Audiophiles

    • February 1, 2023 at 10:32 pm #4563
      Brian Peters
      Participant

        How do you treat audiophiles that will not accept basic science and only claim that using your ears are the only valid techniques.

      • February 2, 2023 at 7:59 am #4568
        Bob Katz
        Keymaster

          Excellent question. With kindness and sympathy. I straddle both worlds successfully, somehow. And often just ignore stupid conversations. I pick my battles. If I had to track down every silly postulate made by every audiophile it would fill my day. Many are clearly placebo effect or cognitive bias — like the little “magic” dots that people put on their walls that somehow fix “major” problems. Digital cables is a difficult one — because if you have a susceptible phase locked loop and a crappy-made digital cable, you might have an audible difference. I do a lot of explaining like that. Then there’s the warmup of digital cables thingy, which is particularly amusing. HOWEVER, if a PLL is a dual stage PLL with a very slow second stage, then a DAC can sound like it’s “warming up” over minutes! So that’s what I mean by straddling both worlds, when you have enough science AND listening experience in your head, like me.

        • February 2, 2023 at 9:33 pm #4581
          James Johnston
          Participant

            Well, audiophiles make me twitch, personally. I just had to deal with some audiophilia involving the question of “time resolution of PCM audio” for instance.

            Patience is necessary, but I lack too much of it.

          • February 3, 2023 at 8:16 am #4590
            Bob Katz
            Keymaster

              Heya, JJ. I explain about the time resolution of PCM in my book. With an explanation thanks to the great Dick (momentary brain fart last name forgotten). What sort of interaction did you accidentally fall into that left you patience-less?

            • February 3, 2023 at 12:50 pm #4694
              Bob Olhsson
              Moderator

                What’s annoying is that some people over-simplify the science and thump their chests about always being “right.” Then audiophiles over-react thinking audio science must be BS because the fake science being claimed as “truth” doesn’t match their experience.

                This two-way ego tripping happens in many areas of audio.

                • February 3, 2023 at 1:03 pm #4695
                  Bob Katz
                  Keymaster

                    Roger that. It goes both ways. The cool thing is that here at Digido Fora we can take a deep dive on anything of this sort that may occur, and hopefully straighten out both sides on matters that count.

                    Well, I hope so 🙂

                    There’s a such thing as legitimate and valid disagreements. Also, regarding audiophilia, I like to weigh the logical likelihood of an assertion to be true. Not put all the conspiracy theories into the same basket :-). For example, the assertion that there are audible differences in digital cables. No, forget that one. The assertion that one magic dot stuck on your wall can change your life. How about that one? Highly unlikely, so I don’t waste my time trying to chase it down, as I have bigger fish to fry. I reply, politely, and diplomatically to the poster.

                    • February 3, 2023 at 2:38 pm #4698
                      Bob Olhsson
                      Moderator

                        The problem is that unlikely stuff that shouldn’t happen can happen as a result of poorly designed equipment. The first generation of digital audio transceiver chips were a disaster that created clocking errors and ground loops in a lot of gear. As a result, changes in these errors resulting from various cables could make an audible difference. The problem finally got solved after the same poor engineering got applied to video and everybody could see it on a TV screen. We’re still living with people’s distrust of digital cables because nobody wanted to openly blame the problem they missed on the chip manufacturer.

                  • February 3, 2023 at 2:38 pm #4697
                    James Johnston
                    Participant

                      Bob K., have you seen the writings from Miland Kuncher?  If not, don’t. You don’t need heartburn.

                      • February 3, 2023 at 3:02 pm #4699
                        Bob Olhsson
                        Moderator

                          Talk about the long way around putting  band-aids on the real problems.. My experience has been that tightening up all of the AC connections (that often haven’t been touched in 50 years) will make cable differences go away.

                        • February 3, 2023 at 3:20 pm #4700
                          Bob Katz
                          Keymaster

                            JJ, you’re begging me to look him up. I don’t need any heartburn today 🙂

                        • February 3, 2023 at 7:30 pm #4701
                          James Johnston
                          Participant

                            Don’t Bob, don’t. He continues to argue that time resolution is lacking in PCM, and endlessly refers to details that are time/frequency tradeoffs, not actual signal detection problems.

                             

                          • February 25, 2023 at 10:06 am #4989
                            Norman Varney
                            Moderator

                              I too rely heavily on both instrumentation as well as my ears. Note that there is much work yet to be done in the area of psychoacoustics, and that there are still things we can hear, but can’t yet measure. In addition, we have a hard time correlating what we measure with what we hear, and an even harder time communicating it. Just think of how poor our current audio perception language is. In my opinion, audio perception terms are in desperate need of standardizing. When we talk the same language, we can expect better understanding and quicker advancements.

                               

                            • February 25, 2023 at 10:25 am #4990
                              Bob Katz
                              Keymaster

                                Hi, Norman. Thanks for joining! Correlating the listening with the measurements is the hardest I think in acoustics, where the science and the art meet head on. Because Room acoutics is a multi-variable problem.
                                We know about Schroeder curves, but the interaction of the Shroeder RT curve with things like transient reproduction and spreading is very involved. Transient perception and frequency response, both the direct and the delayed — are complexly intertwined. Change one aspect and it affects our listening. Should we add some softening on the walls or “diffusion”? (Scattering). I know what I like, I know what I hear in my mastering room, I know the areas in listening where I would still like to improve it —- but I only Suspect what the next step will be to take the room to the next step. I’m going to try some scattering to be placed over some traps on the back wall…..  Fortunately it’s subtle, I’m down to the last tweaks and I can work perfectly well as the room is now!

                              • February 27, 2023 at 2:47 pm #5019
                                dljosephson
                                Participant

                                  I think Peter Belt defined this genre with the colored zipties and pet rocks. It’s real, and in the studio it’s real too. If you program the participants brains, whether they are listeners or performers, they can have different perceptions of the audio performance. It is well known that big microphones give a bigger sound, for instance.

                                  In the community noise world this plays out too. If people see a helicopter image they report hearing noise, even if there isn’t any.

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