been. It's why scientific
investigations of all sorts routinely employs bias controls. Cognitive/perceptual
confounding factors are *insidious* and *pervasive*.

Brilliant; possibly the best I've ever read. But now define "hearing".
And then define the color red.

Why? Such semantic exercises are beside the point...which is the
*fact* of the existence of 'confounding factors', and thus the *need*
to account for them as possible cause of a perception. That there can
be different subjective definitions of 'hearing' and 'red' doesn't seem to
halt the scientific study of perception in its tracks, does it?

Ya just can't get there from here, is the problem. I'll be very
interested in your comments; thanks; and please don't take my
comments negatively; anything but.

But perhaps the "cognitive/perceptual confounding factors" actually
matter for music?

They *absolutely* matter in the sense they they can explain why
two of the *same thing* can be reported as *different*. They
*absolutely matter* in the sense that they can't be ignored...
alas, nor can they be *trusted*.

Orchestral auditions are often done 'blind' these days. Are
you suggesting the judges are 'missing out' on some
factor that 'matters' to the *sound*, by doing this.

Blinding simply means : making sure the listener cannot
know the identity of the souce, *other than* by what he *hears*.


Just some thoughts. We human beans have such a desperate need to
quantify and simplify the overwhelming complexity of the external
world that the need can overwhelm the better angels of our modeling
nature. "Trust, but verify".

'Doubt, unless verified' gives more reliable answers.



--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

Kevin Aylward wrote:
Ethan Winer wrote:
Folks,

Last week at the Home Entertainment Show in New York Arny Krueger
participated in a panel discussion with John Atkinson, editor of
Stereophile magazine. Arny is well known for his support for the
scientific method to test what is audible and what is not. John is
known for, um, - well, let's just call it an anti-science bias.

You can read about the discussion and also download an MP3 file (30
MB, 1 hour long) he

www.stereophile.com/news/050905debate/


The dude claims to hear differences in power cables. Nothing more needs
to be said on his credibility. He is so deluded, further discussion is
pointless.

it's not the only dubious belief of his...

http://www.planeteria.net/home/whist...s/healing.html




--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

So you didn't like it but many others did. It's all about personal
taste and preference then isn't it? Would you say all those who loved
it were wrong?

Of course not, and that isn't the point of what I'm discussing in my
comments here today. It's about objective versus subjective
evaluations, and what each can reveal, particularly as to how objective
ones might not reveal some subtler but ultimately highly significant
truths.

Or just had a different set of likes and dislikes?

Certainly. Everyone is entitled to their own taste and preferences,
whatever they might be. It's worth noting however, that these usually
evolve and become more specific with experience and training.


Ted Spencer, NYC

Anahata wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:
This 'trust your ears' business that audiophiles tend to use as a mantra,
reflects a fundamental overestimation of how 'trustworthy' your ears
are

Ironic, considering that "trust your ears" is a perfectly valid summary
of how ABX works too...

Let's complete the sentence, shall we?

This 'trust your ears' business that audiophiles tend to use as a mantra,
reflects a fundamental overestimation of how 'trustworthy' your ears
are, *when they aren't allowed to be the only arbiters of what you are
hearing.*

(emphasis added)

Subjectivists distort the meaning of 'trust your ears'. They really mean,
'trust your impressions and assumptions'. Because if, hey, something
'sounds' different, it *must* be due to the gear, not the listener, right?


--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

"Kevin Aylward" writes:

wrote:

price on this $3000 piece, which had been sent to me brand new, and I
turned it down. It always made me feel like I was listening to
*equipment*, not music. That's the best way I know how to put it.
Trust me on this...please...

Ted Spencer, NYC

None of this changes anything. Ones meme programming begins when one is
born. Ones gene programming begane billions of years ago.

Trust me on this.

Not a chance, Kev.

While I agree in principle with a number of what appear to be your
intellectual foundations in this post and others (including genes,
evolution, and memes), *your* religion appears to be reductionism taken to
perhaps a level of silliness. What's the famous quote? "There's more
betwixt heaven and earth than meets the eye" [or current *known*
parameters] -- something like that.

Recall the smugness of the physics community circa 1900. "It's the end of
Physics!" many proclaimed, self-satisfied that they Knew Everything. Then
along came Rutherford and the Curies (to name a few) who really managed to
**** off the self-assured elites of the day.

Frank Stearns
Mobile Audio

--

William Sommerwerck wrote:
It may not be foolproof, but it is certainly more reliable than
subjectivists analysis that refuses to explored by any form
of objective methodology.

Double-blind testing is a subjective form of testing. There is no proved
correlation between what one hears in the tests and what one hears when actually
listening to music.

This is essentially saying that a controlled experiment result should replicate
to an uncontrolled experiment result, if we are to consider it valid.

Do you see how backwards that is?





--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

SSJVCmag wrote:
On 5/12/05 1:28 AM, in article , "Steven
Sullivan" wrote:

This 'trust your ears' business that audiophiles tend to use as a mantra,
reflects a fundamental overestimation of how 'trustworthy' your ears
are,

Not so, if we want to keep this a working discussion (and leave no loopholes
to wilgle throuhj semantically!) then it's about letting
'Trust Your Ears'
stand in for
'Trust What You Interpret'

if you'd kept ther rest of my sentence in that quote, you'd see I said
the same thing.

DBT indeed is BIULT around the sole idea of Trusting Your Ears... And not
allowing in your eyes or other evidiciary confusing elements

if you'd kept the rest of my sentence in that quote, you'd see I said the
same thing.



--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

Arny Krueger wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:

What is needed -- and I could name several well-known
people who
agree with
me -- is long-term blind listening tests in which people
simply sit
down and listen for pleasure. Properly conducted, such
testing would
would provide useful information about "how" people
listen, what they
think they hear, and establish a baseline for judging
"subjective"
and "objective" testing. But such testing would require
many
listeners, take a lot of time, and be difficult to
implement and run
correctly. Not to mention the fact that both subjectivists
and
objectivists have a vested interest in believing what they
want to
believe. People are uncomfortable changing their world
views.

FWIW most if not all the original ABX partners did exactly
what is described here. They picked out two components to
compare, did long-term ABX testing, and compared their
results to shorter term tests. There have also been some
more-formal tests that David Clark did with I think it was
Larry Greehill.

Nousaine has also conducted 'long term' tests, where
subjects were allowed to acclimate themselves for *weeks*
before actually taking the test.



--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

Joe Sensor wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:
What is needed ... is long-term blind listening tests


I have to agree with Arny. I can't see why listening long term increases
someone's ability to discern small differences.


I guess I'm not explaining things clearly enough to overcome your
preconceptions.

The problem is Arny thinks people's auditory memory is about 1/10 of a
second. I dunno, maybe his is. I can remember things I heard 40 years ago.

Not in the sort of detail that's meant when psychoacousticians talk of
'auditory memory'. Not reliably. No way, Jose.

Even 'gross' stuff can be misremembered. Even *eyewitness testimony*.
Studies have shown that
people will 'remember' things very 'clearly', that a videotape
record shows *never happened at all*.




--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

None of this changes anything. Ones meme programming begins when one
is
born. Ones gene programming begane billions of years ago.

Doesn't this assume that we are not capable of self programming or any
measure of self restraint and self control? I know I've certainly
learned and changed over the years. Old beliefs and behaviors have been
modified and/or replaced with new input and processing. It all goes
back to a question. I see the color blue as do you. We both know it is
blue. But does it actually look the same to both of us? In the end we
are all self contained universes. We could still be brains in boxes for
all we know.

Chris Hornbeck wrote:
On Thu, 12 May 2005 15:36:50 -0700, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

and without any attempt to make distinctions.

Another biscuit crux. The *attempt* itself is contaminating.
We might not (I would say experientially *do not*) listen/ hear
the same for enjoyment as for "testing".

An oft-observed fact is that eye witnesses to catastrophic
events are amazingly unreliable. We're bred to interpret
the world through a maze of models, assumptions and
imagination. This discussion is about those things; let's
just not forget the "bred" part's true relevance.

?? Do you understand that that 'bred' part is exactly why
listening 'for enjoyment' is unreliable to validate
anything reliably *except* the fact that a listener enjoys something?
(and even that can change at *whim*)


--

-S
It's not my business to do intelligent work. -- D. Rumsfeld, testifying
before the House Armed Services Committee

Of course it is.

In your opinion

It can't be any other way.

In your opinion

Trust me on this.

Sorry, I choose not to.

And you *are* entitled to your opinion, of course. Just don't make the
mistake of rigidly thinking it's the ultimate, final truth that
everyone must accept. It's useful to remember at times like this that
the world's leading scientists once "knew" the Earth was flat. "Facts"
have an odd habit of becoming moving targets.

PS: Don't take this personally, but I really don't enjoy arguing, on
line or elswhere. I'll stick with this only as long as it stays a
discussion...

Ted Spencer, NYC

Jay Kadis wrote:

I think we're approaching this all from the wrong end. Once the brain is
involved, we're not dealing with a cut-and-dried physical system. The brain is
extremely plastic, even in adults. The stability of the electronic systems over
time may be fine, but the system that's doing the perception is altering itself
continuously.

I have thought about controlled experiments with a cognitive psychologist friend
in an attempt to pin some of this down, but the experimental design needed to do
so convincingly seems impossible. The f-MRI is giving us a (somewhat crude)
look at the brain's function in auditory perception, but it's currently not
possible to provide high-quality audio stimuli in that environment. Without
monitoring brain activity, there are uncontrolled variables in the perception
system that rule out solid scientific exposition of the underlying "truth" of
how we perceive what we hear as sound.

'how' we perceive something is one area of investigation -- but simply
substantiating in a scientific fashion whether the listener's *reported*
difference was likely due to what he *heard*, as opposed to confounding
factors, is not nearly so mysterious.

The plastic nature of our auditory perception apparatus confounds attempts to
fully characterize what we can "hear" as differences in what would otherwise be
controlled listening trials. Statistical methods may give some idea of what a
population can discriminate, but it doesn't tell us what a particular listener
"hears" for a given stimulus.

But statistical methods can give a *very good* idea of whether a *subject's*
report of a *particular* audible difference was likely to be accurate.

Generalizing that idea to a population is another issue.

Remember that in a good DBT, there is a perception of 'difference' during the
sighted portions of the test. *That's* what's being tested. The listener
'goes into' it having heard a difference. If, when placed in the testing
situation, the subject no longer perceives an audible difference *sighted*,
then the test shoudl be aborted. There's nothing to test.

Frank Stearns wrote:
"Kevin Aylward" writes:

wrote:

price on this $3000 piece, which had been sent to me brand new, and
I turned it down. It always made me feel like I was listening to
*equipment*, not music. That's the best way I know how to put it.
Trust me on this...please...

Ted Spencer, NYC

None of this changes anything. Ones meme programming begins when one
is born. Ones gene programming begane billions of years ago.

Trust me on this.

Not a chance, Kev.

Oh...


While I agree in principle with a number of what appear to be your
intellectual foundations in this post and others (including genes,
evolution, and memes), *your* religion appears to be reductionism
taken to perhaps a level of silliness.

Yes indeed, apart for the silliness bit, of course.

http://www.anasoft.co.uk/replicators/magic.html

Either one believes in magic or one don't. I don't.

What's the famous quote?
"There's more betwixt heaven and earth than meets the eye" [or
current *known* parameters] -- something like that.

Recall the smugness of the physics community circa 1900. "It's the
end of Physics!" many proclaimed, self-satisfied that they Knew
Everything. Then along came Rutherford and the Curies (to name a few)
who really managed to **** off the self-assured elites of the day.


Yes. Arguments like this are very common. In what way does we were wrong
then, prove that we are wrong now?

Sure, we don't the truth, as there isnt any real truth. However, our
approximations to models of the observations seem to be pretty good now.

Kevin Aylward

http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Joe Sensor wrote:
Geoff Wood wrote:


I can remember things 20 years ago, or 10, that are much better than
they were.


Sure. And plenty of things that aren't, of even worse than they were.

Yep. Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old
house with great big holes in the roof.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room,
all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we
were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t'
corridor!

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to
us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke
up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us!
House? Huh.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a
sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a
lake.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us
living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.

http://www.phespirit.info/montypytho...rkshiremen.htm

Kevin Aylward

http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

In article , Steven Sullivan
wrote:

Jay Kadis wrote:

I think we're approaching this all from the wrong end. Once the brain is
involved, we're not dealing with a cut-and-dried physical system. The
brain is
extremely plastic, even in adults. The stability of the electronic systems
over
time may be fine, but the system that's doing the perception is altering
itself
continuously.

I have thought about controlled experiments with a cognitive psychologist
friend
in an attempt to pin some of this down, but the experimental design needed
to do
so convincingly seems impossible. The f-MRI is giving us a (somewhat
crude)
look at the brain's function in auditory perception, but it's currently not
possible to provide high-quality audio stimuli in that environment.
Without
monitoring brain activity, there are uncontrolled variables in the
perception
system that rule out solid scientific exposition of the underlying "truth"
of
how we perceive what we hear as sound.

'how' we perceive something is one area of investigation -- but simply
substantiating in a scientific fashion whether the listener's *reported*
difference was likely due to what he *heard*, as opposed to confounding
factors, is not nearly so mysterious.


Yes, but whether the difference was caused by changes in the stimulus or by
unrelated changes in the nervous system is important and not discriminated
reliably. What the listener "hears" is processed through their nervous system,
hardly a controlled variable.

-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x

I might even sell them some $2,500 power cables for them to plug into
the
Romex cable feeding their power outlets.

LOL It is laughable isn't it? The wire from the lcoal atation to the
outlet is likely worth less than those crazy poewer cable (min xformers
etc). "Look my Kia goes faster when I paint it Ferrari red!"

It's useful to remember at times like this that
the world's leading scientists once "knew" the Earth was flat. "Facts"
have an odd habit of becoming moving targets.

Are you actually suggesting that those assumptions were based on knowledge
derived from a scientific method? Surely you jest.

As to the comment regarding physicist at the beginning of the 20th century,
yes they were wrong about the scope of the universe, however, classical
physics could and still is able to explain much of the phenomena they were
concerned with then, and that we are concerned with now. So the suggestion
that they were limited in their understanding of the universe does not deny
much of what they achieved. Moreover, I am sure you are not trying to
suggest that the hearing process is more complicated than quantum mechanics,
string theory, and the like.

Lastly, the question of long term listening is a red herring and should be
dropped. First, ABX process allows for long term testing if the person so
wishes. Second, if a person first wishes to test the equipment with all his
or her senses and in a relaxed fashion (taking 5 to 12 months) to determine
all the differences before engaging in an ABX process, they are free to do
so. Third, the apparent differences that are discussed in the high end
media and many forums about differences between electronics are not minor;
i.e. "you should not use a bryston amp, is way too bright with Wilson
Audio", "the amp in comparison sounded like it was broken", "the amp
exhibited greater warmth in the midrange, a deeper soundstage".. and so on;
yet they all claim that the stress of an ABX blind test is so stressful that
their ability to differentiate is swamped by confounding variables.
Remember, a .2 dB difference in audio will show in an ABX test. Moving one
speaker half an inch in any direction will show in an ABX test, but somehow
we humans become incompetent automatons when we have to differentiate
between two well designed amp operating within parameters and level matched.

Consider the many times prices have been offered to pass a simple ABX test
with your own equipment, your own home, yet no one has been able to pass it
(as long as equipment was operating within parameters and levels were
matched). Do you honestly think JA or HP, or any writer within the high end
media community would not jump at the chance of proving their point if they
thought they could? If the differences are as major as they claim (again, a
..2 dB difference would show in ABX), why are they so gun shy to demonstrate
it to the world. Not only could they once and for all silence their
critics, but in one act they would validate the $50K amps, $15K cables (and
the advertising they will gain), plus they will have a wonderful paper to
present at the AES and make a true mark in the history of audio. Again, one
can tell a difference in moving one speaker one inch, but they are not
willing to take a simple test that would easily validate the use of a $40K
Krell amp vs $300 amp (e.g. Behringer ep2500).

To quote "deep throat", follow the money.

"Jay Kadis" wrote in message
...

I think we're approaching this all from the wrong end. Once the brain is
involved, we're not dealing with a cut-and-dried physical system. The
brain is
extremely plastic, even in adults. The stability of the electronic
systems over
time may be fine, but the system that's doing the perception is altering
itself
continuously.

I have thought about controlled experiments with a cognitive psychologist
friend
in an attempt to pin some of this down, but the experimental design needed
to do
so convincingly seems impossible. The f-MRI is giving us a (somewhat
crude)
look at the brain's function in auditory perception, but it's currently
not
possible to provide high-quality audio stimuli in that environment.
Without
monitoring brain activity, there are uncontrolled variables in the
perception
system that rule out solid scientific exposition of the underlying "truth"
of
how we perceive what we hear as sound.

The plastic nature of our auditory perception apparatus confounds attempts
to
fully characterize what we can "hear" as differences in what would
otherwise be
controlled listening trials. Statistical methods may give some idea of
what a
population can discriminate, but it doesn't tell us what a particular
listener
"hears" for a given stimulus.


Jay -

I think you may be interested in the following, in case you are not aware of
it. I've lifted the content from a post I made earlier on RAHE in response
to a poster who questioned why we would "oppose" dbt'ng as opposed to simply
incorporating objections and making it better.

"Jim, those are absolutely good questions. The problem is, even with
modifications it is easy to construct a theoretical model suggesting that
the testing process itself destroys the ability to measure musical response.
The way around this is to use testing which simulates normal relaxed
listening (as closely as possible). Listen, relax, enjoy (or not). Then
evaluate. Period. Ideally, you should not even know what is being tested.
However this approach requires multiple testees (dozens, better hundreds)
and the time and location to do such testing. Let me describe an actual
example."

Some researchers in Japan used such an approach to measure the impact of
ultrasonic response on listeners ratings of reproduced music. They
constructed a testing room with an armchair, soft lighting, a soothing
outdoor view, and very carefully constructed audio system employing separate
amps and supertweeters for the ultrasonics. The testees knew only that they
were to listen to the music, and afterward fill out a simple questionnaire."

Employing Gamelan music (chosen for its abundance of overtones), they found
statistical significance at the 95% level between music reproduced with a
20khz cutoff and that reproduced with frequencies extending up to 80khz.
They measured not only overall quality of the sound ratings, but also
specific attributes...some also statistically significant. When they
presented the paper to the AES, the skepticism was so severe they went back
and repeated the test...this time they wired the subjects and monitored
their brains but otherwise they were just told to listen to the music and
various aspects of the brain were recorded. They found that the pleasure
centers of the brain were activated when the overtones were used, and were
not activated when the 20khz cutoff was used. They also were not activated
when listening to silence, used as a control. Moreover, the correlation
with the earlier test was statistically significant (about half the subjects
were repeaters)."

When I presented the data here, Arny Kruger who was posting here at the time
and is the main champion of ABX testing on the web, became defensive. At
first he tried to dismiss the test as "old news". Then he claimed he found
evidence that the ultrasonic frequencies affected the upper regions of the
hearing range (despite the researchers specific attempts to defeat this
possibility). Then he dismissed the whole thing as worthless because it
hadn't been corroborated (this was only a few months after it was
published)."

Perhaps Arny's reaction was typically human when strongly held beliefs and
conventional wisdom are challenged. But Arny missed the main point. That
point was that monadic testing, under relaxed conditions and with*no*
comparison or even "rating" during the test, gave statistically significant
results. And that these results were not a statistical aberration, but were
repeated and correlated with a physiological response to music. So whether
Arnie's belief in sub-ultrasonic corruption is true or not, the fact is the
testing yielded differences to a stimulus that was supposedly inaudible, and
if audible, subtle in the extreme. "

I and a few others have been arguing that some similar test protocol was
more likely to correlate with in-home experience. The problem is, even if
we are right, such testing is too cumbersome to be of any real world use
except in special showcase scenarios...it is not practical for reviewing, or
for choosing audio equipment in the home. However, it does certainly
suggest caution in substituting AB or ABX testing. Such testing is
radically different in the underlying conditions, and since the musical
response of the ear/brain complex is so subtle and unpredictable and mis- or
un- understood, it is simply too simplistic to assert that what works for
testing using white noise or audio codecs works for overall open-ended
musical evaluation of equipment. That is why some of us prefer to stay with
conventional audio evaluation given the Hobson's choice."

I hope this helps you understand that I have a reason for being skeptical of
DBT's. Even more important, why I believe it is intellectually dishonest to
promote them as the be-all and end-all for determining audio "truth", as is
done here on RAHE by some. They are a tool...useful in some
cases...unproven in others. Until that later qualifier is removed, I think
overselling them does a disservice and can be classified as "brainwashing"."

Here is the link to the article, if you are interested:

http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/83/6/3548

and while we are at it, the following are two white papers by DCS that may
explain why ultrasonics do affect audio perception. Some of this is
probably familiar to many (most?) here, but its an easy reference for
anyone interested.

http://www.dcsltd.co.uk/technical_papers/aes97ny.pdf
http://www.dcsltd.co.uk/technical_papers/effects.pdf

Picking up where these leave off, if you attended the HE2005 show in NY
recently, and particularly the ISOmike demo in the Lincoln Suite, you
probably received a photograph comparing impulse response of analog, 44.1,
48, 96, 192, and DSD. Hint: the DSD virtually duplicated the analog; the
PCM's at any frequency did not although the 192khz ain't too terrible.

In article ,
"Harry Lavo" wrote:

[snip]

Jay -

I think you may be interested in the following, in case you are not aware of
it. I've lifted the content from a post I made earlier on RAHE in response
to a poster who questioned why we would "oppose" dbt'ng as opposed to simply
incorporating objections and making it better.

"Jim, those are absolutely good questions. The problem is, even with
modifications it is easy to construct a theoretical model suggesting that
the testing process itself destroys the ability to measure musical response.
The way around this is to use testing which simulates normal relaxed
listening (as closely as possible). Listen, relax, enjoy (or not). Then
evaluate. Period. Ideally, you should not even know what is being tested.
However this approach requires multiple testees (dozens, better hundreds)
and the time and location to do such testing. Let me describe an actual
example."

Some researchers in Japan used such an approach to measure the impact of
ultrasonic response on listeners ratings of reproduced music. They
constructed a testing room with an armchair, soft lighting, a soothing
outdoor view, and very carefully constructed audio system employing separate
amps and supertweeters for the ultrasonics. The testees knew only that they
were to listen to the music, and afterward fill out a simple questionnaire."

Employing Gamelan music (chosen for its abundance of overtones), they found
statistical significance at the 95% level between music reproduced with a
20khz cutoff and that reproduced with frequencies extending up to 80khz.
They measured not only overall quality of the sound ratings, but also
specific attributes...some also statistically significant. When they
presented the paper to the AES, the skepticism was so severe they went back
and repeated the test...this time they wired the subjects and monitored
their brains but otherwise they were just told to listen to the music and
various aspects of the brain were recorded. They found that the pleasure
centers of the brain were activated when the overtones were used, and were
not activated when the 20khz cutoff was used. They also were not activated
when listening to silence, used as a control. Moreover, the correlation
with the earlier test was statistically significant (about half the subjects
were repeaters)."


What they found was that alpha brainwave production was statistically increased
and blood flow also increased to certain areas. These are both fairly
non-specific indicators of brain function, for example activation of alpha waves
can be increased dramatically simply by closing your eyes. While tantalizing,
it provides little information about the mechanism. My point is that since the
nervous system is part of the chain of perception, its state affects the
experimental situation and is an uncontrolled variable.

When I presented the data here, Arny Kruger who was posting here at the time
and is the main champion of ABX testing on the web, became defensive. At
first he tried to dismiss the test as "old news". Then he claimed he found
evidence that the ultrasonic frequencies affected the upper regions of the
hearing range (despite the researchers specific attempts to defeat this
possibility). Then he dismissed the whole thing as worthless because it
hadn't been corroborated (this was only a few months after it was
published)."

Perhaps Arny's reaction was typically human when strongly held beliefs and
conventional wisdom are challenged. But Arny missed the main point. That
point was that monadic testing, under relaxed conditions and with*no*
comparison or even "rating" during the test, gave statistically significant
results. And that these results were not a statistical aberration, but were
repeated and correlated with a physiological response to music. So whether
Arnie's belief in sub-ultrasonic corruption is true or not, the fact is the
testing yielded differences to a stimulus that was supposedly inaudible, and
if audible, subtle in the extreme. "

I and a few others have been arguing that some similar test protocol was
more likely to correlate with in-home experience. The problem is, even if
we are right, such testing is too cumbersome to be of any real world use
except in special showcase scenarios...it is not practical for reviewing, or
for choosing audio equipment in the home. However, it does certainly
suggest caution in substituting AB or ABX testing. Such testing is
radically different in the underlying conditions, and since the musical
response of the ear/brain complex is so subtle and unpredictable and mis- or
un- understood, it is simply too simplistic to assert that what works for
testing using white noise or audio codecs works for overall open-ended
musical evaluation of equipment. That is why some of us prefer to stay with
conventional audio evaluation given the Hobson's choice."


I prefer to reserve judgement until such time as we can monitor brain activity
as part of the experiment. With SQUID magnetic sensors perhaps this will become
feasable soon. At the present, DBTs are the best we have, flawed as they might
be.

-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x

Steven Sullivan wrote:


"The problem is Arny thinks people's auditory memory is about 1/10
of a second. I dunno, maybe his is. I can remember things I heard
40 years ago."

Not in the sort of detail that's meant when psychoacousticians talk
of 'auditory memory'. Not reliably. No way, Jose.

That is sir Jose' to you, thank you.

And you are quite wrong. It depends if you were training your ears and
your mind for these "details" from the start. From the effects of
changes in volume to eq and harmonic balance. I suspect that I'm not the
only "musician/sound engineer" that started listening for these details
from a very young age. Your brain/ear analytical quality develops
differently if put to the test early on. I have seen studies where kids
learning two handed instruments very young have a part of their brain
develop that others lack, there are other similar connections that have
not yet been studied.

I guarantee you I could pass some of your A/B tests successfully with
days or even years between A & B, where others could not even if
hearing both within seconds. And I am not alone. Plenty of people were
always interested in hearing these things, and have literally trained
their brains for it, where as plenty of others could care less.

And all of your fancy DBT's are not weighted for these differences in
the listeners. One test group could consist of all of the former and
another all of the latter and you would have no way of knowing.


Even 'gross' stuff can be misremembered. Even *eyewitness
testimony*. Studies have shown that people will 'remember' things
very 'clearly', that a videotape record shows *never happened at
all*.

Generalizations. What people? Some people claim to have seen little
green men. Maybe they did? Video at 11:00.

Kevin Aylward wrote:

Joe Sensor wrote:


I can remember things 20 years ago, or 10, that are much better than
they were.


Sure. And plenty of things that aren't, of even worse than they were.


Yep. Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

You are obviously limiting your thinking to the equipment part of the
equation. Not the folks running the equipment. There WERE more folks who
really knew how to make the tools sound great in days past.

A quick listen to most modern records will provide proof.

Jay Kadis wrote:

What the listener "hears" is processed through their nervous system,
hardly a controlled variable.

Nice summation!

R GS wrote:


As to the comment regarding physicist at the beginning of the 20th century,
yes they were wrong about the scope of the universe,

EVERYONE is wrong about the scope of the universe. Impossible to prove
otherwise.