Quote from: andy o on 2009-04-29 22:37:09

pseudoscientific people tend to get VERY offended at the first criticism of their ideas and see it as personal attacks (religious people doubly so).

At the risk of it being assumed I am labeling myself as "pseudoscientific," it should be noted that I haven't responded angrily in this thread to criticisms of my writings and statements. What has annoyed me are the personal remarks made about my behavior, my income, my status, my education, my ethics, etc, none of which have anything to do with my opinions on audio.

I have been lurking on Hydrogen Audio for a while as a "guest", so I had certainly expected criticisms of my writings on this forum - how could I not? But I have tried hard to address the argument, not the arguer, in this thread, respecting ToS #2. But what I had not expected was the puerile nastiness of some of the posters. And now you're blaming _me_ for the lowering of tone, "andy o"?

Quote from: krabapple on 2009-04-29 19:04:34

If this is *all* you think that's going on in this thread, maybe you aren't reading enough of it....or maybe you shouldn't read it at all. 
May I direct you to the Stereophile forum?

Now why would you travel that personal road with me ?
No, you may not.
What do you mean by that ?
Is the Stereophile forum somewhere you send .. erm, who exactly ?

Correct me if I am wrong, I just had a look in the Stereophile forum,
& noticed you, sir, are a member in the Stereophile forum,
So I can reply to you here instead, if that's OK.

All I was saying was people like you have a long history & a lot against just about everything/one, & it carries, for lack of a better term, making it quite hard to gather the audio related bits, nothing personal.

One's opinions do not deserve respect by the mere fact of their existence or the sincerity with which they are held. 

Undue deference to the fallacious idea that 'everyone's opinions are equally valid and worthy of respect' is a very American trope, IME.  Yet opinions can range from generous, deeply informed and well-thought out, to very misinformed and dismally stupid, or even hateful and evil.

Dichotomy between opinion and fact doesn't hold firm either, and one can't always hide behind 'it's just an opinion' -- how many opinions are actually wholly free-floating from *belief* that something is *true* (factual)?  Preference for green over red?
People have killed over  less.

a single HA member playing for the audiophile team, a tester in a lossy format development project,
with positive ABX results & he is now banned ?
That little missing bit of info, smells funny bro.

You´re right. I guess it lies within my character. Also, my mother uses to tell: "Persons who are screaming are always wrong" - and I tend to believe her.

You did not. I didn´t post my own test because I could very easily have been manipulating it. Which of course shows what I maybe thinking about others here - assuming that people are manipulating in order to meet their agenda. I myself wouldn´t have manipulated - but I wanted to forgo any possibilty of that kind of discussion. This presents myself in an unflattering light but I´m willingly accepting this.

Man, I would love to believe you. But in this particular thread I´m afraid I can´t find anything related. On the other hand, my own statement that I can influence the upsampling characteristics in order for them to "sound" better basically is the same since upsamplers are using a similar reconstruction filter. I basically claimed that I found the one that closely resembles an original 24/96 source.

Oh, you´re so right. On the other hand I do believe that the techniques I´m using for regular use on my little home system are vastly superior to the ones normally used (which are, as you said "generally accepted"). They are not even remotely lossless (upsampling, reducing effects of Loudness-War and so on). Sometimes I even do think of most of the people out there (and forgive me, also here) as a bunch of dumb sheep following some advice written long time ago. When it comes to Audio I never took anything for granted, even if it grounds itself in scientific measurments. History has shown that measurments are only the beginning and over the years the methods of measurements have evolved. And they will further do. I firmly believe that some things can´t be measured yet. Take the ear for example. It is not the complex machine most believe it to be, because behind the ear comes the brain which in fact does the major work. Our ear does hear nearly everything (it filters something out though). But our brain decides what is useful and what not. The scientific research in that area is relatively young, so who can know what will come in the future? Is MP3 really transparent to us? I don´t mean by that that MP3 isn´t transparent, I´m just pointing out a possibility. The Hypersonic Effect is just another example, maybe it´ll be proven wrong in the future, maybe it´ll be proven right. Who knows? It would be unwise to assume that everything is written in stone.

All of this writing just to make clear that one should never take anything for granted - because that would avoid exploring new things. The same goes of course for Audiophiles who sometimes don´t believe in measurements. I believe in a healthy co-existence. By the way, I own a headphone amplifier too... beside the sound chosen for practical reasons because my Sennheiser HD-600 is very affected by the impedance of the Amp (the headphone itself has 300 Ohm). But you´re right, normally I restrain myself - because just uttering things like "This is better - and it is the only point of view I´ll accept" is just pointless, proves nothing and it is boring. But so many people here have done otherwise - which shines a not so bright light on the whole community.

This brings me to starting point of this thread here: both sides (objectivist vs. subjectivist, which he and I are not actually) are there to challenge each other. I believe that this in combination with convenience and marketing brings true progress. We need both sides in order to evolve sonically. If the audiophiles find something new, let´s measure it. If we can´t measure it, maybe we can in a few years. If we can´t even then, well then they were wrong. We, being the geeks and nerds we are, are responsible for bringing new & improved methods of experiencing music to the people. And I believe that we owe it to them to do that calm, friendly and reasonable.

Quote from: Stereoeditor on 2009-04-29 23:21:59

At the risk of it being assumed I am labeling myself as "pseudoscientific," it should be noted that I haven't responded angrily in this thread to criticisms of my writings and statements. What has annoyed me are the personal remarks made about my behavior, my income, my status, my education, my ethics, etc, none of which have anything to do with my opinions on audio

Writing and statements (and editing an audiophile magazine) are behavior too.

Regarding ethics, it's been a little bit amusing that the tsk-tsk contingent here hasn't come down on the intermittent dribble of posts which implicitly accuse you and your colleagues of selling out your intellectual principles so as not to offend your advertisers.  I don't mean *my* posts, where I more or less frontally accused you of either shamelessly softpedalling, ignoring, or being plain ignorant of the facts about mp3 before you presume to 'behave' about them in your attempts to educate your readers and listeners. 

I mean the ones from posters that seem to be almost sympathetic, or at worst *resigned* or *rueful* or *patronizing*, saying in effect, hey, look, what do you expect from the guy?  He's got ad space to sell!  He can't go telling his readers that CD players aren't generally likely to sound different if they compare them fairly, or that they could easily make mp3s that they likely couldn't tell from an SACD without specific training.

Quote

I have been lurking on Hydrogen Audio for a while as a "guest", so I had certainly expected criticisms of my writings on this forum - how could I not? But I have tried hard to address the argument, not the arguer, in this thread, respecting ToS #2. But what I had not expected was the puerile nastiness of some of the posters. And now you're blaming _me_ for the lowering of tone, "andy o"?

Whereas I marvel over the awesome power of *reasonable tone* over reason, even here on HA.

The MP3 encoder is LAME 3.98b2 --vbr-new -V2, used from foobar2000. MP3 decoding was done in foobar2000. Both original file and foobar2000 decoded MP3 are in 32-bit WAV format.

• Atkinson makes an unimportant claim about MP3 artefacts. It's not backed up by positive double blind listening test results, that we usually demand here, but shiny frequency plots.
• Axon has a private theory about Atkinson's already unimportant spectral findings being even more unimportant.
• Axon posts several more pages of spectral data that conclude Atkinson's spectral data was OK!

Quote from: Cavaille on 2009-04-30 01:14:03

You´re right. I guess it lies within my character. Also, my mother uses to tell: "Persons who are screaming are always wrong" - and I tend to believe her.

You're getting an biased look of the behavior of people on both sides of this debate. Read rec.audio.opinion and the Stereophile forums (particularly Rants & Raves) for a while to see people screaming just as loud from the other side of the fence.

Some of the most skeptical and intelligent people I know are firm believers in astrology, and believe it has a genuine scientific basis. And, y'know, empirically, calling their beliefs pseudoscientific just does not get me very far.

Nobody believes their own beliefs are pseudoscience - it's always somebody else's. It's kind of like calling somebody a "dumb sheep", actually.

In case it's not clear, the sort of gooey New Agey epistemological arguments you're bandying about irritate me.  It is not necessarily 'unbiased' or admirable to consider all possibilities or all sides of an argument; it can be simply a stupid and unjustified waste of time.

Such manipulations are why the test is documented to an extent that allows re-performance.  In other words, peer review.  Science as it applies the world over should be no different here - fusion, medicine, physics, all are subject to peer review and re-performance.

  And some things really do seem to be remarkably stable.  If you think about it, *unless* the 'laws of physics' actually change over time, then science *must* accumulate models of the universe that are more and more accurate. The 'flux' is turbulence around the asymptotic line approaching truth.

I can sum all this up in one admonition really; keep an open mind, but not SO open that your brains fall out.

Usually you post positive ABX results along with an exact identification of an artifact's location and a description of its character.

The fact that you believe most positive ABX result at HA must be fake rather indicates that you were baffled how hard it is to produce one.

Try starting with a correctly dithered (!) 24-bit file. Or convert the 32-bit file to 24-bits with 1-bit dither Triangular no noise shaping in Cool Edit Pro / Audition.

You're getting an biased look of the behavior of people on both sides of this debate. Read rec.audio.opinion and the Stereophile forums (particularly Rants & Raves) for a while to see people screaming just as loud from the other side of the fence.

Well... when you publish *any* kind of evidence in the digital domain, there's always some way it could be doctored. It's entirely possible I could have faked every one of my plots. If you're reserving yourself for something you can actually prove, you'll never actually say anything! ..... I think you really are spiting yourself a bit by not describing what you have done with your tests. Although I do understand that it can be intimidating. We're not exactly carebears. :F But I'm extremely glad that I posted my blind test results here, in large part because of the criticism I received on them, and the valuable advice I received. Not many people on this board haven't been wrong one time or another.

They call this "The Great Debate" for a reason  People tend gravitate to one philosophical extreme or the other, because only a few fixed personal beliefs, when logically extrapolated, pretty much define the rest of your worldview on audio matters. And much of what we have been discussing with JA has been big-idea, Great Debate sort of stuff. Stuff that's been debated for almost 30 years now.

Just because psychoacoustics is an incomplete field does not mean that it is a useless field. Just because measurements cannot completely cover all important qualities, doesn't mean spurning them is a good idea. Taking those two for granted does not mean trusting them blindly - it means understanding them solidly enough to use them as the basis of engineering decisions, and modifying them when contrary evidence is compellingly presented. What you seem to be advocating is a sort of precautionary principle which I think is unjustified. Just because the possibility exists doesn't necessarily mean it is always worth taking into account, at least for something as existentially trivial as audio... Moreover, operating inside the milieu of psychoacoustics and signal processing largely ensures that such fields grow into new discoveries. Operating outside of them hinders that. Like krab said - science is never really about universal truth.

In this thread JA probably strikes a nicer tone than ABK.

However, look elsewhere (pretty much anywhere else!) and the subjectivist vs objectivist debate is quite different.

Objectivists sometimes visibly post in frustration, but most subjectivists come across as complete nutters, often displaying behaviour that would get them locked up in real life.

The straw men set up against DBTs are silly - there's just one fundamental: you must not know what you are listening to, because if you do, it can cloud your judgement.

Quote from: krabapple on 2009-04-30 03:37:50

In case it's not clear, the sort of gooey New Agey epistemological arguments you're bandying about irritate me.  It is not necessarily 'unbiased' or admirable to consider all possibilities or all sides of an argument; it can be simply a stupid and unjustified waste of time.

Excuse me, Sir. I wasn´t aware that I was being "New Agey". Though I sometimes listen to Enya... but I´m not even romantic. Furthermore my arguments are not new. They exist as long as science existed. At Wikipedia you can read about philosophical questions regarding science.

If people here at HA are calling themselves scientists I merely accuse some of them as being non-ethical, disregarding friendly behavior and social skills.

This has nothing to do with New Age, it has to with how people treat each other.

Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law.

The graphs in this case are largely meaningless because they accomplish nothing other than rebutting an essentially straw man argument that nobody to my knowledge has ever made.  That argument is that mp3 is "the same" as CD.

Whereas I marvel over the awesome power of *reasonable tone* over reason, even here on HA.

Usually you post positive ABX results along with an exact identification of an artifact's location and a description of its character.

The fact that you believe most positive ABX result at HA must be fake rather indicates that you were baffled how hard it is to produce one.

In fact, I don't share that opinion. After some years of ABX testing you get a gut feeling what kind of artifact a certain sound like a hi-hat may at all produce...

Personally I could reproduce most positive samples that have been posted here over time. Many samples, that fail lossy encoding for some people, fail them for many. The distribution seems to be quite bipolar. Some, the so called "killer" samples, are ABXable for many, a huge part isn't ABXable for anybody, and only fery few are ABXable by only a few.