ar-t;372883 Wrote: > This was not directed at anyone on this forum, or anyone specifically. I > talk to a number of industry folk on a daily basis, and > well...........we all were about as frustrated the same amount about > this subject. You would be surprised how often we hear this lodged > against all of us. > > How I perceive (key word) how something sounds can not be quantified. I > can measure things that I think can explain it, but not always. THD can > easily be measured, and no one will dispute those results. But how it > is perceived by the listener can not. If you could, no one would listen > to tube amps. (I don't, so there!)
Not to speak for CatBus, but I think you might have missed the point there. The debate is not over quantifying -how- you perceive something - that's a job for neurobiologists. It's over quantifying -what- and -when- you can perceive it, and -how much- of an effect it takes. When someone says they can hear the difference between (say) cables, there are basically two possibilities: 1) Swapping the cables altered the sound waves emanating from the speakers in a way significant enough to be perceptible to the pair of ears listening to them, or 2) The brain of the listener, knowing the cables were swapped, perceived a difference that it wouldn't have had it not known they were swapped. Reporting a perceived difference in an uncontrolled listening test cannot distinguish between those, and neither can measurements (because the measurements might be more, or less, sensitive than the ears in question). Instead, one must either do a blind test (which eliminates 2) as a possibility) or absent that trust the last 150 years of research on human hearing and psychoacoustics, which tells us in most cases where the perception thresholds are. Unfortunately audio subjectivists (and I'm -not- putting you in that category) often don't seem to recognize that 2) is a possibility at all. That's plain old counterfactual burying your head in the sand (there's -mountains- of evidence that 2) is extremely common), and it's the root of many of these endless debates. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=56712 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
