The Audiophile Debate

[Spotted Horses]

The problem with measurements is that each of them offer only one angle to assessing component quality and ignore a significant number of others.

That is why there are different measurements are employed to fully characterize a system.

In Lombroso's time, many people thought he was right, and his ideas were quite influential. Time has passed, and now many people think differently. So with all so-called scientific knowledge, it doesn't stand the test of time. What seems immutable today will seem ridiculous tomorrow. Your faith in science is comical, it's time to grow up.

Scienficic knowledge doesn't stand the test of time?

Lombroso's work didn't have a solid basis, it was a codification of his prejudices. Legitimate scientific knowledge is never invalidated. It may be found to be a special case of a more general theory. Somewhere above you mentioned, as an example, Newton's laws supposedly being invalidated. This is nonsense. Newton's laws are perfectly valid, in the regime of velocity, mass and length scale that he considered. In quantum mechanics a fundamental particle does not have a definite reality, but Newton's laws apply to the wave functions. In relatively there are new transformation laws, but in the limit of velocity significantly slower than the speed of light those transformation laws and dynamic equations reduce to Newton's formulation. The idea that an amplifier or another device can be described in terms of frequency response is based on Fourier's theorem, first formulated in 1822 and subsequenty refined and generalized.

Good measurements is a pre-requisite for good sound. A device with bad frequency response can't sound good. A device with good frequency response may have shortcomings if other characteristics of its response aren't good (output impedance or damping factor, phase distortion, nonlinearity, harmonic or inter modular distortion). And for transducers (headphones, speakers) there is the additional uncertainty in how it will interact with our physiology or room acoustics.

[71 dB]

Good measurements is a pre-requisite for good sound. A device with bad frequency response can't sound good.

A device with bad frequency response can sound good in special cases: E.g. if for some reason the recording has +7 dB bump at 100 Hz and the device happens to have a mirroring 7 dB dip at 100 Hz, the resulting frequency response is flat and is likely to sound good. The chances of this lucky match is of course miniscule and everything else sounds crap.

[Todd]

1. Yes, you can use two or three kinds of measurements.

For most components, not just one or two or three measurements can be used, but many can be used.  They predict sound.  That is a fact.

2. This is not just an analogy, but an illustration that any "scientific" knowledge can not only be frivolous, but also comes and goes.

It is a false analogy and it illustrates nothing.  Phrenology was pseudoscience that had detractors in its time.  The findings of phrenology could not be verified using objective measurements a century later.  By contrast, the design and construction of audio gear is based on real science that has been verified billions and perhaps trillions of times using objective measurements all over the world for decades, and over a century in some instances.

Though you have denied you are an audiophile, your posts perfectly illustrate the anti-science, fantasyland outlook of audiophiles. 

Your insistence that some audiophile myths are real does illustrate the persuasive powers of marketing, though, so something concrete does come out of what you write.

[Mandryka]

Did I understand you correctly - Hungarians can be distinguished by the shape of their skulls?

In London the Opera House orchestra used to call Solti The Screaming Skull.

[AnotherSpin]

[..]
Though you have denied you are an audiophile, your posts perfectly illustrate the anti-science, fantasyland outlook of audiophiles. 

Your insistence that some audiophile myths are real does illustrate the persuasive powers of marketing, though, so something concrete does come out of what you write.

I'm not familiar with audiophile myths, sorry. And I care little for the quest for perfect sound. It suits me how my current Naim set sounds, and I have no idea what its measurements are.

I think you understand what I'm trying to say but pretend you don't. But, that's totally fine with me, I'm not convincing anyone of anything or forcing anyone to see things the way I see them. Such a task would be ridiculous, quite like the story about the skulls of Hungarians we were told above.

[DavidW]

Hi all, I'm going to split these threads to reserve this audio system thread for just that.  I will temporarily lock the thread. 

[DavidW]

Holy cow that was 12 pages!?! Carry on with the debate here please.  Keeping in mind of course to please continue to refrain from ad hominem attacks.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Oh okay I misread you before.

Thinking about your suggestion of a DAC got me thinking.  I'll have to ask them a few more questions.

If they do have a DVD player and would be willing to buy a DAC, what kind of speakers would they need to be able to hook up to it?  Would they need a powered pair of bookshelf speakers?

PD

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Sounds like a sensible approach.

It's complicated because the ears are not microphones and the brain is not a tape recorder. What is presented to our consciousness as "sound" or "music" has already been processed by subsystems of our brain that we are not aware of. Even and A/B comparison is dicey, because of the tendency to find the louder one is superior, or one with stronger base/treble emphasis. What sounds better in an A/B test may become fatiguing in long listening. I let long term listening pleasure be the ultimate guide, and gravitate towards brands which reputation and my experience tell me are characterized by engineering integrity.

Funny that you mentioned the loudness factor.  I was over at a friend's house a couple of months ago and we were doing a comparison test.  I had asked him about whether or not he could hear much of a difference between a relatively recent CD which he has both on LP and on CD and he was asking what I could hear.  He did also bring up the factor, as you had mentioned, that people tend to find the louder sounding one as the better of the two--which he tried to make adjustments for.  Obviously, it's hard to do on the fly for someone in a home setting.

In any event, I enjoy what I ended up with...and that's all that matters in the end. 

PD

[Todd]

I'm not familiar with audiophile myths, sorry.

You have been propagating them.

I think you understand what I'm trying to say but pretend you don't.

I understand what you are writing, and I understand that it is ascientific and objectively wrong.

[DavidW]

Thinking about your suggestion of a DAC got me thinking.  I'll have to ask them a few more questions.

If they do have a DVD player and would be willing to buy a DAC, what kind of speakers would they need to be able to hook up to it?  Would they need a powered pair of bookshelf speakers?

PD

They can use passive speakers along with an amp, or they can use active speakers by themselves.  There is no point in using a receiver though with an external dac, most receivers will just digitize the signal to add their processing and then decode with their own built in dac.

I mean this was years ago though so I'm sure they figured out what they wanted, and in fact have probably just switched to streaming.

[AnotherSpin]

You have been propagating them.


I understand what you are writing, and I understand that it is ascientific and objectively wrong.

You are propagating the idea of objective knowledge, which makes absolutely no sense. Everything that man knows is subjective. Every bit spoken or written by others inevitably becomes subjective if it enters your knowing for a moment or two before it disappears.

You may dream that you see Beethoven drinking beer with Brahms. In the dream you will have full confidence that you are seeing an objective event. However, everything will be happening in your head only, i.e. in your subjective knowing.

Everything that exists in your knowing under the label of science is just your dream. You are, the rest is smoke.

[aukhawk]

...
1) You have superhuman hearing at your age (you are not a teenager anymore, sorry)
...

In the present context** I consider superhuman hearing to be a disability, not an asset.  I feel a bit sorry for anyone claiming to be sensitive to incremental changes in sound ranging from tiny to imaginary.

** that is, appreciation of music as listened to via an audio system.

[71 dB]

My USB hard disk is connected by a cable which looks like it costs $1. I can transfer a Terabyte of data into that hard disk and the transferred data is bit-for-bit identical. How can you improve on that?

You can subjectively improve on that by making the cable much more expensive and fancier looking. This will trigger Placebo effect on those whose knowledge and understanding of technical things such as digital audio and physics is lacking.

In a way I envy these people who can experience this kind of Placebo effects. The World is certainly more interesting and colourful place for them, if you have tons of money to waste that is... ...for us who understand that a $1 USB cable gets the job done 100 % being an audiophile is less exciting, but also cheaper.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

They can use passive speakers along with an amp, or they can use active speakers by themselves.  There is no point in using a receiver though with an external dac, most receivers will just digitize the signal to add their processing and then decode with their own built in dac.

I mean this was years ago though so I'm sure they figured out what they wanted, and in fact have probably just switched to streaming.

I'll check back in with them.  At the time, the wife told me that they wanted to listen to their CD collection again (which I'm pretty certain wasn't that large).  They travel a lot, so I expect that that project has gone by the wayside [that plus Covid shutting things down and also dealing with repairs to their second home post-tropical storm].

But thank you so much for the helpful comments! 

Best,

PD

[71 dB]

I hadn't even heard of MQA and had to google it.  Tells you how far behind the times I am! 

PD

You missed nothing. MQA was a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

[71 dB]

I'm not familiar with audiophile myths, sorry. And I care little for the quest for perfect sound. It suits me how my current Naim set sounds, and I have no idea what its measurements are.

As far as I know, Naim audio products measure very well. In fact almost all audio gear these days measure well. The exceptions are such as:

1 Loudspeakers have multiple issues.
2 Headphones have issues.
3 Headphone amps can have power capacity and output impedance issues.
4 Tube amps have issues (on purpose to have "warm" sound)
5 Cheap audio gear may have whatever issues.

Apart from the list above, audio stuff tends to measure well enough to be transparent for human ears these days.

[71 dB]

You are propagating the idea of objective knowledge, which makes absolutely no sense. Everything that man knows is subjective. Every bit spoken or written by others inevitably becomes subjective if it enters your knowing for a moment or two before it disappears.

You may dream that you see Beethoven drinking beer with Brahms. In the dream you will have full confidence that you are seeing an objective event. However, everything will be happening in your head only, i.e. in your subjective knowing.

Everything that exists in your knowing under the label of science is just your dream. You are, the rest is smoke.

Are you using drugs? That's possibly the craziest post I have ever seen on this discussion board.

The problematic thing about opinions like yours here is that they promote the idea that all opinions are equal, but that's not the case! You are entitled to your opinions, but that doesn't mean they are equal to other opinions.

[AnotherSpin]

Are you using drugs? That's possibly the craziest post I have ever seen on this discussion board.

The problematic thing about opinions like yours here is that they promote the idea that all opinions are equal, but that's not the case! You are entitled to your opinions, but that doesn't mean they are equal to other opinions.

No, are you?

Of course I am entitled to have my opinions. And you are entitled to have yours. And there is no slightest reason for you and me to hold the same opinions on everything.

[Todd]

You are propagating the idea of objective knowledge, which makes absolutely no sense. Everything that man knows is subjective. Every bit spoken or written by others inevitably becomes subjective if it enters your knowing for a moment or two before it disappears.

You may dream that you see Beethoven drinking beer with Brahms. In the dream you will have full confidence that you are seeing an objective event. However, everything will be happening in your head only, i.e. in your subjective knowing.

Everything that exists in your knowing under the label of science is just your dream. You are, the rest is smoke.

What?