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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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! -
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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