measurement bollocks.

Mine too,

I like 845's a lot too.
and 300b.
and humble little el84.

 

That's a dirty little insinuation Rob. Just for the record what have you ever designed that has ever been lauded as the best in the world by whole swathes of the audio firmament? Oh that's right, nothing.

Never mind, with your decades of electronics engineering experience and audio component design and ASIC consulting and several patents to your name you must be right. Ah but you don't have any of them do you.

I think you may have been reading your own rhetoric just a little too much Rob. it must be so hard not to bask in the light radiating from the success of your own audio design excellence.

 

Hi SQ

Rob helped Simon with the audiosmile kensai. That has been critically aclaimed, at least.

You make a valid point however.. in that many designers in audio..with degree's and all sorts - choose to use high-end parts and beleive they sound better.

 

What Mr. Westlake says on forums may well be to aid publicity, rather than tell the 'whole truth and nothing but'. A lot of audiophiles want to hear about things they can relate to, such as simple component swapping. They probably wouldn't be so impressed by his careful optimisation of ground paths or whatever.

I think what Rob says is true about most designers, it's often hard to keep a good perspective in designing audio equipment when you make so many little changes. It's the same with making recordings. You need to take a brake, listen again later or get a friends opinion. Things often are not quite what you thought when you had your nose to the grind stone.

 

I'm insinuating nothing - I think the man talks nonsense most of the time, certainly on forums with regard to audio quality and standards. It has nothing whatsoever to with his ability to design good kit and everything to do with his assumptions that what he's doing is redefining performance standards. He might be doing so at a price point, arguably, but certainly not by absolute standards.
Talented I'm sure (well obviously is) but all that nonsense about his products being so much better than the rest, I'm surprised you could fall for it. At this stage in the game, nobody is going to produce dacs or amplifiers that are that far ahead of the pack.
So he might well produce great kit and I'm sure it will be keenly priced and well featured (and that you'll buy it), but if you understand anything about the relationship of measurements to audio quality you wouldn't be expecting anything revelatory.

Clue - its been done already.
In some areas of electronics today, the future benefits can only be in cost reduction, size reduction and efficiency.

 

Well then I'm sure you can back the claim up that he talks nonsense about standards and quality with an example then Rob. Of course you'll have double blind tested the kit he refers to yourself to assure that you assumption is correct as befits your demands on others.

If John says delaying production of the CDQ to change selected components in the power supply and output stage has changed the sound of the unit for the better, then what makes you think he's wrong? Just because he can't provide an improved measurement to correlate to the improved performance you assume that he must be deluding himself. That must make you a rather rich proponent of "Everything that can be counted counts and everything that counts can be counted". Seems you, Einstein and every other well respected scientist disagree on that matter...

i'm unaware of John or Audiolab making any claims about their new kit 'measuring' better than anything out there, apart from in terms of jitter performance and even then theres no claim to be the 'best'. No one except you really gives a **** about how something measures over how it sounds. All us real people seem to prefer how gear sounds to how it measures. That's the arbiter of quality for me, does something sound better than something else, if so I don't care how it measures as I'm not chasing some marketing line of 'closer to the original source' I just want satisfaction and enjoyment.

Sadly the CDQ is useless to me, it's lack of USB ability at 192khz rules it out for me due to me having quite a bit of classical at the sampling rate. So my search for a new DAC will continue for some time I guess.

I fully understand the relationship of measurement to audio quality- there is none. Not unless you assume audio quality is solely defined by the lowest of all forms of distortion- which given the significant success of valve amps and crappy speakers over the years simply isn't the case. Good luck in finding that hifi that measures perfectly, no doubt when you do you'll be so happy with it that you won't need to tell all us deluded fools that we are wrong to listen to our satisfying, characterful equipment.

 

This is an interesting discussion, hopefully we can keep it civil=)

Now I'm the first to admit I know very little about electronics- built a few kits, made a few cables, swapped components, read a few books, got a lot of headaches trying to understand the maths, even bought an o'scope- but surely "we" as a race still know very little about how even the basic building blocks of "everything" work. We have theories about electrons, atoms, conductivity etc but so far that's all most of them are- theories, backed up with experiments and "science" for sure, but we still don't know "everything".

Yes I know a scientific theory is not the same as an "I think this is right theory" but there are huge gaps in our understanding, we can't know what matters until we know it "all", surely? Sure we can say "I have measured "this" and it's the same as "that", but are you sure?
Claiming we know all we need to know, seems to me to be like saying " I know all there is to know about earth water and fire, what else is there?

 

We would seem to have some sort of agreement about the interests of the publications but a disagreement about the interests of audiophile consumers. Perhaps it may be helpful if we check that we are referring to the same thing? I was referring to the interests of those people that currently choose to take a significant interest in audiophile equipment, read audiophile publications and post to audiophile forums like this. I was not including the interests of the non-audiophile public that purchase department store home audio or even professional audio equipment and take little to no interest in the audiophile world.

Although this statement is largely supported by the posts in this thread it is not an argument I would make because if home audio publications started to include comprehensive sets of measurements with the intention of informing the reader (not always the case) then they would also include articles about what they mean and why. You could see this process evolving in the UK hi-fi publications prior to the rapid change to matters audiophile in the mid to late 70s.

What is in typical audiophile publications is not valid subjective testing because it both lacks controls and makes statements/connections about matters well outside what has been tested. Valid subjective testing has a useful if limited role in assessing the abilities of home audio equipment. I strongly suspect that publishing valid subjective testing would do far more damage to the audiophile cause than publishing comprehensive sets of technical measurements.

Dumbing down implies that the objectives of reviews in audiophile publications are the same as more traditional reviews of the performance of technical equipment. I would suggest this is not the case and that the current audiophile reviews meet the current objectives of audiophile publications significantly better than traditional reviews of the performance of technical equipment.

 

I ave absolutely nothing to back this up, but if the AudioLab CDQ thing is being delayed due to changing component sin the PSU and output stage, it seems more likely to be for stability or reliability issues, or simply because of quantity supply problems. Doesn't sound so good to say that on a forum though does it.

 

Simon it is very simple.

I've demonstrated digital electronics, ie current technology to many people and asked them to comment on the effect of DA/AD processing compared to a direct feed. I get one of two answers. Either it has no audible effect whatsoever, or it is so marginal that a preference is hard to establish one way or the other. Those indicating the later randomly seem to flip their preference, and sometimes stop hearing it at all.

I've also demonstrated dacs to people in a group session - ranging from cheap and chearful but well specified, to more expensive audiophile devices. Again there is remarkable consistency in the listeners being unable to seperate the units.

Clearly we appear to have reached a performance plateau in that all devices perform well enough that listeners cannot tell them apart.
Add to this the fact that I can and have demonstratede the transparency of existing technology and you'll see why I regard Mr Westlake's claims to have raised the performance bar as unfounded.

I base these comments on what I've experienced and also seen many times over.
If they don't accord with what you've read or what Mr Westlake is saying then fine, but I post according to experience.

 

You're missing the point. People like characterful hifi that may not measure as well but sound notionally 'better'. The measurement crowd don't have ownership of the term better, different people want different things.

I don't accept the validity of blind A/B testing in anything but your own set-up, certainly I'd not buy kit based on how unfamiliar equipment sounds in a third party environment. I'm sure it makes a great demonstration though.

Your and Simon's kicking of JW doesn't sound all that different to Ashley knocking Naim et al, you might want to consider deriding the viewpoint and credibility of well known and well regarded designers as a tactic. Certainly him saying he believes it has made it sound better is more credible than you saying he can't have.

 

Where were these tests conducted?

In somebodies living room full of it's characteristic room nodes and other room artefacts capable of masking differences, or somewhere else?

Were the results peer group tested and published?

if none of this is the case, then the above is of course just conjecture and no different to any other opinion.

 

yup.

 

Ah, come on, my friend. You cannot retreat behind those old saws.

As far as I can tell, all he is saying is that whenever (and presumably wherever) he has carried out these tests, he has had similar outcomes.

I for one have no difficulty in accepting that. Modern DACS are astonishingly good, & it would be very suprising if one could disxcern differences purely by listening in an unbiased manner

Chris.

 

I can engineer a blind test that eliminates the possibility of change in sound of any component. I can also engineer a blind test that can parse the differences between interconnects with considerable robustness. The methodology of the test remains identical, it's just the interrogation process and how trained the listeners are that counts.

The results of asking "is there a difference?" and "what is the difference?" are unalike in every way. They can both be abused - the first tends to Type II errors, the second Type I errors - but this only serves to suggest formal testing should be left to the experts, like Harman.

 

To think that someone untrained in presentation methodology, linguistics and statistical analysis can rustle up an impartial double blind test in their own home is frankly laughable. It shows a rather 'significant' lack of understanding of what's involved.

 

Hi Sq

I think Rob to be fair understands all those things a lot more than I do.

He does however use these as the measure of other people's statements, so thought it only fair for it to apply both ways.

On a point I made earlier about masking differences with the room - I'm sure many will have experienced ''night and day'' differences at a dealer, and at home the differences dissapear.

I used to put this down to being caught up in the moment. I now think that the room acoustics most of us suffer are a mask for high quality hifi.

I have no scientifically led survey to back this up though either

 

Absolute rot and you know it Simon.

The facts are that you'd rather believe the online promotion of your latest pet designer than accept any attempt of others to obtain an unbiased opinion.

Your money, you can chose kit on whatever basis you wish.

Do report back when you've bought one of his products.

 

Absolutely.

Tested in my home, other peoples homes, on a range of kit etc etc.

Funny how the results of those listening seem to accord well with what the measured performance of the items under test would indicate.

You can deliberately engineer anything you wish within reason. You are it seems presuming that the test is rigged to produce a set result.
So you offer a choice of equipment to be used, change it wherever requested, allow the listeners to actually do the selection themselves etc.

People, including you, will desperately try to overcomplicate these things when what you are testing is very simple and by no means difficult.
You play product A & product B and ask if any difference can be heard. The answer is invariably yes from a certain section of our community. So having established that A sounds different to B, how are they different - describe the difference. Having got that far, repeat the process but unsighted, The test conditions are otherwise identical and you change nothing other than the visual clues.
Same questions asked. If A really is different to B those differences ought not to have vanished. Same ears, same system same music, and the same room of course.

Now that might not satisfy you or Simon, but its a damned sight safer as a means of assessment that reading what the designer of the latest kit is claiming in print of online, and believing it.

Oh for goodness sake stop overreacting Simon.

He hasn't been 'kicked' by anyone.
Not everyone agrees with his claims - big deal.

 

So what you've proven is that with untrained listeners less of them can actually hear the differences that they think they can.

Whatever next young car drivers not as skilled behind the wheel as they thought...
you need qualified listeners, in familiar circumstances, otherwise all you have are some quite bland anecdotes.

As I stated before I'll not be buying a CDQ because it doesn't replay the sampling rates I require. Incidentally sampling rates i can't possibly benefit from.