[Greg Wormald[_3_]]

In article ,
Audio Empire wrote:

it comes down to that old Frederick Nietsche=20
connundrum first postulated in his "Man and Superman": "If a tree =
falls in=20
the forest and there is no one there to hear it fall, did it make a =
sound?"=20

If old Nietsche had had access to Google he could have answered that. =
And the answer is: It depends on the definition of the word "sound". =
Some definitions are only about the vibrations generated, so the answer =
is "yes", the tree made a sound. Some definitions include the sensation =
in the hearing apparatus, in which case the answer is "no" because no =
one heard it, there was no sound.

In the case of the "sensation included" definitions we are back to one =
of the favourite problems in hi-fi--"If I can't hear it, or that test =
didn't hear it, then it doesn't exist." Which of course is perfectly =
correct when using that definition. And possibly incorrect when using =
other definitions.

This is one of the reasons why many discussions here go nowhere--no =
common definitions are being used.

Greg=

[Audio Empire]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2010 06:13:22 -0700, Greg Wormald wrote
(in article ):

In article ,
Audio Empire wrote:

it comes down to that old Frederick Nietsche=20
connundrum first postulated in his "Man and Superman": "If a tree =
falls in=20
the forest and there is no one there to hear it fall, did it make a =
sound?"=20

If old Nietsche had had access to Google he could have answered that. =
And the answer is: It depends on the definition of the word "sound". =
Some definitions are only about the vibrations generated, so the answer =
is "yes", the tree made a sound. Some definitions include the sensation =
in the hearing apparatus, in which case the answer is "no" because no =
one heard it, there was no sound.

Well of course. Using the physics definition of sound, there WAS sound
because air molecules were alternately compressed and rarefied at an audio
rate.

In the case of the "sensation included" definitions we are back to one =
of the favourite problems in hi-fi--"If I can't hear it, or that test =
didn't hear it, then it doesn't exist." Which of course is perfectly =
correct when using that definition. And possibly incorrect when using =
other definitions.

That's sort of what I was getting at.

This is one of the reasons why many discussions here go nowhere--no =
common definitions are being used.

That might well be. But we must remember that there are two main schools of
thought here (and several subsets of opinions involving variable from both
main camps), to whit: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist", and "I
don't need to measure it, I can hear it." Seems to me that it would take more
than a common set of definitions to bring those two camps together.