measurement bollocks.

What's with this 'untrained listener' stuff?

If an untrained listener walks into a dealer tomorrow and asks to demo some kit, should the dealer refuse on the grounds that he's not fit to make a meaningful assessment?

Are you a trained listener?
If not, and please post you qualifications if you are, how do you possibly make valid assessments when comparing equipment at home?

We listen and analyse sound every waking day of our lives and we are therefore well able to make good comparative assessments based on what we hear. The young car driver you mention is if course inexperienced and won't have been driving cars since birth, well hopefully not.

Fair enough, what do you need to play?

 

The problem is your blind test methodology is exactly the same blind test methodology deployed by Hi-Fi Choice. And the results they come up with are sensitive enough to define consistent differences between amps, CDs, DACs and even digital cables.

Why? What makes their tests produce results that yours don't?

 

You want to become a trained listener? Read and study F Alton Everest's Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals. Use and reuse the supplied CD of audio files until you are confident enough to build a small portfolio of discs that highlight the problems that plague audio systems, and knowledgeable enough to put together a system that can limit these problems. Learn the difference between systems that focus on specific aspects of musical damage limitation and those that take a broader approach. Determine which works for you and ideally also how to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

Now go back and listen to what you used to think was good audio. Discover what an abomination you created by bad testing.

I'll accept your apology in about a year.

This is (or rather was) the reason why good dealers were 'good'. Not because they stocked everything, not because they gave discount, but because they stopped you creating an audio abomination because everything sort of works together. Now, all they do is sell anything they can because they are desperate for business.

 

I don't really understand your post, however I have studied F Alton Everest's Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals, and I think Rob's system sounds pretty good?

I'd have thought studying this sort of thing would only highlight how far below audibility a lot of modern kit's 'character' is.

 

Getting back to the point about expensive components; it is true that some 'branded' parts perform better in a certain area. I'm thinking of OScon caps having nice low ESR which makes a better filtered PSU. Perhaps a certain mains transformer has better ripple rejection.

The point I think we diverge at, is when someone uses an expensive part where the audio signal at the end of the line is, to within our best ability to measure it, exactly the same as it was with a cheaper part yet claims an improvement. Taking the example of a volume pot. Putting aside channel tracking for now, if we take the audio output of the cheap one and do a null test with the output from the expensive one and the remaining signal is nothing audible, I don't see how anyone can claim they sound different.

Chris, would you still hold your view two pots sound different if a null test of them produced a signal with nothing audible on it?

 

I am not surprised at your statement. Your choice of amplifier means your hearing has probably been profiled beyond salvageable repair. I'm fortunate in having only minimal exposure to the amps you use (around 0.8 mSv/year), but hey... horses for courses.

But you are right, I haven't heard Rob's system and it may well sound good. Because, if you throw enough Scrabble pieces in the air, they might randomly form words.

 

Now I really am confused. Are you saying the Cyrus III is so bad, my hearing must be damaged (or trained broken)?

 

Thing is Rob, I'm not claiming that my ears are any arbiter of the truth, just of my own satisfaction, so they can be as good or as bad as they are, it doesn't matter because that's all i have- trained or not.

But if you are presenting your little soirées as some source of Hifi truth then you need to be a little more demanding- if you want to be taken seriously by anyone other than Simon.

re the potentiometer null. It depends how you set the test up. let's assume one of them passes signal above 20khz and the other has a steep filter built into it beyond 25k because the designer fancies filtering switch mode noise on the signal line this way.

If you null them in a linear power supplied set-up with class A amps, they null perfectly. But one of them is suitable for use in a switch mode power supplied class D set up and the other one isn't. You won't know that until you try it in a switched/class D set-up.

So your null tells you no more than they null for the conditions under test, it tells you nothing about every case, just that case.

A null test only tells you that you can't hear any difference, not that a difference does not exist that could make itself audible in other circumstances.

 

If they were level matched and I could still hear an audible difference - then I would like to believe that sufficient testing should be able to show it in measurements.

Taking for example -

resistor based pot
carbon track pot
transformer based pot
LDR

all passive pots, I can hear differences between them.

I am presuming these will be visible on measurements, but does not detract from my ability to hear differences.

I am a lot less happy about saying I can hear a difference between one resistor and another. Sometimes, maybe, possibly, depends.

 

I wouldn't call it 'bad'. Just vexatious. And no, it wouldn't damage your hearing, but it might train you not to listen too carefully.

 

From personal experience as an audiophile and hifi dealer, I've always found more differences in the home vs the shop. My friends and customers have reported the same. I've always chalked it up to familiarity with one's own rig and room vs the different environment and unfamiliar systems in a hifi shop as well as ambient noise levels which are higher in the shop and may interfere or cause details to be obscured.

 

how good is the listening room in the shop Dave?

I have been in many of course, and they vary hugely.

Definitive Audio in Nottingham have one of the best rooms I've ever heard (if one can hear a room).

Audio T in Reading has an excellent room, but really only suitable for modestly sized speakers.

Noteworthy Audio (now Deco) had an okay sounding room, nothing special.

The old location od....argh my brain has gone blank, a central London dealer who has relocated to the west of London.. their old listening room whilst physically attractive (in the Camden area) sounded pretty dire.

In conclusion I'm simply saying that it seems dealerships vary hugely in the amount of time, effort andbelief they have in room acoustics, and of course they are also somewhat limited by ''how good the basic room is''.

It is much more common that not I find to go into a dealer demonstration room these days and find bass absorbers and traps cunningly disguised as art panels.

 

Thing is, as I've made clear enough times now, I don't propose my blind testing methods, soirees or any other person's blind test regimes as perfect. I use them and support others using them because they are far preferable to the alternatives which easily and routinely give very misleading results.
I suggest you comment on any test circumstances once yuo've actually attended one.

You can take my tests or those of others as you wish.
I am guided, personally, by the consistency of the results obtained and the reactions of others participating - not yourself as a commentator from the sidelines.

What you say about test conditions if very true and not disputed.
The test needs to be appropriate for the thing you are attempting to assess. You are somewhat stating the obvious Simon!

Your specific comment re null tests on pots is incorrect.
The test is performed on the pot - the single passive component - not any supporting circuit or filter.
So take an Alps and Noble 20k log pot and a nul test is perfectly valid when both are inserted into the same circuit.

 

Your first comment is absurd and illustrates perfectly why a campaign to restore the importance of measured and blind assessment is required.

The second comment is telling.
Pure reliance on sighted assessment and exposure to the numerous forms of bias that influence choice means that most people are simply throwing the pieces into the air. The regularity with which they discuss what is wrong with their systems on forums is illustration enough!

 

Selling magazines perhaps?

I'll tell you if I ever attend one of the events.

We can all complile a list of test tracks to stress systems and components.
Martin Colloms did exactly this recently when visiting our room to listen to speakers. He asked us to play his test CD, in the form of short burts of music lasting for perhaps 20-30 seconds. He made his assessment on this basis and left.

All well and good but this will only test certain things.
It will highlight gross differences of the type found in louspeaker systems, it might highlight the defference between a ss and tube amp. It could also be useful in comparing cartridges, TTs and rooms. No question.

It will however fail spectactularly if you are comparing a length of Chord Cobra with some Nordost, or a Cyrus 8 with an Arcam, or a V-Dac with Cambridge Dacmagic. In these cases differences are incredibly subtle, as are measurable differences that actually measure things related to what the ear can actually detect and process.

Such testing is useful for dividing good systems from bad, but nothing more.
They tell you little or nothing about subtle differences existing below the threshold of audibility, the very differences that create so much argument.

 

I have never been so upset by a thread as I have been with this one.
For years ,even when I had a pair of good ears ,I thought I had been getting great pleasure from listening to my Hi-Fi. I now learn that for all of those years I have been listening with uneducated and untrained ears.I'm annoyed at all the possible enjoyment I may have missed, not to mention the possibility of also having a diploma to hang on the wall ( as proof of my having reached the required standard) to further enhance my satisfaction.
Even more annoying is that having reached an age where I can just begin to see the dark at the end of the tunnel I have to accept that it is probably too late to re-train.

 

Pete, don't be upset.

The Golden Ear argument surfaces from time to time but most people realise it is nonsense.

Look at it this way.

Imagine those golden eared boffins at our most repected audio companies spending months auditioning and fine tuning equipment. I mean really fine tuning it, presumably to such a fine degree that others in the company, being untrained, are unable to detect these differences. But no matter, those golden boys and girls know best.

The product goes out into the market place and is offered for demo against the competition. Oh hang on..... the great unwashed haven't been trained so how are they going to hear the differences??

Perhaps manufacturers should be supplying training Cds and software for potential buyers.

 

No, my first statement illustrates perfectly that you have no fun button to press.

My second highlights the fact that if the sound of components were as similar as you claim that they are, there would be no 'what's wrong with my system' comments. The fact that so many people are unhappy with the sound of their systems demonstrates that:

1. People in the industry aren't doing their jobs properly, and
2. The things that you dismiss as unimportant in a system, aren't

 

I have heard of the Linn TuneDem which seems to be about listening to music albeit in an unnatural way, but "Trained Listening" seems to be to submit yourself voluntarily to brainwashing so that you listen as someone I have never heard of tells you to listen. baa!

 

That might happen soon, as Harman is debating whether to make this a publicly available thing:

http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/05/harmans-how-to-listen-new-listener.html

The use of trained listeners is one of the least 'Golden Eared' aspects of audio product development. But hey, what good can a million-dollar programme of unbiased listening do? That's just science.