Viewing 14 posts - 41 through 54 (of 54 total)
  • £35k Headphones
  • DezB
    Free Member

    who would fall for that?!

    And the use of a bloke famous for wearing something over his ears… its just silly.

    chiefgrooveguru
    Full Member

    If you’re aiming for near perfect transient response within the audible spectrum it cannot be achieved unless the frequency response extends beyond this bandwidth and then rolls off with a gentle slope with no resonant peaks or dips.

    TurnerGuy
    Free Member

    I’m not convinced, sorry. Sounds to me like a tax dodge hidden in a spot of audiophile smoke and mirrors

    where’s the audiophile smoke and mirrors in that letter I linked to ?

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    geetee1972
    Free Member

    that doesn’t necessarily imply that it magically changes what we can hear.

    No it doesn’t but if you want ‘proof’ of that all you need to do, indeed all you can do, is ask someone if the music sounds different.

    There is no ontological test to proove that you hear something differently because of the addition of higher frequencies except for self report (which is only that person’s reality; it’s not an external reality).

    If you want a higher confidence interval, you need to ask a lot of people, but I won’t struggle to find a lot of people who will report this phenomenon to you.

    All you can ask for in this situation, where you require ‘proof’, is that there is empirical, physical data that shows situation A (music without higher frequencies) to have a different cause to situation B (music with those higher frequencies). The ‘effect’, is metaphysical; I can no more prov that someone hears something differently as being ‘real’ than I can prove that that peson is even conscious.

    bongohoohaa
    Free Member

    I would like to say this didn’t go as I expected it to, but I think a tiny part of me knew what was coming.

    Right, I am off to buy a directional unobtanium cored HDMI lead…..

    gofasterstripes
    Free Member

    CGG – that’s real info.

    +1

    Cougar
    Full Member

    All you can ask for in this situation, where you require ‘proof’, is that there is empirical, physical data that shows situation A (music without higher frequencies) to have a different cause to situation B (music with those higher frequencies). The ‘effect’, is metaphysical; I can no more prov that someone hears something differently as being ‘real’ than I can prove that that peson is even conscious.

    But that’s not true, is it? You could prove it fairly readily and conclusively with a properly controlled double-blind test to see if a suitable sample size of people can reliably hear any difference.

    If you’re aiming for near perfect transient response within the audible spectrum it cannot be achieved unless the frequency response extends beyond this bandwidth and then rolls off with a gentle slope with no resonant peaks or dips.

    That sounds plausible, though I guess that’s really about working around shortcomings in the reproduction equipment? Ie, if you’re filtering right on the edge of what someone can hear then you presumably risk a form of clipping; or perhaps it’s simply not possible to filter to that degree of accuracy, I don’t know; but if you can’t hear it you can’t hear it, end of story, surely?

    As an analogy, would we buy Dulux claiming that their purple paint is better because it’s visible in the ultra-violet range? It’s patently nonsense, we can’t see it, so why are our ears special?

    You may all be right, I’m not a sound engineer and there may be more technical goings-on that I simply don’t understand. But the Hi-Fi and AV industries are absolutely rife with BS and sorting fact from wild claims is challenging. And quite interesting.

    RustySpanner
    Full Member

    As is the bike industry.
    Frame materials anyone?

    You can only experiment and trust your own judgement.

    sweepy
    Free Member

    At 35 grand I’d expect bluetooth, cables my arse.

    geetee1972
    Free Member

    But that’s not true, is it? You could prove it fairly readily and conclusively with a properly controlled double-blind test to see if a suitable sample size of people can reliably hear any difference.

    Er yes, quite, that’s precisely what I’m saying. But approach to data collection is is still based on self report of what people say they hear. It cannot prove, externally, what they actually hear.

    Your problem is going to be the sample (rather than the size). If you asked 100 ‘audophiles’ their opinion, you will almost certainly get a very different positive response rate than if you asked 100 people who, like my wife, were either tone deaf or ‘amusical’.

    You could try to sample those two ‘populations’ evenly but then your data would be inconclusive; it would just tell you that some people can hear a difference and some can’t. In that scenario, you might as well make the objective of the study the differences in hearing perception between individuals, rather than whether there is any actual differnce.

    So then you’d try to get a graduated sample, but then how would you do that? You’d have to prequalify people first but you could only do that by using the very test parameters your hoping to use to prove whether there is a difference in the audible spectrum or not.

    Ultimately, we agree in some way, which is that the only data you can really use to prove whether the conjecture is true or not is self report data but that’s been done time and time again among the audiophile commnity and I can assure you that they (audophiles, and I include myself in this sample) can hear a difference in this test.

    As an analogy, would we buy Dulux claiming that their purple paint is better because it’s visible in the ultra-violet range

    Did you see the worldwide phenomenon of ‘thedress’ earlier this year. A picture of a blue and black dress posted on the web elicited 50% of the population claiming it was white and gold.

    chiefgrooveguru
    Full Member

    That sounds plausible, though I guess that’s really about working around shortcomings in the reproduction equipment? Ie, if you’re filtering right on the edge of what someone can hear then you presumably risk a form of clipping; or perhaps it’s simply not possible to filter to that degree of accuracy, I don’t know; but if you can’t hear it you can’t hear it, end of story, surely?

    Pretty much everything in hi-fi is about working around the limitations of the reproduction equipment.

    According to standard filter theory any change in magnitude will cause a change in phase and the quicker the rate of change of phase, the greater the group delay and thus the worse the transient response. Sharp filtering close to the audible spectrum will result in under-damped response, which you can hear as ringing in the treble region.

    Bear in mind this is true whether the filter is acoustic, mechanical or electrical – the acoustic filter caused by narrowing of dispersion as the wavelength approaches the diaphragm size will cause the same problem.

    bongohoohaa
    Free Member

    As an aside, this is an interesting read: http://nwavguy.blogspot.de/2012/04/what-we-hear.html

    ….I wonder what happened to NwAvGuy?

    footflaps
    Full Member

    At 35 grand I’d expect bluetooth, cables my arse.

    Bluetooth is so last year, WiGig is where it’s at now….

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Is that what Donald Trump uses?

    Pretty much everything in hi-fi is about working around the limitations of the reproduction equipment. [etc]

    Interesting; I think I follow most of that! Thanks.

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