It's not necessarily true that "false in one is false in all" but Boyk's
admiration for this particular bit of dreck is worrisome.

" I'm eager to see whether the test would correlate with specific subtle
aspects of performance. For example, my friend Doug Sax, a recording and
mastering engineer, tested two line amps himself by a clever method to
learn about their performance with very soft signals. He had someone
talk at one end of a studio; and put a microphone at the other end, 90
feet away. The output of the mike ran to a power amp and speakers, and
he could hear and understand the speech over the speakers. In the cable
between the mike and the power amp was a switch. When turned to its
other position, it inserted a line amp between the mike and the power
amp. The line amp's volume control was adjusted so the volume didn't
change. If the line amp were perfect, adding it to the chain wouldn't
change anything. And that's what happened with one of the line amps, a
unit Sax had used for years, and which he liked. Then he substituted a
different line amp, which had better THD and noise specs than the first.
When it was switched in, he tells me, the spoken words became
unintelligible. To be sure, they were very soft, but lots of things in
music are soft, like the dying away of reverberation."

All this tells ME is that Doug had become VERY familiar with the way
speech sounds through one device and wasn't familiar with the other.
BOTH could have been distorted horribly. An extreme example of this are
people who get used to the way cerebral palsy victims speak and can then
interpret for others. Just because they understand one impaired speaker
doesn't mean they could understand another. (NOTE - this was an extreme
example - don't get too carried away with any analogy).

And another

"Such listeners would be useful to audio designers. But in general,
designers and manufacturers don't ‘get' it about listening. This is why
most gear isn't very good. One fellow who makes very expensive speakers
seemed to be bragging that he doesn't listen to his own designs. (He
also claimed to be a music lover, but didn't know the make of piano in
his own home!) [Audience: Laughter.]"

I don't know the make of the piano in my home either, inherited as it
was, but I do love music. What does one have to do with the other?

And another

"Here's how a playback system damaged my Beethoven. When my first album
came out, I sent a copy to a young pianist friend at a conservatory. She
wrote back very embarrassed, saying that the first movement of my
Beethoven had too many climaxes, and my tone was "bangy." This was
crushing. When summer came, she wrote again. At home for vacation, she
had listened to the album on her father's system, much better than her
own dorm-room player. Now she did not hear the extra climaxes or the
banging, and she loved the performance. In a flash, I realized what had
been wrong. The recording has a wide dynamic range. When the music got
loud enough, it had overloaded her dorm system. Any such passage came
out equal in loudness to any other such passage; hence, multiple
climaxes. They were graded dynamically in the playing and on the
recording, but couldn't be distinguished by the system. Overloading also
makes the reproduced tone ugly; but because she was thinking in musical
terms, she heard the ugliness created by her system as though it were
created at the piano! ( Stereophile magazine ranked this album a "Record
to Die For." )"

Is Boyk seriously suggesting that one can't measure when amplifiers
clip? Or when speaker cones hit their limits?

"Here's how a common problem in playback systems could damage Schubert:
In the posthumous A-major sonata, the bass comes in groups of four
sequential notes, with the first of each group holding through the
remaining three. ( Note 13
http://www.performancerecordings.com/capturing-music.html#note13 ) But
for two groups, it's not held. This contrast in texture means something
to Schubert, but if there were a resonance in the audio system on either
of these unheld notes, or a broad resonance in the general area of their
pitch—as many cheap loudspeakers do have—these notes might seem to be
held when they're not; and the textural contrast would be damaged."

Resonances are routinely measured and damped - a spectrum analyzer can
help a lot too.

"Here's how mis-design of a playback component can frustrate the
listener: The KLH company made a small two-way speaker that came with a
box to connect between your preamp and power amp. After calibration,
when you played soft music, the speaker would go down much deeper in the
bass than you would expect from its tiny woofer. As the music got
louder, if the low frequencies were still present, the box reduced them
electronically to prevent the woofer cone traveling too far and damaging
itself. You could play the speaker as loud as you like, and it would
always give you the most bass consistent with its own safety. This was
clever; but consider its musical impact. At climaxes, things tend to be
loud and full-bodied; and the speaker led you to expect that you'd get
what you expected. But at precisely those moments, you did not get it!
The ultimate audio tease."

It's not mis-design at all - it's very good design. It preserves what it
can given the limits of physics, and to do that you can bet KLH measured
the HELL out of things. What idiocy.

"Here's how musical damage was narrowly averted in one recording: I
helped out on a recording of the Kodo drummers from Japan. Their dynamic
range is enormous. At our mike position 30 feet from the loudest drums,
we tried three different mikes. First was a condenser with a one-inch
diaphragm. At the loudest moments, the diaphragm hit the stops thup thup
thup: unusable. Second was a five-eighths-inch condenser; the diaphragm
didn't hit anything, but the character of the sound changed a lot
between soft and loud passages. We were nervous. The third mike was a
ribbon; and fortunately for us, it sailed through everything with no
change of character"

Once again, did Boyk ever look at the specs for the mikes in question?
Doesn't he think such obvious distortions can be measured?

Boyk actually says a few interesting things, but, for me it's all
outweighed by the patronizing tone, the false dichotomies, the
caricatures and the morass of soggy opinion. Ick.


Bob T.

Chelvam wrote:

The above subject is actually a seminar given by James Boyk. I did a quick
search on google to see whether it has been discussed here on RAHE but could
not find one.

(bunch of quotes from the following snipped out -- bt)

More at http://www.performancerecordings.com...ing-music.html