Objectivity vs Subjectivity
- Thread starter Passive_audio_enthusiast
- Start date
Thanks for sharing, but this is a paid article which I don't intend to purchase only for reading. Again for me non-linear distortion is a non-issue as ambient noise at home will be above the distortion level which anyway would mask them.
Thank you and if your statement meant you just did not get this, Let me try to explain.
It is an objective representation of identifying a subjective topic like how much of an Objective /Subjective you are and it is clear from this thread that everyone is different and has different weightages to measurements vs ears.
And I think we all agree that anyone having only "My view is right" is better avoided.
eg you may give 80% to measurements and 20% to listening..so you could be an x1 But you may care 80% for your listening and 20% for a measurement ..you will be an x4
Of course it can be argued that x1=x5 are just points in it and its an continuum hence someone may fit in at a 25% between an x2 and an x3. It could also be said to be depending on the person thir their mood, the budget, the time of the year/month etc etc
Exactly what i tried to bring out below.. I do understand that humanity can be divided also into people who like ambiguity and preferring greyscale situations and those who prefer it in black and white and we need both.
I guess if you put Nos and a chart it becomes "Objective" like @Anurag mentioned so aptly?
This article helped me get a better insight into my impulsive reactions.
www.psychologytoday.com
Black-and-White Thinking in Our Social Worlds
The evolutionary basis of simple thinking.
square_wave
Well-Known Member
A request to hardcore subjectivists. Can you talk about your experience with home auditions / listening room auditions of systems ? Systems that are solely assembled based on fabulous measurement vs ones that are widely accepted as really high end because they went beyond measurements ( typically )? You can even talk about your personal journey - > how you went about choosing your system and how certain measurements contributes to more entertainment for you ? Personal experiences would be great.
To me..personally, unless conversations go into this direction, it gets quite meaningless. Music is a human experience. The science just gets you there. The proof is in the pudding. Nowhere else.
It will be educative as well. Some of us can try that out and post our experience here and that will add value to the forum.
To me..personally, unless conversations go into this direction, it gets quite meaningless. Music is a human experience. The science just gets you there. The proof is in the pudding. Nowhere else.
It will be educative as well. Some of us can try that out and post our experience here and that will add value to the forum.
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Isnt Alan Parsons also of the group Alan Parsons Project ? APP takes me back to youth ! Eye in the sky, Tales of Mystery and Imagination..and so many more !
Here is a video of them talking on Mixing (at 11:35 min) and sonic properties around analogue/digital and now Audiophiles talk about the good ol days
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For me measurements is always the starting point. I may have made exceptions in the past like purchase of the Rethms or the Croft. I heard the Rethms and I liked what I heard. In case of Croft, even though it didn’t measure well, 3 reviewers on Stereophile loved it. Plus I could hardly find anything bad written about it. So went with it.
I normally like tube amps. But again I would prefer to buy ones that measure decently. I definitely don’t look for the perfect measurements.
Once I shortlist gear based on decent measurements and reviews, I write to the designer and understand the product more. Without speaking to the designer I would never buy. Vintage ones are obviously an exception. If the designer does not engage in a conversation, I do not buy the product, irrespective of how well it has been reviewed. If it’s vintage, I speak to people who are very well versed with vintage stuff.
I normally like tube amps. But again I would prefer to buy ones that measure decently. I definitely don’t look for the perfect measurements.
Once I shortlist gear based on decent measurements and reviews, I write to the designer and understand the product more. Without speaking to the designer I would never buy. Vintage ones are obviously an exception. If the designer does not engage in a conversation, I do not buy the product, irrespective of how well it has been reviewed. If it’s vintage, I speak to people who are very well versed with vintage stuff.
Eye in the Sky and I, Robot are especially great musically , apart from being sonically excellent which is a common trait in Parson’s productions. And of course Parson’s work in DSOTM is what shot him to limelight, but before that he had also mixed the underrated Atom Heart Mother.
He also contributed technically to the 30th Anniversary LP mix of DSOTM released in 2003 which as per aficionados is the best sounding version ever.
He also contributed technically to the 30th Anniversary LP mix of DSOTM released in 2003 which as per aficionados is the best sounding version ever.
Couldn’t agree with you more!
Thanks to my work, I’ve spent countless hours in recording studios watching music being made. I’ve also attended a ton of live events at outdoor venues, auditoriums and jazz clubs. To my ears, no piece of equipment can match the real thing.
The main factors I use to judge a system are tone, timbre and timing; musicality, if you will. Soundstage height, width, depth, imaging, micro details, explosive dynamics, silent backgrounds, etc are icing on the cake. If I forget to focus on the minutiae and just get lost in the music, I know I’m listening to a great system.
The only time I look at measurements is when I’m trying to match amps and speakers. An 86db 4 ohm bookshelf is not something I’d pair with a tube amp. For me, music is like food - either I like a dish or I don’t. Waxing eloquent about how it was prepared or the quality of the ingredients does nothing for me. If you need spec sheets to tell you your system is good, your ears have lost their tastebuds
I think all speaker design are very much flawed. Centuries will pass and no single speaker design will never be able to mimic multiple sound sources at the same time. The thing of using a paper cone with a coil that moves over a magnet is flawed.
Our vocal chords produce sound differently. Is the speaker design anywhere close to how our vocal chords produce sound?
String instruments produce sound differently
Wind organs produce sound differently
Flute produce sound differently
Drums produce sound differently. Sound is produced by a diaphragm moving up and down, much iike the speaker cone. The only thing that the speaker paper cone design comes close to is probably the drum.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but I think we are fooling ourselves by measuring speakers and expecting it be a perfect tonal match for all natural sound producing things. So an objective way of looking at this conundrum is to accept that it is impossible at the moment to expect that the playback can ever perfectly play back what your ears heard. And I'm not even talking about recording. But IMHO, recording should be much easier. The microphone has to mimic the human ear perfectly and nothing else.
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Let’s see - I had posted it earlier in the thread, but let’s repeat it.
Back on the day, I used to own Parasound amps that were in Stereophile Recommended Component Class A or B. I picked them because they had oodles of current, ability to drive loads down to 2ohm, among the best measuring distortion figures, and a legendary designer behind them (John Curl).
I had them paired with various speakers, settling finally on a pair of fairly high-end Snells. They met all the audioweenie requirements - bass, imaging, air, soundstage, blah blah blah.
Then I heard a pair of SETs driving some custom horns at a friend’s place. Oh. My. God. I ended up selling my rig above and getting a 2A3 amp which provided 3W, had distortion figures that were on the left of the decimal point and a S/N ratio that was abysmally low. And it sounded a LOT more lifelike, atleast with classical music and vocals.
This was in the 90s. Now forward to a few months ago. I was looking for a new system. My wife and I were auditioning Sonus Faber speakers - she isn’t an audiophile and we listened to it with 2 amps: a solid stage McIntosh and a single ended Unison Research tube amp. I asked her which she preferred - she isn’t an audiophile, she didn’t even know which amp was what, but she and I do attend a lot of classical concerts and she, without hesitation, picked the sound with the first amplifier - she said the vocals sounded like they were in the room and the strings and piano also sounded more real. The first amplifier was the tube amp and that was exactly what my own ears told me.
And that was the same reaction all my friends had when they heard both systems in my room back on the 1990s - and that is what gave me the confidence to trust my ears over a spec sheet.
YMMV.
Now I’d like to hear the story of an objectivist and how they pick a perfect speaker based on measured frequency response and how that correlates to the sound of the real thing (ie, u amplifier instruments heard live).
square_wave
Well-Known Member
Can the Objectivists also do the same ?
Coming from a professional, this says a lot !Couldn’t agree with you more!
Thanks to my work, I’ve spent countless hours in recording studios watching music being made. I’ve also attended a ton of live events at outdoor venues, auditoriums and jazz clubs. To my ears, no piece of equipment can match the real thing.
The main factors I use to judge a system are tone, timbre and timing; musicality, if you will. Soundstage height, width, depth, imaging, micro details, explosive dynamics, silent backgrounds, etc are icing on the cake. If I forget to focus on the minutiae and just get lost in the music, I know I’m listening to a great system.
The only time I look at measurements is when I’m trying to match amps and speakers. An 86db 4 ohm bookshelf is not something I’d pair with a tube amp. For me, music is like food - either I like a dish or I don’t. Waxing eloquent about how it was prepared or the quality of the ingredients does nothing for me. If you need spec sheets to tell you your system is good, your ears have lost their tastebuds
What a great observation! Thanks for sharing.
Very similar experience here. All my hifi fundas flew out the window in an instant
Just to clarify, I’m not involved in the music business in any way
As an advertising copywriter making tv commercials, I was very particular about the music that went with the visuals. I almost always used live musicians rather than canned tracks. On a few rare occasions, I would chop up and rearrange existing popular music. Not telling you which tracks, though!
So true
From what i could find out the difference in the "Quality" of sound boils down to "timbre "which is , as I understood it, a complex amalgamation of all the harmonics and subharmonics of just one frequency of just one instrument.
eg when you speak you have several waves of different frequencies at any given time time and each of these have harmonics and subharmonics of each tone which when summed up create a complex wave. A spoken sentence has so many tones. all of it put together defines the timbre of that one persons voice . Now imagine a music piece with several people and instruments with so many different fundamental frequencies.
So much would be lost/changed right from recording to reproduction ! so in the end the recording itself is a approximation of the actual event and a playback another approximation of the recording.
OF course it could be that the difference is too low for our ears to make out
The point that I was attempting, but apparently failed, to make was that the purpose of that 34-yo AES paper was to suggest a measurement technique that might provide a way to reconcile the differences between measurements and perception of the performance of audio equipment. Based on your posts and comments that pertain to the gross discrepancy between what you measure and what you hear in your own system, it clear that such a reconciliation has yet to be achieved. Also, if you were to ask the folks at Jensen Transformers for a complimentary compy of the paper, I seriously doubt that they would tell you that you needed to purchase it from AES.
square_wave
Well-Known Member
My contribution to experience :
Trying to keep this a little general because there are too many to count. I realised after about 5 years into the hobby that my emotional response to a system playing music have no correlation with how best it adheres to the mainstream accepted and published measurements. There are some fundamental measurements that I would call " basic engineering ones " that I look up to get to a common sense - baseline. Beyond that, I have found that everything is all over the place and it is only actual audition that determines how my emotional response will be. For example, I have sat fully emotionless in front of a very high end Genelec system while a single driver full range on a SET amp made sure that I could not even sit still, smiling ear to ear with the same music.
However I have heard some really awesome measuring systems like fully active ATC in a controlled acoustics environment where I felt all the music was well represented in its glory. However it was my brain working and getting ready to dissect the music. A fabulous tool to someone who will study music and its reproduction.
A subjectively appealing system on the other hand will stop my brain from dissecting everything and just lets me enjoy the music. Time will fly!
Trying to keep this a little general because there are too many to count. I realised after about 5 years into the hobby that my emotional response to a system playing music have no correlation with how best it adheres to the mainstream accepted and published measurements. There are some fundamental measurements that I would call " basic engineering ones " that I look up to get to a common sense - baseline. Beyond that, I have found that everything is all over the place and it is only actual audition that determines how my emotional response will be. For example, I have sat fully emotionless in front of a very high end Genelec system while a single driver full range on a SET amp made sure that I could not even sit still, smiling ear to ear with the same music.
However I have heard some really awesome measuring systems like fully active ATC in a controlled acoustics environment where I felt all the music was well represented in its glory. However it was my brain working and getting ready to dissect the music. A fabulous tool to someone who will study music and its reproduction.
A subjectively appealing system on the other hand will stop my brain from dissecting everything and just lets me enjoy the music. Time will fly!
This is something I personally relate to. Visual cues have a big effect. The moment I try to dissect something, I stop enjoying music. The biggest hit is on the imaging. With my eyes open, the room boundaries play a big role. Whatever I do, the sound seems to stop at the wall boundaries behind the speakers and the music seems two dimensional. I have experimented with various speaker placements, but I haven't managed to get the feeling of the sound stage to be bigger than the room, unless I black out the room and put on an eye cover. But when I play music using my Yamaha AVR (RX-V667 quite average), I enjoy it a lot with the Cinema DSP function enabled. The cinema DSP converts the 2 channel to 7.1 and even with my eyes open I get a feeling of 3 dimensional sound and the room boundaries don't seem to matter.
Fully agree on this point in general. I had heard Genelic and Neumann bookshelves in a sound studio. Very nicely engineered speakers with accuracy that don't seem to distort at high volumes.
But for my preferences, the Dynaudio being played in the same room added the soul to the sound and made it musical. You tend to stop analysing music and just tend to enjoy it. I guess most of the studio speakers are more for accuracy & reference listening rather than enjoying the music. Offcourse the Dynes were much bigger so not a fair comparison. But their sound signature seemed more musical to me. I am not an Audiophile though, just an impression about what I felt. It could be an opposite experience with someone else's tastes.
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