Robin Bowes;574198 Wrote: > On 04/09/10 02:57, ncarver wrote: > > > > Well I will post a dissenting view of the OP's linked site. Yes > there > > are plenty of wacky "audiophiles" around, but there are probably > even > > more "everything measures perfect so it must sound perfect" types, > and > > they are just as deluded. > > Yes, those are the two extremes, and as always the truth lies > somewhere > in the middle. > > <rest of rant snipped> > > I feel that you too are falling into trap of pigeon-holing people into > one of two camps - either they're loony audiophiles with green pens > and > cables in the freezer, or they're measurement-obsessed scientists who > don't really use their ears. > > Most of the talk about measurement, etc. on here is in relation to > eliminating the possibility of expectation bias, ie. thinking > something > sounds better because you've spent a few quid on it. I don't think > there > are many on here that advocate equipment selection based on > measurement > alone. > > My view? Well, I have a background in sound engineering, and a degree > in > Acoustics so I am firmly in the middle ground. I generally trust my > ears > to tell me whether I like what I hear or not, but I also think that > (in > theory at least) it should be possible to measure any differences that > my ears can hear. However, in practise, I don't think we yet know what > to measure to do that. > > In the end, it's all about the music. For example, I have heard > several > performances of the Rachmaninov piano concertos, but the one I come > back > to is a very early recording of Rachmaninov himself playing them - > poor > sound but performances to die for. >
Of course I was reacting to a post about how great a site was that in my opinion pigeon-holes all/most audiophiles as loons and was specifically making fun of them for believing that cables could sound different because they don't measure substantially different. It was not me doing any pigeon-holing (except perhaps for 1980's era Stereo Review--and they fully deserve it). As I said, I have never met a single audiophile who meets any of the loony stereotypes; such stereotypes are straw men. The rest of your post sounds very reasonable, and I agree with most of it (though it is my experience that "expectation bias" is vastly less of a problem than many believe). Since I am a scientist, I put quite a bit of effort into eliminating as many issues as I can when doing listening tests. Ultimately, though, I am simply trying to get a system I enjoy listening to music on; I am not trying to prove generalities. The latter is frankly difficult in the extreme, and people that say things like "just do ABX testing" are quite naive. Incidentally, I had an interesting exchange with a class of my college-age computer science students after I showed them a shell script to convert MP3s back to wav files. Why would you want to do that? This eventually led to a discussion of sound quality and it came up that I had gotten some 96/24 flac files to test sound quality. Their response: aren't those files large so you cannot store as many? Sound quality is not ever considered by a single one of these kids. Their focus is on how many thousands of tracks they can store on one device. I told them that when I was their age our focus was on obtaining better and better sounding hi-fi's along with buying more and more records. Their focus is solely on fitting tens of thousands of low-fi MP3s on their "iPods." If the music industry wants to know why CD sales are dropping so fast, I can tell them: these students to a one had no idea why one would want a CD, and also frankly did not care when it was explained to them. -- ncarver ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
