ASR Member Takes Offense At Real Science; Also Cries

A Moog synth is still going to sound like it does( guitar, drums, Nord Lead etc) Based on skill of the engineer, on the higher end system it going to be better or worse sounding. If they over load with effects on good source material then probably, washed out digital sounding. What I'm saying is, it can be easily better sounding on a better setup.

 

I've referenced them in impressions before but every now and again I'll be on a bit of a riot grrrl or similar binge e.g. Huggy Bear or Bikini Kill. At least on my current rig and comparing that to what I remember hearing on older chains I used to run (i.e. Sennheiser HD428 out of a Creative Zen X-Fi DAP), the aggression on the modern stuff is a bit more jarring.

Just for the record I am reasonably sure my hearing is less sensitive now than it was when I was a teenager, though I can still sorta hear up to 17~18kHz. At the very least, I'm still able to easily hear and get headaches from this bullfeces: https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_mosquito.php

 

As @purr1n says, the recording is fixed when that bunch of people say yes to the final master. That's where "artist's intentions" end, and where what we get begins.

We know what we get. We can hear it, we can hear it on a huge range of equipment ranging from dirt-cheap to billionaires-only. What difference will it make to whether we think it fulfils the performer's intention? How could anybody ever know? Do they have a transcript of all the chat, from beginning to final master, of the creation process? Nope. OK, maybe occasionally there might be a relevant interview. Once in a while.

We may or may not be able to revel in our own taste for listening into the fine details of music, but anyone who is an actual music lover can feel it on a phone speaker. Perhaps that too carries the "artists' intention."

If we get it, we get it. And gear is only a part of that.

Oh yeah, of course: we all want to listen to the most beautiful sound possible. And it's totally valid to want to dig into the detail, and that is not merely an intellectual pursuit either. But the gear is secondary to the music.

Oh... Audio gear, like photography gear, is. of course, a valid hobby in itself.

Me: I want to buy a new camera
Counterpoint: Will it make you a better photographer?
Me: No. But hey, what if my hobby is also collecting camera gear

(ps: my new camera takes better photos. But actually, it does not make me a better photographer because it is cleverer than I am. Is this relevant... probably not)

 

And then there are the times when artists change their mind about what their intention is about their past work and want to force people to forget what they originally responded to and see it another way.

 

Not just this, but somehow I have a feeling Amir keeps screwing up the distortion measurements for headphones.

Let's investigate. Look at the HD800S:


Okay, so with his rig that costs more than my entire setup and the car combined he gets 94dB - 30dB = 64dB THD at 1kHz.

Here's what 70€ gets you:

... but where did the distortion go?

Let's investigate further:

On an FFT we see that D2 is at -91.6dB and D3 at -100.5dB at 94dB SPL at 1kHz. This is on a coupler and with a low noise omni mic. THD is at -90.6dB.
(I set the scale so that 1kHz is at 0dB.)

Oratory1990 certainly seemed capable of getting better results than Amir:
https://imgur.com/a/XeZpYhw

How the hell Amir gets 30dB worse THD than I do on my cheap setup is beyond me. His rig is certainly capable of achieving similar results.
And let's please ignore the linear scale he uses for the distortion measurements for now.

 

However now for the more interesting bit. I never actually listen with the above amp. The amp I use for listening at my desk is the Schiit Vali instead.

This is a bit of a blast from the past... Yes, it has audible noise and rings, but it's also a heck of a lot better sounding in pretty much every way. More resolving, larger stage, has nicer timbre, has much better microdynamics and even slams somewhat more, you name it. Granted I use it with the HD600 as part of my desktop rig and use the HD800 with the Ragnarok at my speaker rig instead, but that doesn't really change anything.

So how does the plot look like with the Vali?

OMG Serious, now you're adding 35dB worth of distortion at 1kHz! There's no way that sounds good! After all the lowerer distortion amp must be betterer.

The truth is I'm not even sure I can hear -55dB distortion at 94dB at 1kHz. 94dB in the midrange is frickin loud and if my ears were blasted with 94dB of midrange energy I think I'd concentrate on other things than distortion that's 55dB down.
I do think this much distortion is audible in a blind test at a more reasonable volume level, but that's an edge case and normally one would never say that this is audible. That only comes with enough 'tism and ADHD hyperfocus.

Or is it that I prefer the "warm and rich" sound of the 2nd harmonic? To which I'd reply "Have you ever heard a Vali?"
And if that was the case I should also prefer the Vali to my Ragnarok, which I don't.

"But it's all placebo anyway and you couldn't tell the difference in a blind test."
-I can and I bet you can too with some concentration. I've done such blind tests before. If you can't I'd blame it on the nocebo effect.
Nowadays I prefer blind testing cables, though


So where am I going with this?

• If you're going to measure, do it properly
• However also don't take measurements as gospel and build a whole religion around them.
  Basically what @purr1n likes to say.

 

I'm not sure why anyone's surprised about Amir's measurements anymore. His incompetence is pretty well know.

 

First time I saw this discussion, went through it slowly over past few days and just wow.

 

Maybe because he has not first conducted a statistically-valid Measurement System Analysis (MSA)? Before one can take statistically-valid measurements, you have to conduct a valid MSA, first.

You know, to know with statistical rigor that your measurement system is FIT for Purpose, and has:
1) Accuracy
2) Precision
3) Repeatibiility
4) Reproducibility

Before one can start obtaining measurements for any system, you have to statistically qualify the meaurement system ITSELF to know with statistical rigor it has sufficent STATISTICAL POWER for the four attributes I've listed above: Accuracy, Precision, Repeatibiility and Reproducibility. (Hint: accuracy and precision are not the same thing and neither are Repeatibiility and Reproducibility)

For example, with respect to the Precision measurement, It stands to reason that a measurement that is only measuring to 1 significant figure does not require the same level of measurement system precision for a measurement that is made to four significant figures. Ya guys follow me? Therefore, the only way to know if your measurement system is FIT for PURPOSE is to perform an MSA, first.

Moreover, what's the "Percent Contribution" of ASR's measurement system ITSELF? In other words, how much do the Sums of Squares of ASR's measurement system itself contribute to the sums of squares of the TOTAL SYSTEM VARIANCE? In MSA, this is known as the "Percent Contribution"

If one can't answer that basic question, then one doesn't know with STATISTICAL RIGOR if the measurement system itself is FIT FOR PURPOSE.

https://quality-one.com/msa/

This isn't rocket science we're doin' here. Just good, basic science.

Oh, wait, ASR doesn't ACTUALLY know what that is...

 

Shit, OP is right.

f**k everything, I’m listening with my eyes now.

 

Recreational drugs are fine just so long as you don't develop a dependency thereon to function, and it causes no immediate and/or lasting harm to yourself or others.

Whether or not use of recreational drugs may have informed certain other individuals doing hackneyed measurement jobs is beyond the scope of this jibe.

 

One phenomenon not to overlook here is that we are effectively measuring the end distortion of the entire chain DAC->AMP->HP->Microphone, and in certain circumstances, harmonic products may be out of phase between the different elements in the chain, resulting in a deep cancellation when they are at comparable levels. This is what the 130Hz 2nd dip looks like, on your graph.
Now, this is level and frequency dependent so we'd need Frequency x Amplitude maps of each elements to really have a clearer picture... Not easy
My understanding is that this is one of the reason why system synergy is so important.
Bottom line, I corroborate what you said: measurements should not be taken as gospel.

 

This for sure. If you want to get even closer to the same thing the director and colourist are seeing there are some viewing room tweaks you can make. Colourists working with monitors will usually/often have bias lighting - it's a high CRI 6500K light behind the screen on a neutral 18% grey wall that is no more than 10% as bright as the screen. Our eyes read colour better this way.

It's never perfect, though. There is also metamerism - the display reads as in spec with calibration tools but eye see white differently with different monitor illumination technologies, scale - things read and feel differently depending their size, and contrast ratio - OLED at >1000000:1 is very different than cinema which is at best 4000:1, and the accompanying sound which also changes the impression of the image (and we're back to that

I think all of this is to say that "wire with gain" doesn't exist in any domain... Even if you could get closer to that ideal, it would not necessarily get someone closer to the artist's intent - that's a reading question, which I think ASR excludes from any of their arguments. That would involve actually listening to the music.

 

Latvia is number 13 of Europe’s most depressed countries.
https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-depressed-countries/

 

Why the "have more sex" suggestion is critical.

 

Haha wow 6 pages and on the homepage. I guess every 6 months or so SBAF needs to vent about ASR. I don't know if it's a good thing or just creates drama that gives them attention as well, maybe positive attention that they wouldnt' otherwise get. it feels good though!

 

I'll add that our eyes/vision system are not...spectrophotometers. The reason we see "blue" or "green" is not because our eyes/vision system are discriminating between 445-520 and 520-564 nM, respectiively.

We see color based on Edwin Land's Retinex Theory of Color Perception.
Scroll down to Retinex Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy

You can download and read Land's paper here:
https://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~tai/cp_papers/E.Land_Retinex_Theory_ScientifcAmerican.pdf

And, once again, like with the perception of "music", the "color" we see is a construct of our brains.