@cleeds
What I mean by "what's with you" is you repeatedly come at me out of pure ignorance, such as now, or you're just inventing a circumstance out of thin air to reframe something I've said, like you did the last we met on the Tekton thread with your "one complaint" silliness.
I'm sorry if you can't comprehend the clear and obvious differences between a phenomenon of stimulus and a phenomenon of perception. That's what I'm talking about. Pretty much everybody but you gets it. You're arguing against widely accepted science here. I've already directed you to excellent sources in this field. If you choose to not bother looking it up just a little, thats on you. If you think you're right, then take it up with the experts in the field who totally disagree with you. |
I'm a little perplexed here. This OP popped up as I was debating with Erik about the miserable measurements class D amps produce compared to a class A amp. Now we're debating the finer points of digit sources? We're going to quibble about the nuanced aberrations of digital sources while arguing the obscene aberrations of class D make no difference? Which side of the fence are people going to be on? |
I see "clearthink" and hear "foggythink" in my head.
There is NO divide between math and perfection. It's just delusional to suggest that there is. Human beings have been using math to craft beauty for as long as we've created art. All organic beauty is mathematically correct. We perceive it as beauty because we're governed by the same math that created the beauty.
As far as audio systems go....
If the speakers produce mathematically perfect output, and if the source provides a perfect signal to an amplifier that perfectly amplifies it, and the sound is heard in a mathematically perfect environment, then the result will be indistinguishable from the live event. There's very little guess work in this. We make art out of the compromises actual parts and materials force us to make. The best we can hope to accomplish is to creatively juxtapose failings in such a way as to mitigate their obvious nature. To understand those failings we must measure them and quantify them. Only then can we understand them and manipulate them. That's how engineering works. |
@geoffkait
How can you use so many words yet say nothing that makes any sense? Try again. |
Brains are vastly more similar than they are different. It’s the individual’s delusional inventions of self that tend to differ more radically.
I glossed over the article posted above and the links to which it refers. The question to be begged is "What is hi-fi?". Is it the reproducing recorded material with a high degree of accuracy, is it using gear to reproduce music as you intend rather than the artists and technicians the created it, or is it both? And if it’s both, where’s the line?
I don’t think it’s my stereo’s job to go about reinventing material. I assume (rightly or wrongly) that the material represents the realized intention of what the masterii engineer sought to achieve. If he wanted more body or more color, I assume it would have been put there.
I think the tolerance for coloration should be quite low, but I do think there is a small place for it. Lots of people like nonlinear response and compressed dynamics because that stuff is very easy to listen to. But it’s not really hi-fi. Lots of people like loud and think that’s good. God knows a lot of us have had a true rube look at our system and comment how loud it must be, as if that’s very good.
I completely agree with Ralph on the distortion issue. It’s not hard to build a stereo that sounds impressively dynamic and lush by artfully adding copious amounts of distortion. It’s like paint. How much are you going to use and where are you going to put it? Maybe if you’re good you can color something very nicely using a lot of it. But you’re using a lot of it. And if you’re using a lot of it, what are you really doing? Are you using your stereo to listen to the music, or are you using your music to listen to your stereo?
I prefer to listen to my music. |
@cleeds
Teo made some astute points, and yes, that's pretty much what I'm saying. Look at the strong opinions voiced just in this thread. Over what? How to properly replicated vibrations in the air! It's really pretty ridiculous if you think about it.
Science is fairly clear on the question of how similar brains are. When you look at animals that have no sense of identity they behave very uniformally. You start throwing in the realization of identity very complicated behavior begins to arise. When you mix in the concept of self, that behavior tends to get strange in complicated ways. We're much better at sorting out the mechanics of brains than we are the complex interactions of the phenomenon, like self, they create. |
Bring your measurement gear! I want to know exactly how deep it gets. |
Nobody goes to CES to look at audio gear. That's why the audio press hardly bothers with it. It's where Onkyo displays their new Dolby Atmos surround sound receivers. Nobody that listens to music cares.
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In the strictest scientific sense, there is no such thing as music, or sound, or color, or hot or cold, or pain or pleasure. They're abstractions produced by the brain to allow consciousness to interpret them. There can be made correlations between quantifiable phenomenon, but there's no direct causal link between the phenomenon and the abstraction of conscious experience. Likewise, the quantifiable conscious experience doesn't directly correlate with the quantified physical phenomenon, only indirectly. The indirect nature of correlation leaves two questions to be asked. What is the nature of the correlation? And, what is the quantifiable value of the conscious experience. Those two questions need some sort of answer before the question of quantifiable measurement can take on any sort of meaning. |
@cleeds
What exactly is the numeric value of blue? What is the quantifiable value of pain? What value is a D note? There aren’t any. The quantifiable values of the phenomenon have nothing to do with the actual experience. No part of our biology is counting wavelengths to determine blue or a D note, and those values don’t even come close to describing the experience of them. This is a widely accepted truth in neuroscience. Since experience itself is extremely difficult to quantify, it’s not a reliable measure of phenomenon and it’s abundantly obvious that experience tells us very little, at best, about the underlying function of reality.
@stevecham
Don't confuse the physical phenomenon with the experience of them. They're not even close to the same thing and the connection is vague at best and most definitely not directly correlated. Any cognitive psychologist or neuroscientist will tell you that. |
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@cleeds
Then tell me what the actual quantitative value of blue is. Any shade, I don't care. Prove me wrong. And don't quote some frequency wavelength of radiation. That's definitely not what blue is. That's just the phenomenon that gives rise to the perception. They're totally different things.
Go.... |
@cleeds
Ok... You've brought a measurement apparatus into the scheme that's got nothing at all to do with quantifying the experiencial value of blue. Unless your apparatus can definitively communicate to a blind man the actual experiencial value of a shade of blue, it's just measuring the phenomenon, not the experience. They're most definitely not the same thing. Go do some reading. Try Antonio Damasio, Even Harris Walker, Steven Pinker, Howard Gardner.
I don't understand what it is with you. I think everyone else reading this gets what I'm saying except you and Geoff.
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@stevecham
Welcome to the camp of the wrong as well. None of that jazz you're talking about has anything to do with the actual conscious perception of anything. None of that can be pointed to as the actual substance of a thought or emotion or the various constructs we create arbitrarily. Unless you're telling me that those folks there can take their measurements and definitively tell the exact thoughts and feelings of a human being, you're not even close to understanding what I'm talking about.
Like I told cleeds, go argue this stuff with the finest minds in the science. They're clearly not in the biology labs at U. Oregon. |
@stevecham
I don’t see evidence that the ephemeral things of consciousness are well bound by the laws of physics. I don’t think the science has evolved that far yet. It’s speculative, at best, and would require a very particular interpretation of physics that the field is trying hard to avoid. Clearly we’re able to perceive things that don’t reflect physical phenomenon. There are no physical parallels that give rise to perceptions of God or love or hate, or lust. Those are pure inventions of perception that are not analogous to the phenomenon that give rise to them. Perception, buy nature, doesn’t reflect underlying physical phenomenon. I’m not saying the phenomenon of consciousness and perception cannot be quantified. We haven’t developed the tools, methods, or metrics by which to do it yet. But I’ve got Cleeds up there swearing up and down he CAN do such things, which I think you and I both agree is impossible at this point.
This quantification of consciousness is a real problem when it comes to really understanding what all kinds of measurements mean well beyond the characteristics of an amplifier. It seems to me that if we we’re able to quantify perception and consciousness, then the measurements we do have might have different meaning, and we may find that other kinds of measurements are necessary. For whatever reason, we try very, very hard to analyze and quantify the physical world to the extreme and deliberately avoid trying to analyze and quantify the experience of being. It makes for an incomplete equation. It’s the difference between knowing what a thing is, and what a thing means. For lack of a better analogy, knowing the thing is a very single ended proposition, whereas knowing what the thing means requires a complimentary understanding, and that complimentary factor is better understanding consciousness and perception. |
