18th Sep 2019, 12:41 pm
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#997
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Octode
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,885
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Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!
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Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers
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Originally Posted by stevehertz
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Originally Posted by julie_m
So cables that were "used to", say, jazz, would not sound as good when the system was being used for listening to, say, folk?
That hypothesis would be worth testing, but for the inevitable accusations of insufficiently-sensitive measuring instruments .....
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Oh we have such sensitive instruments, they're called ears, and in some respects, contrary to the view of us 'techies', audiophools trust their ears 100%. That's even when the difference either doesn't exist, or is demonstrably so miniscule as to be unmeasurable, as it is in so many cases. No, the problem that audiophools have is that they are either unaware of, or choose to ignore the fact that what they are listening to is actually not just an aural event, but a psychoacoustic one. And that changes everything. The reason? because it is dead easy to convince ourselves (for lots of reasons but one of them being that you just dished out thousands of pounds on this new piece of hifi) that the 'upgrade' that you have just made sounds better. In short, you desperately want, and really believe that this new piece of kit will make your system sound better, so your brain says, there you go, it is better! Seller and audiophool are happy! This satisfying deduction is arrived at on the basis that in truth, your ears have not been able to detect any difference. But you knew the difference would be subtle anyway (didn't you?!), so it all makes sense..  |
You have to be a trifle careful regarding human hearing. I suggest you scan this http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/...ghly-nonlinear
And the paper from Physical Review Letters on which that is based https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstrac...ett.110.044301
Quote "We study human ability to simultaneously judge the frequency and the timing of a sound. Our subjects often exceeded the uncertainty limit, sometimes by more than tenfold, mostly through remarkable timing acuity. Our results establish a lower bound for the nonlinearity and complexity of the algorithms employed by our brains in parsing transient sounds, rule out simple “linear filter” models of early auditory processing, and highlight timing acuity as a central feature in auditory object processing."
Craig |
Something I've been keen on when trying out HiFi has been "clarity" both of speech and music also stereo placing and _movement_. My homebrew tinkering and experimentation has led me to the conclusion, that to my ears and those who I've tried who can be bothered to join in, group delay and temporal distortion seems to be more important than chasing distortion down to sub percentage levels.
To those who say if you can't measure it it doesn't exist, I say "Are you sure you're measuring the right thing?"
I no more *believe* in the 'phoolery than any good scientist but as a Physicist I'm always open to being proved wrong!
D
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