FUD, intellectual honesty, digital facts, and the TAS articles...

[andy_c]

Stick around man! Sanity is not so easy to find in audiophile forums.

[Wombat]

Stick around man! Sanity is not so easy to find in audiophile forums.

Of coarse i will

But always when i read such luch statements like this:

Actually, we set up the tests so that they were blind, in fact as well as in principal, and I have high confidence in them.

Closing one eye for a moment on a sighted test is the max i anticipate of such a claim.

[andy_c]

What I've noticed is that people who value blind tests know that they are difficult to perform correctly, and are therefore unlikely to perform such tests on a hypothesis having little merit. And yet one reads claims of blind testing of pretty questionable hypotheses, with alleged positive results! Where does this come from?

What I see a lot is vague descriptions of the test methodology, making the results unrepeatable. Or in rare cases of clear description of the methodology, one often finds that the probability of the outcome by guessing is 0.5, rather than the negligibly small value it should be.

[paul.raulerson]

Paul - the problem with this is PRECISELY the same as the problem with those daft TAS claims. If a file ripped on a PC with a lousy power supply is bit-for-bit identical with one ripped from a PC with a better power supply, then the power supply made no difference. Just as the ripper makes no difference. It's as simple as that - there really is nothing but the bits in a rip.

Do you not see that? How can you give this a moment's credence? I'm afraid this doesn't help your case regarding your claims about USB cables.

Whoa - who said I was making a case? I said quite simply that I wasn't ready to dismiss it as swamp gas, because there is a possibility that something is going on I don't understand. I did not make a conclusion as to what that might be.

Take two jumps back and enjoy some nice music.

-Paul

[paul.raulerson]

Of coarse i will

But always when i read such luch statements like this:

Closing one eye for a moment on a sighted test is the max i anticipate of such a claim.

Then you are being nothing more than an arse. For one thing, I didn't test to convince you, just myself.

Have you tested a few USB cables out to see if you can hear any difference? Any proof that as few as three different USB cables sound the same in your system? Or are you sprouting untested theory?

Oh, and what they heck makes you think you have to close your eyes for a test to be blind? SImply making it impossible to know what cable is in circuit is quite satisfactory. (sarcasm intended)

-Paul

[paul.raulerson]

What I've noticed is that people who value blind tests know that they are difficult to perform correctly, and are therefore unlikely to perform such tests on a hypothesis having little merit. And yet one reads claims of blind testing of pretty questionable hypotheses, with alleged positive results! Where does this come from?

What I see a lot is vague descriptions of the test methodology, making the results unrepeatable. Or in rare cases of clear description of the methodology, one often finds that the probability of the outcome by guessing is 0.5, rather than the negligibly small value it should be.

Whooo boy. Are you guys really going around the world to get next door.

It's really pretty simple - there is no club initiation to enjoy home audio as a hobby. No certification exams, nor any oversight agency checking credentials.

I'm not sure how you find "standards" for evaluating home audio on a personal basis.

Anyone is welcome to design, conduct, and publish any tests they like. Some of them are going to be pure crap - as witness the TAS articles in question.

Why don't more people do so, and to rigorous standards you accept? Why haven't you done so?

That's a trick question, you already answered it. Because it is a lot of work, right?

This is a hobby - who has time to conduct rigorous lab experiments? Besides, what's the fun in that? How many people would spend $300 on a Squeezebox Touch if they had to spend two weeks of their time testing the thing before they could enjoy it?

Don't you think it is reasonable to suppose that people can and should trust their ears to some degree or another? Just assign a dollar limit to what makes sense and go have fun with the stuff.

Great heavens. If you are not having fun with, go play with something else. Reefkeeping is fun/ Dosing tanks with Vodka is the current "fad" running around in that world.

Imagine that - wasting good vodka on coral - yikes! That's worse perhaps than wasting two weeks testing equipment to meet some non-existent global standards.

-Paul

[andy_c]

Whooo boy. Are you guys really going around the world to get next door.

It's really pretty simple - there is no club initiation to enjoy home audio as a hobby. No certification exams, nor any oversight agency checking credentials.

That's fine. In that case, there should be no reason whatsoever for someone to post the results of his own allegedly blind tests, claiming to have discovered some audible property of, say, USB cables. It's all about just enjoying audio, right?

On the one hand, you are here with something to prove regarding the alleged audibility of USB cables, but on the other, you claim that there is nothing to prove. Either way is fine with me, but you can't have it both ways.

[Mnyb]

Not sure that either people are capable in general of detecting bullshit, or that it's strictly relevant here

Partially I like to argue for the fun of it. Partially because people like item_audio who spew bullshit really annoy me, and I don't see any reason why they should be given a free reign. Partially because all my friends are engineers and scientists, and I'm embarrassed to be called an audiophile, because the term has been brought into disrepute by this kind of stuff, and all during my youth I aspired to be one.

But the increasing lack of privacy online makes any possible real harassment by nutters (and I must hasten to say that I'm not including you in that class) potentially damaging.

People are in general not so good at detecting bullshit , the whole alternative medicine circus is prime example society is rife with this . There is simply to much to learn in modern life there will exist some situation in life where all of us are gullible idiots and consequently people who prey on this and want to separate us from our money.

I also think that audio once was an respectable hobby has turned in to a parody and is closer to new age crystal therapy than engineering these days and it makes me genuinely embarrassed .
I want to reboot the audio hobby to what it once was.

Speaking of brainwashed by the cult , been there done that got the T-shirt, I have a closet full of bizarre cables .

TAS and the other cultists are propagating this kind of uncritical magical thinking, pseudoscience is not isolated to hifi ( just as audio is not a special case of engineering with other laws of physics ) and is a real problem any movement that is a part of this larger problems deserves to put down sometimes.


And it is not harmless even for audio due to this cargo cult engineering :

In the best case scenario the product is just over engineered and overly fancy parts of the products have been designed not for sq but to cater for audio fool believes for example biwiring terminals special boutique components, but the design is working it may be 5-10 times more expensive than it should be but at least it is a decent design.

Then there is completely crackpot designs that are extremely expensive and useless as audio products like audionote they are actually worse than any cheap brand-name reciever you can find .
There is no special magic with high thd low power high output impedance inability to drive speakers.
This is cargo cult you attribute emotional states to the machines used to reproduce the music the amps don not sing for you it is the musicians that makes the music not the hifi system, the thinking error here is that it is the hifi that needs to be musical .

But the Sfx stops at the studio to actually hear what's on the discs you should strive to the usual boring stuff like flat frequency response low
thd low noise .
And to drive speakers, power, this is greatly overlooked just have the power reserve to never drive
anything to clipping and the sound is very relaxed and grain free.

And then we have stuff somewhat in-between decent DAC " improved " by tube outputs etc.

And all the over design that is done to speak to audiophiles emotions, with gold handles and glowing tubes chromed covers audio bling bling , when are people going to realise that box cost more than it's content.
Futuristic looking speakers any one ? my own main speakers is at some fault here they would be better in a more PMC like box a cube on a stand deep with small surface area as it is now the midrange is to close to the floor , but such boring designs are unmarketable .
This is not functional at all more like expensive interior design sculptures people buy 20000$ stand mounts 2 way speakers may be good speakers but not by far the optimal method of transforming the signal from the amp to sound waves, for the money .

And the conservatism active speakers are hardly known by audiophiles as an example.
So time stand stills in audiophile country it is basically the same stuff over and over again and of course mkIII is of the same old design is more expensive it always is .

So the " harmless " audiophile cult has catered us with garish expensive junk called high end and and a time machine worthy of doctor who where we can enjoy bygone engineering standards abandoned by any sane designer at ridiculous prices .

They are of course products that brims over with solid engineering but you have to look for them and even then it can be slightly backwards due to market demands for example the silliness of not having tone controls anymore in very expensive preamps.

[chill]

Whoa - who said I was making a case?

Semantics. You ARE making a claim, aren't you?

The point is that if you allow your ears to mislead you into thinking that rips made with different power supplies sound different, then providing those rips are bit identical, that should be sufficient to conclude that your ears aren't totally reliable.

That's the conclusion that many are drawing from the TAS articles, and it should have been the TAS authors' first (and only?) conclusion.

[andynormancx]

1) I ripped a track from a CD into a wav file.

2) I converted that wav file to a flac file.

3) I uploaded this flac file to a newsgroup which means that the flac file was converted into a yEnc file (a yEnc encoder converts binary data, like the data (not music!!!) in a digital audio file, into text) and that yEnc file was then split into several smaller message files for posting.

4) I downloaded this yEnc file from the newsgroup which means that all the posts which contain the text only representation of the binary data were downloaded and then assembled into one big encoded text file which was converted back into a flac file.

5) I converted this uploaded/download flac file back into a wav file.

6) Finally I compared the two wav files and guess what - they were identical!!

Pathetic. You could at least have included a leg via an RFC 1149 link !