Audio Science: Does it explain everything about how something sounds?

PeterA · Jul 14, 2015

PeterA said:
The bottom line to me is this: people come to these forums to share experiences and to perhaps learn a few things about this wonderful hobby. There is plenty of room for discussions about both objective measurements and data and how they effect audio system performance and also subjective listening impressions and how our ears tell us things that audio science can not yet explain. People do not want to be confronted and badgered by fellow members who condescend to them. Life is too short. Participating on forums should be fun. When it no longer is, people will find other things to do with their time.

I wrote this in another thread. I have highlighted a particular sentence and included its context. Amir commented thus about my phrase "...audio science can not yet explain.": "As to confrontation, unfortunately that is what we have even in your statement when you say "audio science can't yet explain." Audio science very much explains much of what you think it doesn't. You don't like that answer but you have to understand that such comments are inflammatory to the other camp and hugely so. You are telling them that they have to throw out a mountain of research, published and accepted audio science. As I said, on a number of other forums, any of the active threads on our forum would have been considered "anti-science" and riots in streets would follow. confrontational."

Does this highlighted sentence, in my original quote above, seem confrontational, controversial and "(hugely) inflammatory to the other camp"? Are the objectivists, or anyone for that matter, offended by this phrase? I'm curious and want to learn if and why this might be.

Perhaps I should have written, "I do not think measurements can explain everything we hear from an audio system. For instance, I have not seen measurements that will explain how a speaker system will perform in the areas of micro dynamics, resolution, sense of presence, or the listener's level of emotional involvement, in a given system and room." For these areas of performance, I have relied on my ears.

Does audio science really explain everything about how something sounds?

rockitman · Jul 14, 2015

PeterA said:
"I do not think measurements can explain everything we hear from an audio system. For instance, I have not seen measurements that will explain how a speaker system will perform in the areas of micro dynamics, resolution, sense of presence, or the listener's level of emotional involvement, in a given system and room." For these areas of performance, I have relied on my ears.

Does audio science really explain everything about how something sounds?

Bottle it, pack it and ship that statement....it's a winner. Harmon marketing would disagree with you of course...

DaveC · Jul 14, 2015

Harman has only given us one small piece of the puzzle, one that is not even the most important aspect of good sound imo, in order to use it for promotional/marketing purposes. The extent of their knowledge and testing is unknown, and I suspect the cutting edge of audio science is done almost entirely in private company's research programs which are kept confidential. Of what is public knowledge only some of what we hear can be correlated to measurements and this is of very little use to the end user imo. Edit: except room acoustics and how different speaker designs interact with the room, this can obviously help the end user... but even here you can simply hire an expert to optimize your system.

However, I believe it is a good idea to attempt to make correlations between what we measure and what we hear in order to advance our knowledge and understanding of the subject. To a designer this probably seems much more interesting than to the end user, which is part of the issue we have here imo. And people getting butt-hurt a little too easily...

DonH50 · Jul 14, 2015

Belittle the research, then go on to say research is a good idea? I am sooo confused...

I do not think any amount of science will prove anything to a pure subjectivist. The argument will always be that science does not know it all, does not test the right stuff, and is too easily manipulated.

I do not think any amount of subjective testing will prove anything to a pure objectivist. There will always be bias, a lack of controls in the testing, and one more experiment/one more test condition to try.

I do think both sides could learn a lot from the other, but learning takes significant effort.

I honestly see this as the "anti-science" thread complement to Amir's "pro-science" thread. Both seem to start from a reasonable-sounding premise and ask a reasonable question but lead to flaming raging debate with no clear winners and a lot of angst.

Speedskater · Jul 14, 2015

For instance, I have not seen measurements that will explain how a speaker system will perform in the areas of micro dynamics, resolution, sense of presence, or the listener's level of emotional involvement, in a given system and room.
But those are not part of the audio system! Those are just labels that humans give to their interpretation of what they hear. Test equipment is very good at measuring extremely small differences, but not very good at guessing what humans might label those differences. We should also note that humans have a poor track record at (repeatably & reproducibly) applying those human labels. A strict listening protocol (like Harmon's) gives much better results.

Does audio science really explain everything about how something sounds?
Once we put microphones in one room and loudspeakers in another, the calculus of the situation expands almost without limits. There is little chance of a complete explanation with so much data. But if we limit and simplify the model, science does a rather good job.

DaveC · Jul 14, 2015

DonH50 said:
Belittle the research, then go on to say research is a good idea? I am sooo confused...

I do not think any amount of science will prove anything to a pure subjectivist. The argument will always be that science does not know it all, does not test the right stuff, and is too easily manipulated.

I do not think any amount of subjective testing will prove anything to a pure objectivist. There will always be bias, a lack of controls in the testing, and one more experiment/one more test condition to try.

I do think both sides could learn a lot from the other, but learning takes significant effort.

I honestly see this as the "anti-science" thread complement to Amir's "pro-science" thread. Both seem to start from a reasonable-sounding premise and ask a reasonable question but lead to flaming raging debate with no clear winners and a lot of angst.

This is obviously part of the problem with typed communication... I did not belittle anything. Why do you assume the worst? What I said was the information Harman released is carefully calculated to be useless to their competition (partly because much of it is already public knowledge anyway) but useful as a marketing tool. This does NOT belittle it in any way!!! It's just the way it is and this is to be expected of ANY for-profit business.

I mentioned this not to belittle anyone or anything, but to point out that we simply don't know the extent of what audio science can explain because it's very likely we are not aware of much of it. I'd bet not one person is aware of the extent of audio science because it's being kept secret by those who have done the work. All we can discuss is (mostly) decades old knowledge of gross phenomenon.

Speedskater · Jul 14, 2015

DonH50 said:
I do not think any amount of subjective testing will prove anything to a pure objectivist.

I have a very different viewpoint. Once differences are measured or demonstrated (in listening tests), then a good objectivist will switch to subjective testing to determine a preference.

ddk · Jul 14, 2015

DaveC said:
Harman has only given us one small piece of the puzzle, one that is not even the most important aspect of good sound imo, in order to use it for promotional/marketing purposes. The extent of their knowledge and testing is unknown, and I suspect the cutting edge of audio science is done almost entirely in private company's research programs which are kept confidential. Of what is public knowledge only some of what we hear can be correlated to measurements and this is of very little use to the end user imo. Edit: except room acoustics and how different speaker designs interact with the room, this can obviously help the end user... but even here you can simply hire an expert to optimize your system.

However, I believe it is a good idea to attempt to make correlations between what we measure and what we hear in order to advance our knowledge and understanding of the subject. To a designer this probably seems much more interesting than to the end user, which is part of the issue we have here imo. And people getting butt-hurt a little too easily...

Not to take away from JBL or their products but that video definitely had a strong marketing angle to it peppered with some data to present it as authoritative. The DBT was little more than a joke as presented and conducted in the video and the follow up pictures, I pointed out its many deficiencies in threads with Amir.

david

DonH50 · Jul 14, 2015

Speedskater said:
I have a very different viewpoint. Once differences are measured or demonstrated (in listening tests), then a good objectivist will switch to subjective testing to determine a preference.

I should have clearly defined "subjective testing" as folk listening and providing opinions; no measurements, no DBTs and the like, since those fall into the "science" camp. Otherwise I agree with your statement.

I should also note that I consider those (my) "I thinks" to be extreme positions, not the norm. And certainly neither is my own personal opinion.

NorthStar · Jul 14, 2015

Is WBF free of any bias in the pursuit of better high fidelity sound reproduction? ...The closest replication of the live musical event.

DaveC · Jul 14, 2015

I'd also point out that it's very common for measurements and testing to be misinterpreted.

For example the Harman speaker preference testing might seem to say that a flat FR correlates to listener preference while all the work I have done points to a SMOOTH frequency response being more important. If you look at the data I think this interpretation fits and the correlation of a flat FR to listener preference is assumed but not necessarily true. It could be but those factors have not been tested independently as far as we know.

So even for folks that rely on data entirely or mostly, their interpretation could easily be wrong if it's not backed up by a ton of actual experience. Another reason to keep an open mind...

TheMadMilkman · Jul 14, 2015

In my opinion, there are really two questions here.

Q: Can we measure it?
A: Yep.

Q: Do we understand the psychoacoustic response to what is being measured?
A: It depends.

Speedskater · Jul 14, 2015

DonH50 said:
I should have clearly defined "subjective testing" as folk listening and providing opinions; no measurements, no DBTs and the like, since those fall into the "science" camp. Otherwise I agree with your statement.

Ah yes. "subjective" one word with two opposite meanings.

ddk · Jul 14, 2015

DonH50 said:
I should have clearly defined "subjective testing" as folk listening and providing opinions; no measurements, no DBTs and the like, since those fall into the "science" camp. Otherwise I agree with your statement.

I should also note that I consider those (my) "I thinks" to be extreme positions, not the norm. And certainly neither is my own personal opinion.

Why would you consider DBTs as part of the science camp when the final results squarely rely on subjective impressions? It also seems to me that so much of the material presented here and labeled as science are simple specs that many of us will and have used regularly and without any objection. Science and engineering are the designer's tools, the quality of final quality of the work depends much on his art and subjective experiences as well his technical knowledge, you can't separate the two with a line down the middle.

david

DonH50 · Jul 14, 2015

Because IME purely subjective people who trust their ears alone consider DBTs useless and part of "science". They do not need a test to prove to them what they know they hear.

As for the line down the middle, earlier I did state that I consider these to be the two "extreme" positions, but IMO (an important disclaimer) that happens a lot (we hear from people sitting at one end or the other). I suspect the majority are in the middle, but we hear more from those nearer the extremes as they feel most strongly moved to present and defend their viewpoint. Such is the case in much of life...

ddk · Jul 14, 2015

DonH50 said:
Because IME purely subjective people who trust their ears alone consider DBTs useless and part of "science". They do not need a test to prove to them what they know they hear.

As for the line down the middle, earlier I did state that I consider these to be the two "extreme" positions, but IMO (an important disclaimer) that happens a lot (we hear from people sitting at one end or the other). I suspect the majority are in the middle, but we hear more from those nearer the extremes as they feel most strongly moved to present and defend their viewpoint. Such is the case in much of life...

I can't say anything about other people but in my own case I sometimes need DBTs when sighted tests are inconclusive but I conduct them without a particular outcome in mind. The extremes are just that...

david

BlueFox · Jul 14, 2015

PeterA said:
Does audio science really explain everything about how something sounds?

Not yet, but it gets us in the ballpark. Unfortunately, for some people, when something cannot be explained with current knowledge/science the fallback position is to imply the listener is weak minded, and influenced by the appearance of the audio gear. If that doesn't work then imply the listener is delusional because they are imagining what they hear.

the sound of Tao · Jul 14, 2015

BlueFox said:
Not yet, but it gets us in the ballpark. Unfortunately, for some people, when something cannot be explained with current knowledge/science the fallback position is to imply the listener is weak minded, and influenced by the appearance of the audio gear. If that doesn't work then imply the listener is delusional because they are imagining what they hear.

Funny stuff lol

... but soooo true

Occam · Jul 14, 2015

ddk said:
Why would you consider DBTs as part of the science camp when the final results squarely rely on subjective impressions? It also seems to me that so much of the material presented here and labeled as science are simple specs that many of us will and have used regularly and without any objection. Science and engineering are the designer's tools, the quality of final quality of the work depends much on his art and subjective experiences as well his technical knowledge, you can't separate the two with a line down the middle.

david

David,

I'm really quite surprised you see it that way, as from my perspective, you're one of the few here applying 'science' properly. You are going for a 'direct proof/verification'; can an assertion be proved with some statistical certainty, . An 'indirect proof/verification' requires a mechanism of causality. Why does this happen, and how does the mechanism (typically expressed mathematically) predict, and how accurately.
What usually passes for scientific palaver on these boards is often simply a bunch of assertions with no numbers or experiments to back them up. But it sounds plausible to the reader, which is the primary goal of any marketing literature, to make the reader feel smart.

From my perspective, Armin's graphs of speaker evaluations by different cohorts are tremendously informative, and it certainly gives substance to subjective metrics. My takeaway is that among all the differing cohorts, they maintain absolute rank, but those with respectively, audio reviewer, audio dealers, and HK training graduates experience lower and lower variances. And as you lower the variances, the probability of individuals within those cohorts coming to the same statistical results increase. Experience helps, and if done appropriately, rigorous, standardized experience helps even more... I'm unsure why anybody would take issue with that.

FWIW,
Paul

FrantzM · Jul 14, 2015

TheMadMilkman said:
In my opinion, there are really two questions here.

Q: Can we measure it?
A: Yep.

Q: Do we understand the psychoacoustic response to what is being measured?
A: It depends.

+ Many

It is hard for me to put my head around the notion of "cannot be measured". A phenomenon very existence is proof of its measure-ability. There is no way around it , to me. IT is truism that we don't know it all but we are constantly moving ahead with our knowledge and our ways and means to measure. The measurement may exist but we may not yet be able to correlate it to our perception (I would like to say reliable perceptions but allow me to drop the epithet). I would go as far as saying that the interpretation is key to apprehend reality.

Someone else mentioned the microdynamics and macrodynamics ... What is a dynamic? .. a ratio.. How can it not be measurable?

I am an audiophile and for the most part i listen and like and base my preference on what I deem to be good sounding, an unreliable metrics. ... I fully know that my prejudices are always there and however much I fight them they color my perceptions. yet one can be trained to listen better and I believe that audiophiles do that (to a certain extent) along the way of their audio experiences...
That a phenomenon is not measured is not proof on it not being measurable. I'll stop there...

Audio Science: Does it explain everything about how something sounds?

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