As the great line in the movie Forrest Gump goes, “I don't remember being born. I, I don't recall what I got for my first Christmas and I don't know when I went on my first outdoor picnic. But, I do remember…” my most embarrassing and sobering audio moments! 
They have been the source for much learning for me so I thought I share them with you and see if others can do likewise.
Episode #1, Circa 1980: I am working in a “HiFi” shop, fixing audio equipment. I go to the showroom one day and see this great new solid state amp. No ICs for the output stage. Three massive power supplies, making the amp three times heavier and beefier than anything around. Wonderful specs. You name it. I listen and love the power and performance. To my pleasant surprise, I find otu that employee pricing is quite reasonable so I go ahead and buy one.
At the time I was going to college and living with my brother. My brother is also an engineer but is about 10 years older than me so he grew up with tubes (I started life with transistors). He looks at my amp and says tubes would sound better (btw he is NOT an audiophile). I say no way and go about my business.
A few days later my brother comes to my room and asks me to come to the living room to see something (where I had put my amp and speakers). There it sat, a little tube amp he had designed. I am thinking this is going to be easy. It has maybe 1/10th of the parts my amp has! I figured I can easily clean his clocks.
So we play something with my amp first, then switch over to his. I have to say, I could not believe my ears. The musicality was in another planet. Mid-range was so smooth and pleasant compared the sterile feel of my solid state amp. Lost for words, I got lucky and asked him to turn up the volume where the tube amp fell apart and could not reproduce the bass. We switched back and my amp at the same volume blew his tube amp away on bass. In front of him, I declared myself a winner but inside, I knew something didn’t make sense there. Here was technology multiple decades later but couldn't match the musicality of its older brother.
As an aside, the above was the experience I remembered when I visited Steve’s room recently and listened to his Lam tub amps. Same fluidity and mid-range ease. And of course, he cheats with his sub, taking care of the above issue I had with my brother’s tube amp.
Episode #2: Circa 1983-1984: I am out of school, CD format is out, and I have my own $500 unit (second gen products after Sony’s). The engineer in me thinks digital is perfect. I throw out my cheap turntable and start loving the convenience and authority of CD, blowing away my speakers with Telarc 1812 overture canons.
My close friend who had gotten the “high-end audiophile” bug comes over one day. He tells me my CD player sucks both compared to his Meridian CD player but more importantly, the LP. I tell him he is nuts especially after he told me he had spent $500 for his interconnects alone! He proceeds to invite me to a challenge at the local high-end audio shop.
We go there and he explains to the sales guy that I am an engineer and that I believe there is no way LP can match the CD because the latter is perfect. He smiles politely and suggests an experiment to A/B CD against the same title on LP. And to make the job of the LP harder, he was going to select the most inner track. I sit back comfortably, ready to declare victory.
Boy was I unprepared for the slap in the face. The LP as with the tube experience above, was so much more music than the CD. I mean it was not close at all. Note that he used the Meridian CD player my friend had bought which was their first gen unit (the modified Philips top-loader). This was the first time I had evidence that high-end audiophiles were not entirely crazy.
Episode #3: Fall 2000: We had just acquired Pacific Microsonics, the creator of HDCDs. Reason for acquisition was their 20-bit encoding in audio CDs and their speaker correction logic. During the due diligence process, I got content from them with or without the 20-bit embedding and could clearly hear the difference. Fast forward a few weeks later and the team is on board and working down the hall from me.
I happen to be chatting with one of their engineers and he throws this line at me: “you know that some of us didn’t believe in this 20-bit stuff. Right?” Shocked, I asked what he meant. He said well, most of us can’t the difference at all. I told him they must be deaf because I hear it clear as a bell at which point, he hands me his headphone and says, “let’s do a test.” I turn around and he starts playing the same sample files as above.
I am thinking, this is easy, I can clearly hear the difference. I ask him to switch back and forth multiple times and I was able to firmly solidify my choice of which one was the 20-bit HDCD version and which one was straight 16-bit.
I turn around and tell him which one was which and why. At which point he hits me in the face with a 2x4 by saying he was playing the exact same file every time! I asked him to conduct the experiment again while I had my back turned, and now the two sounded the same. There was no face saving here. You swallow your pride and accept defeat.
Episode #4: Circa 2001-2002: I am by then a certified Golden Ear in all of Microsoft. After a few years of training, I could hear an artifact from a mile away. No one could match me at that job including our trained listening panel. So the audio codec team would routinely ask my opinion of changes to our audio codecs (WMA family) before release.
I was home sick once so I offered to test out a new revision of the encoder. My team sent me the before and after the change versions of the encoding. I was surprised that they would run this variation past me as it was clear as a bell that there were regressions and the new version was far lower quality. There was more harshness, more pre-echo, etc.
Not being well, I lash out at the engineering manager that they had gone backward in a big way. He responded with surprise that this could not be and that the change was very minor and could not account for such a big difference. I told him that was not the case and the degradation was considerable.
He proceeds to send me email with another set to test. I again complain that the new set is far worse with similar kind of regressions. He answers back with … the files were identical to the reference! I reply back that it can’t possibly be as the difference was very clear and not subtle at all. He insists that the files are identical. I pop up a command-line prompt and use the diff program to compare the files against reference. And wouldn’t you know it the computer said the files were identical down to the last bit!
I go back and listen again, now they sound identical yet again!
I better stop here before I lose more of you all’s respect. But let me net out that that I find a lot of truth in what forum members say on either side of the fence. No question that listener bias can get one in trouble in a big, big way. Even as a skilled tester with no dog in the hunt, I could fall victim to it. At the same time, there are experiences that I cannot, as an engineer schooled in the science, explain such as superiority of tube amps. So there I sit, with scars on my back, that this hobby (and job) has aspects to it that defy fully understanding at least by me.
Yes, the experiences are old. Same comparisons may have different outcomes now. But the human nature is as valid as it has been over the last three decades described above. Better not be overconfident that you know everything there is no to know here...
I welcome your comments and experiences.
They have been the source for much learning for me so I thought I share them with you and see if others can do likewise. Episode #1, Circa 1980: I am working in a “HiFi” shop, fixing audio equipment. I go to the showroom one day and see this great new solid state amp. No ICs for the output stage. Three massive power supplies, making the amp three times heavier and beefier than anything around. Wonderful specs. You name it. I listen and love the power and performance. To my pleasant surprise, I find otu that employee pricing is quite reasonable so I go ahead and buy one.
At the time I was going to college and living with my brother. My brother is also an engineer but is about 10 years older than me so he grew up with tubes (I started life with transistors). He looks at my amp and says tubes would sound better (btw he is NOT an audiophile). I say no way and go about my business.
A few days later my brother comes to my room and asks me to come to the living room to see something (where I had put my amp and speakers). There it sat, a little tube amp he had designed. I am thinking this is going to be easy. It has maybe 1/10th of the parts my amp has! I figured I can easily clean his clocks.
So we play something with my amp first, then switch over to his. I have to say, I could not believe my ears. The musicality was in another planet. Mid-range was so smooth and pleasant compared the sterile feel of my solid state amp. Lost for words, I got lucky and asked him to turn up the volume where the tube amp fell apart and could not reproduce the bass. We switched back and my amp at the same volume blew his tube amp away on bass. In front of him, I declared myself a winner but inside, I knew something didn’t make sense there. Here was technology multiple decades later but couldn't match the musicality of its older brother.
As an aside, the above was the experience I remembered when I visited Steve’s room recently and listened to his Lam tub amps. Same fluidity and mid-range ease. And of course, he cheats with his sub, taking care of the above issue I had with my brother’s tube amp
.Episode #2: Circa 1983-1984: I am out of school, CD format is out, and I have my own $500 unit (second gen products after Sony’s). The engineer in me thinks digital is perfect. I throw out my cheap turntable and start loving the convenience and authority of CD, blowing away my speakers with Telarc 1812 overture canons.
My close friend who had gotten the “high-end audiophile” bug comes over one day. He tells me my CD player sucks both compared to his Meridian CD player but more importantly, the LP. I tell him he is nuts especially after he told me he had spent $500 for his interconnects alone! He proceeds to invite me to a challenge at the local high-end audio shop.
We go there and he explains to the sales guy that I am an engineer and that I believe there is no way LP can match the CD because the latter is perfect. He smiles politely and suggests an experiment to A/B CD against the same title on LP. And to make the job of the LP harder, he was going to select the most inner track. I sit back comfortably, ready to declare victory.
Boy was I unprepared for the slap in the face. The LP as with the tube experience above, was so much more music than the CD. I mean it was not close at all. Note that he used the Meridian CD player my friend had bought which was their first gen unit (the modified Philips top-loader). This was the first time I had evidence that high-end audiophiles were not entirely crazy
.Episode #3: Fall 2000: We had just acquired Pacific Microsonics, the creator of HDCDs. Reason for acquisition was their 20-bit encoding in audio CDs and their speaker correction logic. During the due diligence process, I got content from them with or without the 20-bit embedding and could clearly hear the difference. Fast forward a few weeks later and the team is on board and working down the hall from me.
I happen to be chatting with one of their engineers and he throws this line at me: “you know that some of us didn’t believe in this 20-bit stuff. Right?” Shocked, I asked what he meant. He said well, most of us can’t the difference at all. I told him they must be deaf because I hear it clear as a bell at which point, he hands me his headphone and says, “let’s do a test.” I turn around and he starts playing the same sample files as above.
I am thinking, this is easy, I can clearly hear the difference. I ask him to switch back and forth multiple times and I was able to firmly solidify my choice of which one was the 20-bit HDCD version and which one was straight 16-bit.
I turn around and tell him which one was which and why. At which point he hits me in the face with a 2x4 by saying he was playing the exact same file every time! I asked him to conduct the experiment again while I had my back turned, and now the two sounded the same. There was no face saving here. You swallow your pride and accept defeat.
Episode #4: Circa 2001-2002: I am by then a certified Golden Ear in all of Microsoft. After a few years of training, I could hear an artifact from a mile away. No one could match me at that job including our trained listening panel. So the audio codec team would routinely ask my opinion of changes to our audio codecs (WMA family) before release.
I was home sick once so I offered to test out a new revision of the encoder. My team sent me the before and after the change versions of the encoding. I was surprised that they would run this variation past me as it was clear as a bell that there were regressions and the new version was far lower quality. There was more harshness, more pre-echo, etc.
Not being well, I lash out at the engineering manager that they had gone backward in a big way. He responded with surprise that this could not be and that the change was very minor and could not account for such a big difference. I told him that was not the case and the degradation was considerable.
He proceeds to send me email with another set to test. I again complain that the new set is far worse with similar kind of regressions. He answers back with … the files were identical to the reference! I reply back that it can’t possibly be as the difference was very clear and not subtle at all. He insists that the files are identical. I pop up a command-line prompt and use the diff program to compare the files against reference. And wouldn’t you know it the computer said the files were identical down to the last bit!
I go back and listen again, now they sound identical yet again!
I better stop here before I lose more of you all’s respect
. But let me net out that that I find a lot of truth in what forum members say on either side of the fence. No question that listener bias can get one in trouble in a big, big way. Even as a skilled tester with no dog in the hunt, I could fall victim to it. At the same time, there are experiences that I cannot, as an engineer schooled in the science, explain such as superiority of tube amps. So there I sit, with scars on my back, that this hobby (and job) has aspects to it that defy fully understanding at least by me.Yes, the experiences are old. Same comparisons may have different outcomes now. But the human nature is as valid as it has been over the last three decades described above. Better not be overconfident that you know everything there is no to know here...
I welcome your comments and experiences.
