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Absolutely. And for me, it's no coincidence that DBT extremists have the worst listening skills. Brainwashed by lovely sounding theories that convince them all the answers are easily available in black and white, they have already accepted the fact that most things sound the same, and they stop doing critical listening tests. So if someone with better hearing acuity comes along and talks about hearing something they couldn't possibly make out, well naturally they're all going to jump on that guy and claim he's deluding himself. It's like trying to argue about the existence of "colors" to a blind man.
"Reality" is different for everyone in this business. Up until this Sean Olive business, DBT's weren't supposed to be necessary for loudspeakers, because the DBTers insisted gross differences were proven. Ok, so for at least some DBTers, at some time, loudspeakers were proven to be different. And yet I have tested people who sometimes couldn't tell the difference between one loudspeaker and another. Does this mean loudspeakers are now proven to have no influence on sound? Of course not. It's like everything else in audio. What matters is what matters to you. There's nothing wrong with science, if that's what it really is, but the ears should have the last word.
Have you ever made pinot noir?
Beer?
Cheese?
Someone has to make the product in order to be able to appreciate it?
Pap!
You have any evidence that the guy who seems to make all the current rock CD's has any hearing acuity?
We do, on the other hand, have hard evidence that YOU can't hear a 3 dB and rising HF defect that is measurably present on recording snippets that we know you've done "extensive DBT style" listening with.
We have no proof of your acuity, either.
Time for DBT Club.
Maybe we can form one and have some competitive listening trials!
All we need is a bunch of different clips with different parameters that vary and we can start to home in on what we can hear.
A master CD set of about 1,000 varying parameters and frequency response, etc...and we can start having awards for hearing, with ranks and stuff.
Like Master of Wine does!
Ethan, you are one of the most foolish people I've had the displeasure to deal with in quite some time. We are all out here on this forum, tying to talk about audio - the higher and highest end bits- yet you refuse to deal with the fact that nearly 100% of the people on this forum hear differences in recordings, pressings, recording techniques, cables, speakers, rooms, equipment, and dare I say...between a record being demagnetized -or not.
The very basis of the magazine (and by extension, the forum) is that these differences are known and we/they try to qualify and quantify these obviously minor bits -when it comes to measurement. If they (noted aural phenomena) cannot be measured (quantified) yet..but are KNOWN BY ALL who read the magazine, who make the magazine, and who make all the equipment..these differences EXIST...where you get off telling them they are all wrong? What immature minded pipe dream of internal bullshit drives you to keep spewing that we are all somehow lying to ourselves? Holy Fuck, man!!! Get thee the fuck over thine self.
However, hearing is not measuring and that is where your literal and linear mind (and logic) falls flat on it's face.
You just don't get it -- and I really think you should find some other place to cause grief.For all your 'knowledge' of acoustics-I seriously doubt you would last one day on a film set. It is by far the toughest acoustics gig on the planet.
I however, have had to come to the conclusion that you are too old to ever understand these concepts as a part of any change that may come to your mind. You are stuck in your mental past, my friend. From here, it appears that all mental growth has stopped. You have driven yourself into psychological obsolescence.
I pray that such a thing will not happen to me and I go out of my way each day to keep my mind open and flexible, as I realize it is key to learning. I strive to learn -each and every day- a new thing, a thing that challenges my capacity to accept. The more difficult to accept... the happier I am. I'm starting to run out of those sort of challenges. It can happen..and it takes considerable work to get there.
However, I do not see such with you. From here, it appears that...this end, this freezing, -therein lies your path till the end of your days.
My only objective at this point, is to wish you the hell off this forum so it is no longer polluted by such mentality -which drags it down.
Go to DIYAudio. Go to the Pass Audio forum area, Go to the Speaker Forum area, Go the tube form area, Go to the Solid State forum area. Try to walk your walk and talk your talk there.
Your ass would torn in minutes. You would not last long.
I would say that's one of the best, most concise posts this forum has turned out in many a month.
Stop beating me and anyone else who disagres with you over the head with your preconceived, absolute as you see it "Truth" when it is not my or everyone-who-disagrees-with-you's conceived reality and we don't care what your Truth is if you insist only you have The Truth. I stopped going to church for that very reason. Why would I want to read it here? Hifi is not about saving my eternal soul from damnation.
You remind me of a blind amplifier listening test at a London AES meeting in which I was involved in the mid-1980s. It was a Same/Different test rather than an ABX test. One of the listeners, Reg Williamson, a good engineer but a hardened objectivist, filled in his score card with 10 "Sames" _before_ the test started.
Reg was outraged when the proctor refused to include his results. "The 2 amplifiers sound the same," he thundered, "and I don't need to listen to them to know that!"
"How many amplifiers have you listened to, to be so sure of your opinion?" I asked Reg.
"Just one," was his reply!
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Post deleted by sasaudio
I'm just going on a bit about the fundamentals concerning the difference between engineering (which comes out of equations in textbooks) vs science..which is fundamentally exploratory reasoning, which begets hypothesis, which begets a test rigor, which begets results and then correlation..then finally THEORY..as there is no fact! Never has been! Any good scientist will tell you that. No facts-only theory, subject to change-on new information. Maybe..maybe not. With reasoned logic moving the whole thing along.
Ethan constantly conflates the two.
Therein lies the core of the issue.
I decided to just delete my post.
Take care.
Sorry, but your comparison with headphones and speakers is simply thoughtless. For example, in an ordinary stereo setting, the early sound from the right speaker must travel around your head to reach the left ear, and vice versa. With headphones, this does not happen.
Xeno, I would say your recent dredging up of posts from months ago to disparage is ... well, desparate to say the least.
IMO what is mindless is your thinking headphones can "image". When signals wrap around your head to create illusions of three dimensions, then we have "imaging" or the placement of sonic images in a relative space representing something akin to the original event. Headphones don't do that - I and everyone else other than you realize that.
The original statement was, "So once all the response-skewing reflections are reduced enough, imaging is then fine."
Headphones eliminate response skewing reflections totally. They still don't image. I can point to the "image" of the tuba player when I listen to my system. I can't do that with headphones other than to say the tuba player is in my head and to the right.
I guess it should come as no surprise (to me, anyway), that I have in my time with Winer come to the exact same observations. Beginning with:
Ethan, you are one of the most foolish people I've had the displeasure to deal with in quite some time.
I often feel like you can argue with a ficus plant, and have a better chance of getting somewhere. And the ficus plant would probably not contradict itself so much.
We are all out here on this forum, tying to talk about audio - the higher and highest end bits- yet you refuse to deal with the fact that nearly 100% of the people on this forum hear differences in recordings, pressings, recording techniques, cables, speakers, rooms, equipment, and dare I say...between a record being demagnetized -or not.
This is why I find myself telling Ethan of late, that he is simply on the wrong site. And politely suggesting he go elsewhere, where his message will be more tolerated, and hopefully, he'll be a happier Weiner. Because instead of accepting the fact that nearly 100% of the people on this forum hear differences in just about everything he can't hear differences in, and should not be badgered when trying to talk about that on an audio forum, he thinks instead he can stay here and somehow change the minds of nearly 100% of the people on this forum, to accept his beliefs. This is literally what they call "pissing in the wind".
I don't need a crystal ball to predict that Ethan will always be a source of dissension and discord on this forum. Not simply because his beliefs are at odds with nearly 100% of its members, but because he keeps insisting on bullying them into accepting his beliefs, and pretending they have more legitimacy than everyone else's.
What immature minded pipe dream of internal bullshit drives you to keep spewing that we are all somehow lying to ourselves? Holy Fuck, man!!! Get thee the fuck over thine self.
That just needed to be said!
I however, have had to come to the conclusion that you are too old to ever understand these concepts as a part of any change that may come to your mind. You are stuck in your mental past, my friend. From here, it appears that all mental growth has stopped. You have driven yourself into psychological obsolescence.
This in particular is what I meant when I said I came to the same observations about Winer. Because he also struck me as an example of a sort of fossilized mind; a mind that doesn't learn much of anything new, and is too old (or rather, set in his ways) to learn new things, or to unlearn old things that may no longer be valid. A friend of mine had a beautiful term for it: "ossification".
Ethan continues to prop himself up with the misguided notion that the problem with audiophiles like me is that I don't understand audio science very well, and if only I did, I would hold the same views. Quite the contrary, I understand his POV perfectly, as I -did- generally hold the same sort of views he does. When I was like... 12 years old. I grew out of them, just like I grew out of Cracked and Mad magazine. I learned to understand the limitations of audio science; of which there are no end, and developed a finely tuned bullshit meter, when it came to what was said in audio magazines. So I guess some people evolve and some are too afraid to evolve. I'll bet there's probably a copy of Cracked magazine on Ethan's nightstand.
My only objective at this point, is to wish you the hell off this forum so it is no longer polluted by such mentality -which drags it down.
Perhaps if we both donated something to the Make-A-Wish Foundation...? I agree his mentality drags down the forum and is poison to productive discussions, but more than that, I found myself in high agreement with Art Dudley. Who told me during the Stereophile debate he felt that such mentality was partly responsible for dragging down the level of the entire high end audio scene. This everything-sounds-the-same nonsense is exactly what keeps people buying fancy boom boxes for home audio, and thinking mp3's is as good as it needs to get. This is one reason why I have such strong opinions against this kind of "it's all good!" mentality and the DBT mantras. The high end community has way more than its own share of narrow and closed-minded thinkers, that has hindered its own progress. It does not need to import any more from the pro audio camp.
Go to DIYAudio. Go to the Pass Audio forum area, Go to the Speaker Forum area, Go the tube form area, Go to the Solid State forum area. Try to walk your walk and talk your talk there.
Your ass would torn in minutes. You would not last long.
On RAO, he'd last even less time than that.
Sorry for adding nothing new here but, I really saw myself in this post...
You're losing it, Jan. What did I dredge up from months ago?
You made a silly out of context response to Ethan's post and I responded to your post with the very relevant remark that the sound paths to our ears from headphones and speakers are very different.
You are quite wrong when you state flatly that headphones cannot image. Indeed, you can even get surround sound with appropriate binaural recordings!
Well, Ethan, it's this way. You see, when someone asks subjectivists for objective evidence, that's bullying. When subjectivists reply with all sorts of personal attacks, ad hominems and circumstantial ad hominems, fabrications, and so on, it's just because they were driven beyond endurance.
There is no good defense for the anti-DBT positions. That's the real reason for the attacks. They have nothing else.
Anybody who has done headphone listening experiments based on binaural recordings simply knows better than to say or believe that headphones can't image.
Given the right recordings, which are almost trivial to create, headphones many who have actually had the experience, agree that headphones can provide the most engaging, believable imaging there is.
The jump from binaural recordings to properly-made mixdowns of closely-miced sources is not all that big of a step.
From there, the jump to a properly-made recording based on a coincident pair of mics is not all that large.
The fact that binaural recordings often don't sound *right* when played on speakers is actually an indictment of the t flaws inherent in listening to speakers, as we now know it.
One of the canonical skills that a good audio production person needs is the ability to mentally translate what they hear to what they would hear under different circumstances. These are learned skills, not often acquired without motivation and practice. Not everybody can mix well with headphones, but many can.
The ability to listen to a typical recording with headphones, and translate it into a well-formed sonic image as might be heard with speakers is an example of translation while listening. IME, skills like these require first and foremost an open mind and a williness to try some things that are a little different.
Letsee, 30 years ago, someone whose name some of us know, who obviously intimidated John, said something that frankly sounds to me like it was poorly thought out.
Of course we don't have a multiply-witnessed transcript. We've got a paraphrase from a biased source.
It's 30 years later! Why is anybody using this as an example?
Just a left-over twitch from HE2005? ;-)
IME, people who can't reasonably answer a reasonable challenge tend to quickly tire that way.
I'd like to see someone who has staked their career on sighted evaluations, actually for once give a sensible answer to my challenge that most subjective evaluations fail even the most basic of logical requirements for there to be a test. I don't even have to bring up the issue of bias controls.
No, it is absence of suspended disbelief.
With all of the libel and bullying that goes on around here from the subjective side, one wonders what those restrictions are?
Like I said John, we don't have to bring up ABX, all we have to do is mention bias controls. And, we don't have to even mention bias controls, because what's offered by the subjective side generally isn't even testing, based on the common, dictionary meaning of the word test.
Actually 24, but I'm not the one who is supposed to adhere to factual accuracy, eh, Mr. Krueger. :-)
Because it neatly illustrates the point that was being made by another poster: that those who accuse so-called subjectivists of hearing what they believe are themselves guilty of the same failing.
For them then to claim any kind of superiority for their belief, be it intellectual, moral, whatever, is thus no more than misguided hubris.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
[with thanks to Stephen}
Three errors here:
(1) HRTFs (which you refer to as "signals wrap around your head" are neither the main source of our perception of a spatial image, nor are they required for the perception of a spatial image.
(2) HRTFs do not have to be reproduced precisely in order to be highly effective at creating the perception of three dimensional depth.
(3) HRTFs primarily relate to situations where either our head is in motion, or the sound source is in motion. If you haven't noticed that the perception of a sound stage disappears when the sources remain at the same general locations, or that they suddenly appear as a sound stage when you move you head, then your perception of a sound stage is based on something else.
Headphones or other means of reproduction don't need to impose HRTFs on recordings in order to create the clear perception of a 3 dimensional sound stage.
It is generally believed that reflections from the room do quote clearly and audibly skew the sound in a number of ways, both spectrally and temporally. These detract from the perception of the actual origional live performance.
That's generally thought to be a good thing if you want to listen to the sound as it was in the original performance space, no?
Except, they do. Furthermore, we have all these cases of recordings that make no attempt to capture the sound of the space in which they were made. Do not at least some of these recordings create the perception of the music being in a real place?
Good. Many of us can do that when we listen to many different systems ranging from loudspeakers to IEMs.
Jan, do you think that there is a possibility that not everybody suffers from this disability?
So what you're saying John is that because you can recite this anecdote involving one man in one place 24 years ago, it is absoutely true of everybody at any time and in every place who places stock in DBTs?
Seems like poorly-founded prejudice against a group of people based on their other beliefs to me!
One of the things that is now clear to me is that there are people who actually believe that if they can formulate an analogy or recall an anecdote, then the relevance of that analogy or anecdote to the present situation is beyond question.
Hmm... Hold on, hold on... One, two. One, two, THREE!
Wait, I think I can count at least one error here.
Hee hee. Just messin' around. Carry on.
I don't know why the response I had posted earlier this AM doesn't appear here now but I'll just deal with this for now;
The post you quoted was from two months ago, Xeno, and it occurs on page two of this thread. We are now on page seven.
Which was silly to point out since we all understand how sound moves around our head when listening through speakers and through headphones.
Years ago I had a friend who owned a Mitsubishi automobile with an early version of a voice warning system installed. Pete was an EE, and excellent technician and one of the better subjective listeners I've known. He was also the son of one of the most famous radio announcers of the 20th century and from the time he was in diapers had been around electronics and audio equipment as well as live and reproduced sound. He had a great concept of when to allow technology to be useful and when technology was less than useful and when to trust your senses.
One day we were headed over to Fort Worth in his Mitsubishi when he stepped hard on the gas and pushed the button to get a read out of his gas mileage as we climbed a short hill.
"You are getting 3 miles per gallon", came the reply from the mechancial voice.
We were travelling about 90 MPH when we crested the hill as Pete put the car in neutral and took his foot off the gas pedal as we headed downhill.
"You are getting 682 miles per gallon."
We both burst into laughter.
"Given the right recordings ... " we can achieve the results we desire.
The fact that binaural recordings often don't sound *right* when played on speakers is actually an indication of how much recording techniques influence the final result.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
The fact binaural recordings work as well as they do under very specific circumstances is proof comb filtering is essential to our preception of correct and accurate imaging. It is hardly proof comb filtering is bad for imaging.
"Different" indeed. There are more than a few instances of what we can do to hear something "different". The question would be whether we care to believe something different or not.
I checked the context of that purported claim due to Ethan, and find that he said no such thing.
Furhtermore, your response to Ethan was just another example of the problems with excluded-middle arguments.
In neither case Jan, did you actually respond to what Ethan said. Instad, you made a pretense of responding, gave responses that were in themselves false, and then pretended that you have effectively falsified what Ethan said.
It appears that this kind of dogmatic posturing is considered to be exemplary around here, which is one reason that actual effective exchanges of opinons are pretty much impossible.
One error here, I never said any of those three things.
However, if this is true, "HRTFs do not have to be reproduced precisely in order to be highly effective at creating the perception of three dimensional depth", this probably is not, " ... once all the response-skewing reflections are reduced enough, imaging is then fine."
I would agree, they require specific circumstances which allow them that quality. Go pick a recording at random off your shelf and listen through headphones to what is not 3-D sounstaging as you will hear from speakers. This would appear to be counting hairs on a flea's butt one more time.
Those of you who do not understand this, please raise your hand.
I thought so.
Arnie, that isn't the issue that I responded to in my intial post from two months ago. And you know it.
I don't know, Arnie. What disability are you suffering from? Shall we take a poll?
Of course! And it's even worse than that. I admit to occasionally jabbing at the most insulting people, but the majority of my posts are facts supported by logic and evidence. Versus those who have mainly insults. If they refuse to download my evidence, I've done all I can. You can lead an ass to water, but you can't make him drink.
Right, they have no logic or science, and apparently they don't have examples of their own work to convince us of their musical or audio aptitude. So what's left? Only strong uninformed opinions. And of course insults!
At least JA puts his stuff out there. We know he's an excellent bass player, and we know he knows how to place microphones and record serious music. So if I disagree with John on something, I can still have respect. But these other guys? No respect. Not in a million years.
--Ethan
There are a great many very desirable things that people would like to achieve with their recordings that cannot be achieved at the current state of the art.
A sonic result that could not be easily distinguished from the original live performance is just one of them.
So Jan, your claim is not true in general.
What is this, Jan?
I think I know.
You really don't want to stand behind your earlier indictment of headphones so you are trying trick after trick to avoid admitting that your comments were poorly-advised.
First you ranted and raved over the fact that they were a couple of months old, and now you are flogging a number of statements with poor relevancy in order to distract attention from your previous errors.
Non-responsive because you're not distinguishing between the comb filtering that is part of the origional acoustic performance and the comb filtering that is added by listening in rooms with loudspeakers.
It is so poorly stated as to have no or at best very poor relevancy to the discussion.
"Different" indeed. There are more than a few instances of what we can do to hear something "different". The question would be whether we care to believe something different or not.
Jan, you again appear to be trying to change the discussion so as to obfuscate the your earlier erroneous claim that headphones can't image.
Headphones can image. You may not prefer to listen with headphones which is a choice you get to make, but that is not relevant to or binding on very many people.
What you're showing here Jan is how you will bob and weave in order to avoid taking responsibility for your claims of even just a few weeks ago.
No, Arnie, once again my claim is not true when you are counting butt hairs.
Oh, arrrrnie .....
ROTFLMF'ingAO!
Why don't you and Xeno discuss what makes a butt an ass. I can give you some clues on that one.
Ooooh, set myself up for a snappy reply there, didn't I? Go ahead, Arnie, this one's free.
Arnie, SM has deleted several of my posts here because he believes I agreed to something that I never agreed to. And he and I will go around in circles about that. But, Arnie, you didn't come on well in those deleted posts. Everything you posted was proven to be untrue and inconsequential - mostly untrue.
Just thought I'd let you know.
Whether you agreed to it is beside the point. Here is what I said:
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