|
Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
|
|
|
Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
|
In Reply to: Well, we seem to agree again... posted by Silver Eared John on December 27, 2005 at 23:21:14:
Y'all say: "I suppose I'm splittin' hairs when I see a difference between "this improves your experience" and 'this improves the sound'."As someone who has gone on several occasions from not being able to make a distinction between those 2 statements after making a change to being able to make just that distinction after living with the change for some time, or swapping back to the original set of conditions after some time, I think I feel comfortable in saying that obsessing on fine differences is most definitely "splittin' hairs" and sometimes that's just what is important.
They aren't the same but we can be so focussed on simply producing a change, or on moving the overall sound in a specific direction that we focus only on the fact that there is change and think that's good (after all, all change IS good, isn't it?
) or that we have achieved the change we wanted but don't bother to notice that it didn't come on it's own and that it brought a few drawbacks along with it. The experience, or at least in many cases the novelty of the experience, can certainly overwhelm the assessment process in the initial stages. "Improving your experience" and "improving the sound" are 2 very different things, but both can sometimes occur together. I'd like to think that there is a positive correlation between their occurring together and the truth of the "improves the sound" claim, where "improves the sound" equates to a gain in accuracy. Unfortunately we sometimes don't like the most accurate sound there is, live sound, and complain about the sound the performer creates and if we sometimes would like to hear a different sound character to a live performance, then it's a pretty safe bet that we'd sometimes like that with recorded music too. Sometimes accuracy is simply not what we want and while we can't correct for what we don't like at a live performance, we can with recorded playback and all of us, to some degree or other, would like to improve on reality.
As to what I'd want a manufacturer to do, that's a hard one to call. Some tests showing a verifiable difference in the sound produced (not necessarily what people hear but what is picked up by the test gear) would be nice but that may not always be possible. Jitter tests, for example, show us differences between players but we had CDPs before we had jitter tests. It unfortunately does happen to be true that we can't always measure what is there. And even if we can measure what is there, correlating what people hear with a given change is sometimes difficult and the link may not be causal.In the end I think it comes down to hoping that manufacturers will genuinely do the best they can here while knowing that some won't, and also hoping that they will refrain from trying to cover up the fact that they sometimes don't know what is going on, just that it does work and work with some reliability, with a crap explanation that causes more problems than it solves. And hopefully the manufacturers who do the right thing in both cases do better than those who don't so there is some motivation for all manufacturers to move that way over time.
There is one other necessary requirement that is best illustrated by a comment made by our Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, on the holiday road death toll this year" "There's too many people getting into their cars and leaving their brains at the footpath!" Customers have to think as well, and it's no use the customer expecting the manufacturer to guarantee that the customer will always be happy with the result they hear. Customers do need to 'engage brain' before making choices and failure to do so inevitably leads to more mistakes than you would otherwise make.
I realise that's probably a bit on the naive side and not what any of us would see as an ideal solution but that's about the best I can suggest.
David Aiken
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Follow Ups
- Hair splittin'... - David Aiken 13:31:09 12/28/05 (0)
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
