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Blinded by science?

Hi

At least scientifically, there is no question what you see effects your perception of what your hearing AND the reverse too.
One study I just ran across (cleaning) relates to TV, published in an old AES journal had the following conclusion (Vol 47 number 5 May 1999)
“The main conclusion is that there is a significant mutual influence between audio quality and video quality. When subjects are asked to judge the quality of an audio visual stimulus, the video quality will contribute significantly to the perceived audio quality”

This is one of many studies, from the scientific perspective, there is no doubt what so ever, what you SEE, effects what you THINK you HEAR.

About 10 years ago much of my time was spent developing loudspeaker transducers.
This was about as frustrating as is possible as it was also an unknown design approach. In the beginning I would finish what ever mod I was trying and race to listen to it, to see what the change did, then I would measure.

Once the design had reached a decent level of performance, I was no longer able to clearly say IF a change was positive or negative as it seemed to depend a lot on WHAT music I played.
One speaker in particular sounded unbelievably, even impossibly good with cymbals, on steel guitar (RY Cooder) but sounded bad on Synth music and voices.
At this point, the light went on, I was hearing favorable coloration on some programs and unfavorable coloration on others.
It also occurred to me that most of my HIFI friends, chose their program material based on what made the system sound “good” and not surprisingly, were reluctant to play things that sounded poor. This was why they would listen to things here that they wouldn’t at home.
When comparing TDS measurements of the speakers, one was swamped with information however, if one watched the most obvious gross problems and worked on reducing them, the speakers became less dependant on the “right” program material.

This was really frustrating, over the project life, I probably built 150 –200 drivers by hand and only gradually switched to depending strongly on the measurements to give me clues which way to go with the design.
It’s funny too, hearing the subjectivists suggest there is something hiding that measurements don’t / can’t see. Using a TEF machine for 20 years, the overwhelmingly strong impression I got was there is a huge blizzard of information.
It still depends largely on the operator to interpret what something in one domain meant and then what to do about it.
The posture the subjectivists take is that a measurement is a pronunciation of quality and since doesn’t track what you hear, it is invalid.
The engineer says, a measurement is what it is, a measure of “something”, what that means depends on many things including other measurements, they mean more to some than others too.
FWIW, in the old days, this debate was referred to as the Golden Ears -VS- Meter Readers issue.

It is not a surprise that you mostly have the dedicated buyers of the equipment, educated by the magazines (using a largely made up vocabulary unrelated to engineering), which help sell the stuff on one side.
On the other side you have the skeptical and more technical people, like those who actually design or are familiar with the workings of electronic stuff etc on the other.

Personally, I wouldn’t consider go back to depending only on my ears, those are the “bad old days”.

Best regards,

Tom Danley




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