ASR Member Takes Offense At Real Science; Also Cries

Alternatively, one could take Marcus Aurelius' Stoic perspective about this and not "worry about it". Or to paraphrase Marcus: "Why do you care what others think? All that matters is what YOU think."

As such, one could just "let go of it" and do Hans says...."Enjoy the music".

Cheers.

 

Totally. There was a thread and a paper I saw a while ago about psychoacoustics. I will try to find this.

 

Psycho acoustics?

 

Then watch a bunch of old Technicolor movies and Kurosawa in color on it to realize just how poorly most modern movies are shot and color graded.

 

Cool, I'd be interested in reading it, thanks, Justin.

BTW, the well-characterized Harman Curve is based on psychoacoustics.

 

Aahaha. I'm a dummy. Psychoacoustics. Edit... No, I got it right. But yes. Psycho acoustics could be used to describe a few things

 

Yes I agree. I wrote a post in this thread too. I do think part of our reaction is emotional, but that's ok too. I mean there is a whole forum full of people who believe that something that brings meaning and joy to our lives is all bullshit. And those opinions change the kind of gear that is made which affects us.

But what is actually ridiculous here is that ASR members care so much about what we do. There's a reason Vodka whatever cares enough to join here and post here about how we are all idiots. The reason is of course that we threaten ASR member's absolutist belief system and so we must be idiots or else they can't just buy a topping DAC and feel really proud of themselves.

You see the same pattern all over the place with people. We create belief systems that make us feel safe or create comforting order, or enable something or other that feels good or stops something that feels bad. And when someone threatens that belief system, we have to blame them and attack them because that is much easier than questioning ourselves and the possibility that the world is more complex than we can handle or than we are able to be happy with. There is so much prejudice, war, genocide, etc, caused by the same pattern. THEY threaten my belief system so they must be wrong, shunned, or in the worst case, eliminated.

ASR members are greatly comforted by their absolutist measurement only approach because otherwise $6000 tube amps might actually sound better than a Topping amp and that would leave them wanting a $6k tube amp.

I bet if the gear that had super low SINAD was not extremely cheap, ASR would not even exist because no one would be drawn to that approach. It would not bring anyone any emotional gratification.

Which is funny because that's what ASR constantly accuses people who use/trust/foillow their ears of - pursuing something that is emotionally gratifying but not actually true or real.

 

Yes, I wanted to point that out originally, but thought it wasn't that important.
The phase match was even better with the HD540II - the resulting notch was even deeper. Kind of cool that the distortion products of amplifier and transducer indeed cancel out - that they are 180 degrees out of phase. Distortion =/= distortion.

No, frankly those cheap electret microphones suck. At least the ones I've used - I've demonstrated that before. Those capsules are why you'll seldom see measurements with less than 0.1% distortion at 90dB. It's possible yours is better, but the others also don't seem to get much better distortion measurements from their cheapo electrets.
I bought like 10 different models and have like 200 electret capsules - money that could've gone to a much better microphone - before I realized that it was pointless. I do have two nice custom measurement microphones now, though

I'm using a much larger omni condenser capsule. The noise floor is lower than the one used in the GRAS system, but there's no ear gain to help me out. And it was relatively inexpensive and has a FR that can easily be corrected. You do need at least one reference microphone to correct it against, though and it will still be more beamy than a smaller microphone, of course. So I use my smaller microphones for in-room speaker measurements.

Nowadays I'm fairly confident in my compensation, which is why you see me posting extended range FRs now.

The maximum SPL is insanely high for both measurement rigs anyway, past 140dB. The thermal noise of those Class 1 capsules should be in the 20-22dBA range IIRC.


At the end of the day I want to see better measurements from Amir. He has built a real database and I do trust the FR measurements he gets, both for headphones and speakers since they're industry standard. His measurements of the RAAL CA-1a most closely gel with what I heard, for example. And I'm glad that he uses his NFS rig to measure all types of speakers. It's not perfect and IMO my own LS50 Meta measurements looked better, but the NFS system is much faster and more convenient.
People like oratory consistenly get less noisy industry standard measurements with better channel matching, etc. Those guys take their time and retake measurements when they find errors, just like you do. Like most people on this site do. And they point out the flaws in their measurements. Amir sometimes seems to post graphs he seemingly doesn't understand very well himself. At the end of the day it's not Amir that is annoying about ASR and I'm sure he will learn with time.

 

BLIND TESTS:

So my dad showed some interest in a DAC with a Cirrus Logic CS43131 chip. I told him "that's boring, the dongle I use for my UERMs has those chips inside. It won't be too different from my cheapo dongle. If you want, you can give it a listen."

So I plugged the Moondrop DAWN into his Freya via XLR (with an adapter I made) to compare against his Audiolab 8200CDQ. It turns out they were closer than we thought and I was quite impressed by what the small dongle can do. He bet me to a blind test, so that's what we did...
Here are my notes:


So I got 9/13 wrong, which according to ASR is enough for 95% confidence that I wasn't guessing. I simply mistook one DAC for the other.

So yes, sometimes two wrongs do make a right. Or rather 9 wrongs in this case.

 

Usually how I watch movies on my cheap LG B8 OLED.

 

God this thread is becoming G E Y

 

Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, with the inimitable Toshiro Mifune. This film was the inspiration for Star Wars (and..it's actually better than Star Wars).

 

More Flash Gordon (Lucas actually tried to acquire the rights but failed so created his own space opera), but yes Hidden Fortress was heavily borrowed from.

 

BLIND TEST PT2


I was just curious how hard the DAC comparison would be in my rig.

Yup, this one was easy. Volume was matched, both at 4Vrms. And tonally they're suprisingly close, too.
DAC filter on the DAWN was set to linear phase, sharp rolloff. Don't like the other ones.

Anyway, enough of this.

 

Is that the one with the two idiots, I mean peasants that are super annoying?

IMO, the best Kurosawa is the revenge one: The Bad Sleep Well.

That title might also be a commentary on ASR :-D

 

Ikiru

 

Wonderful film...with Takashi Shimura.

Yes. "C3PO" and "R2D2"...

Clearly.

If you haven't seen it, check out Seven Samurai, rated several times by the British film journal, Sight & Sound, as one of the greatest films ever made. I'd personally agree.

Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's film adaption of "Macbeth" is also amazing...

 

They are great films but...

The cultural gap between myself and Japan make me feel as if I'm missing most of the subtext. That renders them less than compelling (somewhat, slightly). That's on me, I know. I also feel that way about other non-Japanese films with subtexts that would be more obvious to someone with a different personal history.

In terms of Japanese films, Tampopo and Princess Kaguya / Studio Ghibli are more my speed.

Now, waiting for the ignorant peasants over "there" to come up with a SINAD for movies :-D