Speakers vs amps and cd players
Reply #114 – 2014-09-13 20:16:31
Science can be difficult to distinguish from pseudoscience, and I just think that some of the audio 'science' is getting into the pseudo category. What I mean by that is that as soon as we try to investigate whether a human listener can hear distortion at some level in "music" we have crossed the line; aesthetic judgements (which this has then become, no matter how much we try to avoid it) are outside the scope of science. What line does that cross? Are you saying that audio reproduction is arbitrary and without any goal? Do you know what high fidelity stands for? Flat frequency response, minimal amount of noise and distortion, ... This sounds more like an anti-science stance than an attempt to distinguish science from pseudoscience.If the idea is that distortion levels can be higher in "music" and not, say, sine waves, then a difficulty is that I could come along and create a piece of music comprising four minutes thirty three seconds of 1 kHz sine wave (and "publish" it on Spotify etc. :-) ). If our would-be scientist then adds the qualifier "normal" or "typical" (music) then I think the conclusions of the experiment must always be open to question because of the possibility of cultural bias etc. Basically, even if a scientific procedure is followed, an experiment may not be science if what is being investigated is outside the scope of science. Possibly a good topic for another thread! What instrument produces a single clean sine wave? All bets are off as soon as you start generating artificial sounds ... you can even make phase shifts audible that are completely inaudible with music. Science investigates both, the effect of distortion on pure tones and on music, be it jitter, harmonics distortion ... It's all science. The only problem I see is using single tone results and claim that you can hear the same with real music. That is pseudoscience, or audiophile FUD.