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Topic: DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So (Read 55179 times) previous topic - next topic
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DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #125
Myself, I still wonder if HiRes vs CD will be successfully ABXed one day. I mean, I'm sure we can create a rigged test (bad converters, extreme content) where they can, but I wonder if something fairer will ever be passed. I don't discount the possibility, though given how hard it appears to be, it can't be that big a difference. It can't be "Life vs Death", as described by Stereophile.

Contrary to popular belief among sensualist audiophiles, I think that most audio-interested scientists and sceptics would love for that to happen.

Me, I woud be happy if the audio industry moved focus (and R&D funding) away from snake-oil and towards the difficult stuff that everyone agree affects listening experience. There is a _slight_ chance that homeopathy works, that 192kHz is better than 44.1kHz and that I will become a professional football-player. Instead of wasting an infinite amount of resources searching for those improbabilities, I would rather spend limited resources on the stuff that likely do matter. Such as proper health-care. Proper microphone placement. Getting your daily exercise...

-k

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #126
Myself, I still wonder if HiRes vs CD will be successfully ABXed one day. I mean, I'm sure we can create a rigged test (bad converters, extreme content) where they can, but I wonder if something fairer will ever be passed. I don't discount the possibility, though given how hard it appears to be, it can't be that big a difference. It can't be "Life vs Death", as described by Stereophile.

Contrary to popular belief among sensualist audiophiles, I think that most audio-interested scientists and sceptics would love for that to happen.


Of course. Reality is that many have put a lot of effort into obtaining positive results for the audibility of whatever, but since only negative results were obtained, they quietly moved on.

Quote
Me, I woud be happy if the audio industry moved focus (and R&D funding) away from snake-oil and towards the difficult stuff that everyone agree affects listening experience. There is a _slight_ chance that homeopathy works, that 192kHz is better than 44.1kHz and that I will become a professional football-player. Instead of wasting an infinite amount of resources searching for those improbabilities, I would rather spend limited resources on the stuff that likely do matter. Such as proper health-care. Proper microphone placement. Getting your daily exercise...


That's the big picture of audio since probably the early 80s or so. Around then good electronic equipment generally became good enough that further significant improvements in SQ were improbable. There has been tremendous progress since then, but mostly in the realms of price/performance, and mostly in the form of applying technological advances first obtained in other areas.

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #127
There is a _slight_ chance that homeopathy works, that 192kHz is better than 44.1kHz and that I will become a professional football-player.

I don't think there's even the most heavily diluted of slight chances that homeopathy works.


DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #129
Me, I woud be happy if the audio industry moved focus (and R&D funding) away from snake-oil and towards the difficult stuff that everyone agree affects listening experience.



I happen to know that will be part of the subject of the Heyser lecture this coming AES convention.
-----
J. D. (jj) Johnston

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #130
Quote
No amount of imagination could bring back something that was missing, and there was no other clue that something was missing.


This is not something I attempt to keep up with, but my memory says that I first learned about it in a psychology of perception university class decades ago: subjects can be made to believe/expect that they are listening to a signal that contains X and they will be certain they hear X when it is not being presented. This kind of result gets reported every now and then by the popular press in studies of wine tasting and "consumer" responses to expensive vs inexpensive goods.

Rather recently, perhaps not more than a year ago, I read an abstract. or report, about some new DBT and deception experiments. I wish I knew where to find it again, for reference.

The main focus of the study seemed to be applying a new technology that allowed some brain measurements to identify the individual areas in the auditory cortex that responded to each different signal. Subjects were trained with a number of signals. Parameters for presentation were established where the subjects could reliably identify the different signals with a very high probability of success. The correlations between the specific signal and the specific auditory cortex neuron's response were found to be very consistent.

Then the subjects were led to expect a particular signal when they were in fact presented with one of the others, or sometimes with no signal at all. Subjects reported positively hearing what they expected to hear. This part has been know about for a long time. The new revelation was that the auditory cortex responded not in the spot/pattern  for the actual signal but in that for the expected signal. What was presented to the ear was irrelevant when it came to what was experienced by the subject's brain and by the subject's consciousness.

Has there been anything newer that cast doubt on these results?

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #131
Seriously though, I've been happy with the remastering work he did in the '80s and perhaps other work, but I don't typically get too caught up with that type of stuff unless the engineer was grossly incompetent beyond annoying stylistic trends. What's unfortunate is that while the man obviously has gifted ears, it would seem he has limited his potential by not embracing unbiased critical listening exercises (to Arny's point).



Aside from his demonstrated ignorance of the principles of digital audio, psychoacoustics, and testing methods (see his many posts on Steve Hoffman's forum)  and his reliable retreat to the I-hear-it-therefore-it's-real fallacy (ditto), there's the fact that Barry Diament  apparently couldn't hear that he'd reversed the channels on the first CD version of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy.

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #132
I'm not familiar with that but the channel reversal problem on IV appears to have been caused by a two-byte shift in the digital audio stream, and as such, most likely not caused by the mastering engineer and may not have been detected by the remastering engineer until it was too late to do anything about it (if ever).

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #133
I'm not familiar with that but the channel reversal problem on IV appears to have been caused by a two-byte shift in the digital audio stream, and as such, most likely not caused by the mastering engineer and may not have been detected by the remastering engineer until it was too late to do anything about it (if ever).



Barry didn't do LZ IV.  That was a Zal Schreiber mastering.  He and Diament appear to have been Atlantic's two most prolific mastering engineers in the early days of CD.

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #134
Is it possible that Houses may have suffered from the same issue?

PS: Apologies for the mastering/remastering inconsistency. I mean the same individual held responsible for digitizing the analog source.

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #135
Quote
No amount of imagination could bring back something that was missing, and there was no other clue that something was missing.


This is not something I attempt to keep up with, but my memory says that I first learned about it in a psychology of perception university class decades ago: subjects can be made to believe/expect that they are listening to a signal that contains X and they will be certain they hear X when it is not being presented. This kind of result gets reported every now and then by the popular press in studies of wine tasting and "consumer" responses to expensive vs inexpensive goods.

Rather recently, perhaps not more than a year ago, I read an abstract. or report, about some new DBT and deception experiments. I wish I knew where to find it again, for reference.

The main focus of the study seemed to be applying a new technology that allowed some brain measurements to identify the individual areas in the auditory cortex that responded to each different signal. Subjects were trained with a number of signals. Parameters for presentation were established where the subjects could reliably identify the different signals with a very high probability of success. The correlations between the specific signal and the specific auditory cortex neuron's response were found to be very consistent.

Then the subjects were led to expect a particular signal when they were in fact presented with one of the others, or sometimes with no signal at all. Subjects reported positively hearing what they expected to hear. This part has been know about for a long time. The new revelation was that the auditory cortex responded not in the spot/pattern  for the actual signal but in that for the expected signal. What was presented to the ear was irrelevant when it came to what was experienced by the subject's brain and by the subject's consciousness.

Has there been anything newer that cast doubt on these results?


Any idea where you came across this report/paper?

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #136
Any idea where you came across this report/paper?


I'm not AndyH-ha but I think I remember hearing about this paper too on one of the podcasts I listen to. Trouble is it could have been one of many, e.g.:

Skeptics Guide To The Universe (probably not that likely)
Scopes Monkey Choir (possibly one on audio pareidolia)
Naked Scientists (their general podcast and/or one of the topic-specific podcasts they make - most of which have a searchable transcript webpage)
Brain Science Podcast (also has transcripts available)

far less likely, but possible:
Little Atoms
or a sciency BBC podcast like
Material World
Infinite Monkey Cage (don't remember it being that jokey though)

It's possible that AndyH-ha heard it the same way and might narrow down the list.
Dynamic – the artist formerly known as DickD

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #137
I'm guessing you mean the paper that found auditory neurons triggered by what was expected rather than by what was actually received at the ear. I know it was something I read and I'm fairly sure I read it on-line, but it could have been somewhere I picked up a journal or science related magazine to which I don't usually have access. It is aggravating when I can't recall or find something like that again.

I've also read about a study on wine tasting that found the brain stimulation of pleasure related areas was the same when people drank an expensive wine -- whether it was really an expensive wine or was a cheap wine passed off to them as something else.

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #138
I'm guessing you mean the paper that found auditory neurons triggered by what was expected rather than by what was actually received at the ear. I know it was something I read and I'm fairly sure I read it on-line, but it could have been somewhere I picked up a journal or science related magazine to which I don't usually have access. It is aggravating when I can't recall or find something like that again.

I've also read about a study on wine tasting that found the brain stimulation of pleasure related areas was the same when people drank an expensive wine -- whether it was really an expensive wine or was a cheap wine passed off to them as something else.


Aaaahhhhh....

I've given talks to that idea many times, and cited it on SGU, among other places, so yeah, you might have heard it.

There is a simple, trivial, wonderful example of that with so-called "backward masking", too.

Just show me the words, as it were...

Note: this doesn't show auditory neurons, it shows their results. That's good 'nuff for me.

Expectation bias exists, cross-sensory contamination is why our species is so successful, and in fact we shouldn't even call it contamination, it's integration of all senses, and its how humans survive.
-----
J. D. (jj) Johnston

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #139
Me, I woud be happy if the audio industry moved focus (and R&D funding) away from snake-oil and towards the difficult stuff that everyone agree affects listening experience.



I happen to know that will be part of the subject of the Heyser lecture this coming AES convention.



Presumably the above will help unwind the innumerable revolutions of Heyser's body in its resting place that were added last year. ;-)

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #140
... Me, I woud be happy if the audio industry moved focus (and R&D funding) away from snake-oil and towards the difficult stuff that everyone agree affects listening experience.  ...


I doubt you'll be happy any time soon. Snake oil is much more profitable than making real improvements.
Regards,
   Don Hills
"People hear what they see." - Doris Day

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #141
So if "science" runs contradictory to how humans inherently work, to the solution that has helped us survive as a species for quite some time, where does that leave science? Is it a "harness" trying to force humans, against their nature (individually and collectively) to produce stuff that would otherwise be impossible?

Will the era of scientific dominance in the "truth-finding" tasks (such as: does punishment make for less crime in society, how do I calculate the area of this circle, what affects the quality of my hifi experience...) be but a short historical blimp? Preceded and succeeded by religious and intuitive explanations supported by anecdotes and authority.


Sorry about the philosophical rambling, I watched a debate about healers and alternative medicine yesterday. People seem to _really_ want to believe. And whenever there are believers, there will be people who give them what they want, either because they are cynically exploiting cancer patients, or because they are, themselves, believers.

Expectation bias exists, cross-sensory contamination is why our species is so successful, and in fact we shouldn't even call it contamination, it's integration of all senses, and its how humans survive.


If you think about it, many of the important problems that our ancestors had to solve in order to survive and reproduce can be seen as some sort of pattern recognition problem. "given what I am currently seeing and hearing, what I have learned about this place, is there or is there not a sabre-tooth tiger hiding in the bushes". The consequence of erroneous conclusions is either 1: running for no reason, 2: being eaten. Clearly, the problem is asymmetric, and the "nervous" individuals, or those who tended to see patterns even when there is none, would be better suited to survive such problems.

-k

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #142
I've also read about a study on wine tasting that found the brain stimulation of pleasure related areas was the same when people drank an expensive wine -- whether it was really an expensive wine or was a cheap wine passed off to them as something else.


Just saw this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vhw1d

They fool people -- even chef students -- by adding the wrong colour to drinks.
The subjects also eat potato crisp, but wearing headphones, where the pitch of the chewing noises is altered. Higher pitch --> potato crisp rated as more crispy.

And there's the McGurk effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFPtc8BVdJk

DBT Is Flawed Because Bob Stuart Says So

Reply #143
So if "science" runs contradictory to how humans inherently work, to the solution that has helped us survive as a species for quite some time, where does that leave science? Is it a "harness" trying to force humans, against their nature (individually and collectively) to produce stuff that would otherwise be impossible?


Does depend a bit on whether science resorts to being descriptive (and that includes the disciplines' use of words. For example, rationality is a normative word, and economics fail at being merely descriptive if it tries to define something as 'rational', I would say.)

Humans inherently work in a 3-dimensional colourspace. Physics has shown there are more than three base “colours” if colours are to mean “wavelengths”. That doesn't leave physics anywhere wrong, except that it may be contrary to the common interpretation to all it “colours”. People would likely accept that  “colours” that the human eye cannot see could still be referred to as “colours”, and “sounds” that the human ear cannot hear could still be referred to as “sounds”. At least I like(d) to think so. Call it naïve.




Will the era of scientific dominance in the "truth-finding" tasks [...] be but a short historical blimp? Preceded and succeeded by religious and intuitive explanations supported by anecdotes and authority.


Twenty years ago, the denialist industry still claimed there was no proof that tobacco smoking was dangerous. Obviously that ship was going down like an apple towards Newton's head. But it was a highly successful campaign (when you are essentially bound to die sooner or later, a long and prosperous life is a success). I am not much of an optimist, and my gut feeling is that mumbo-jumbo is on the rise, but that is not a scientific statement -- it could very well be the “everything was better in the old days” effect. It wasn't necessarily better then! Americans did not accept evolution twenty years ago, and I would not be surprised if someone dug up an old poll from the pre-internet era showing that the Europeans too were just as stupid then as they are now. Just because nowadays we face massive evidence-in-your-face for Einstein's claim of the infinitude of human stupidity, it may all boil down to the internet pill being, shock, the red one.

Blah blah blah, grrr, grrr, grrr ...