Re: audio culture nonsense?

"Sonnova" <sonnova@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:fluimp0bt7@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> I don't know if I'd call it hyperbole but some of these "differences" 
> between
> components are quite subtle.

Only if you don't measure them. Then the differences are huge.

> Many are so tiny that it takes someone who has
> trained themselves to listen for them to hear them, and even more so, it
> takes a type of personality who CARES about those tiny differences.

We've always been careful to find listeners who care about the diffference

at hand, and believes that they have trained themselves to hear it.

BTW, there are legitimate ways to train listeners to hear relatively small

differences, but there's one catch - the difference has to be, in some 
sense, audible for them to reliably detect it.

>  An  analogy is oenology. :->

> Go to a formal wine tasting. Listen as the oenologist at the front of
the
> room tells you about the vanilla, coffee, chocolate and raspberry 
> overtones
> of the vintage you are tasting. Huh? All I taste is wine. It's either a 
> good
> wine or a mediocre wine. It's too young and astringent or its older and 
> more
> mellow. It has a good nose, a nice balance of acid and sweet or its
bitter
> and almost devoid of aroma. That's it.

Wow, you must have an alergy or something. I often sense all those sorts
of 
things when I'm eating or drinking.

>  Now is the oenologist pulling our leg  or is he indulging in a little 
> hyperbole?

If we chemically analyze the wine, we find all sorts of chemicals that
each 
has some characteristic odor and/or taste.

> No. He can really detect these
> things and has developed (along with other wine scholars and
connoisseurs) 
> a
> mutual vocabulary to describe what he's tasting. He can taste it and I 
> cannot
> because he's trained his palate to notice these things.

I must be weird. I tasted a lot of those things the first time I tasted
wine 
or even coffee. No expert was needed to fill my head with similies and 
metaphors.

>  I cannot because I
> don't know what to taste FOR, but equally im****tant, I don't care. I
like 
> a
> nice wine, its just not my life. If the wine is pleasant, I'll enjoy it.

> I
> might also mention that in a double-blind wine tasting, I can't tell one
> cabernet from another.

Ouch!

>> Quite so.  Thus my sarcastic
>> reference to 'soul changing' experiences with amps.  But the
>> rhetoric nevertheless implies *unsubtle* audible difference ...

> Many of these differences are subtle. Some are not and some are program
> dependent. I'm not going to make any soundstage determinations listening

> to
> rock-n-roll and three-channel mono jazz recordings.

But you already did. You said that the soundstage of that jazz recording
was 
like 3-channel mono.

>> which usually* hasn't been established as real in the first place. 
>> Meanwhile,
>> we have the 'simple fact' of human error always operating
>> in the background.

> Human error is always possible.

Actually, it is likely maybe even certain.

The question is not whether there is error, the question is how big is it 
and can we manage it anyway?

> But what do you say when a magazine p***** a
> single unit around to several reviewers, all of which live in different 
> parts
> of the country and who do not necessarily know each other and who do not
> communicate, but when the evaluations are in, they all have almost the 
> same
> things to say about the piece?

Group think.  And don't think that group think can't happen when the
members 
of the group are isolated for a time.

>> So, the question remains, is there good reason to believe such claims
>> of difference AREN'T nonsense?  Where's the data?

> What data?

Answer a question with the identical same question?

> Conventional measurement doesn't reveal anything about these
> differences

I wouldn't be too sure about that.

> and do nothing to tell anyone what the system is going to sound
> like.

I wouldn't be too sure about that.

> THD doesn't seem to mean anything because its been found that the human
> ear is largely insensitive to anything but rather large amounts of it in
> amplifying devices.

Mentioning THD at this point in the history of audio technology is like an

excluded-middle argument. If the concept of THD had any life left in it 
before a few years back, Geddes and Lee finished it off with their AES 
papers.

> Sine-wave intermodulation distortion is also undetectable
> by ear except in large amounts

In which alternative universe?

> (much higher than any competently designed
> amplifier would ever have).

That depends on what you call a competently-designed amplfier. You have
kept 
on talking about how great some tubed amps sound despite their high
measured 
distortion, so you must think that they are competently designed.  I can
set 
up a DBT  that will let you clearly hear the nonlinear distortion in them 
when it is a tenth what you say is is.

>  So what does that leave us? SID? DAD? Some people
> discount those as being bogus.

They are just different names for nonlinear distortion.

> So, what is left?

Lots of different kinds of linear and nonlinear distortion, and noise.

> Frequency response? With
> modern amps having DC to daylight frequency response graphs that look
like
> they were drawn with a straight-edge, I don't see that being anything.

Try hooking one of your favorite tubed amps up to a modern speaker load.
The 
straight line turns into a cross-section of the Alps!

> So  what measurement do matter?

Lots of different kinds of linear and nonlinear distortion, and noise.

>  You will say that this is proof that there is no
> audible difference between amps, I say that we aren't measuring the
right
> things.

I don't see any signs of strong competence with measurements. I do see a
lot 
of high end journalistic truisms, which are liberally dosed with myths.

>  Impasse.

Lack of familiarity with the relevant facts.

>> (* sometimes we'll be shown bench test data that indicates, indeed,
>> that the amp might well sound different ...because the measurements
>> are so poor compared to other amps, including mass-market ones)

> What measurements?

Lots of different kinds of linear and nonlinear distortion, and noise.

>  I remember once that there was a French tube amp (this was
> probably 15-20 years ago and I do not remember the brand) that measured
> terribly (over 2.5% THD!) yet was one of the musical-sounding amps that
I 
> had
> ever heard.

Just an anecdote.

Most likely, the high THD only occurred under conditions that were not 
present during the listening evaluation. What you did hear was probably 
frequency response ****fts caused by the amps' high source impedance.  The 
alleged listening test wasn't a test because no reliable standard was
being 
used. IOW, it wasn't a straight-wire bypass test, or something like it.

> I was reluctant to send it back. and would have bought it were it
> not for the fact that it cost an arm and a leg.

I can easily afford the best-sounding amps around because amp technology
has 
progressed that far, and I use reasonable means to evaluate amps.