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Hi all,
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Real Reviews ....

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    #32
    kfoltman
    Closed Accounts Posts: 252 ✭✭kfoltman


    Neurojazz wrote: »
    Would be nice if gear had some sort of pure wave input and the output in an overlay you could compare and see the loss/gain/change.
    Wouldn't help, really. Even if you could see it in time domain, frequency domain and hex dump at the same time.

    There are still people who argue about clear audible differences between digital interconnects even if it can be shown that data flowing in and out are identical when compared bit-wise :)

    The amount of "placebo response" and number of attempts to negate the laws of physics and mathematics is frightening.


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    #33
    dav nagle
    Registered Users Posts: 2,182 ✭✭✭dav nagle


    PaulBrewer wrote: »
    I see what you're say but your argument has a fatal flaw !
    Figures don't tell you how stuff sounds, ears do !

    You could have a diagram of an ear and the more red it gets the hotter the gear sounds? Something like this?

    hot.jpg
    This would mean that the gear is sounding really hot but not roasting.


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    #34
    PaulBrewer
    Registered Users Posts: 7,790 ✭✭✭PaulBrewer


    dav nagle wrote: »
    You could have a diagram of an ear and the more red it gets the hotter the gear sounds? Something like this?

    hot.jpg
    This would mean that the gear is sounding really hot but not roasting.

    That's it Dav ! Thanks ....:D


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    #35
    dav nagle
    Registered Users Posts: 2,182 ✭✭✭dav nagle


    '' Glad to have helped, it's all in the ear! I feel a poem coming..no, no I will leave it. My poems are only stupid compared to the gear review ear gauge I could easily make a fool of myself. ''


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    #36
    PaulBrewer
    Registered Users Posts: 7,790 ✭✭✭PaulBrewer


    Go on, build an Earometer !


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    #37
    dav nagle
    Registered Users Posts: 2,182 ✭✭✭dav nagle


    PaulBrewer wrote: »
    Go on, build an Earometer !

    Only if you will help me build it, would Richard from SSL allow us to do a radioaudiograph on his ear? Maybe drop him a line?


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    #38
    jtsuited
    Registered Users Posts: 6,401 ✭✭✭jtsuited


    1. All the science in the world doesn't tell you if something sounds good or not.

    2. Neither do your ears. Human ears are hopelessly useless at making consistent objective judgements.

    3. THere a are a million reasons why something becomes industry standard. And being the best for the job is only one of them.

    For these three reasons I think this whole idea is barking up the wrong tree.


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    #39
    kfoltman
    Closed Accounts Posts: 252 ✭✭kfoltman


    PaulBrewer wrote: »
    All of the above is readily available in most reviews
    Well, if all the reviews contained more of the "concrete" information like the examples above and less fluff, they would be more useful.
    Figures don't tell you how stuff sounds, ears do !- if they did we'd all be sorted.
    I didn't mean figures like frequency response charts, though those would help in case they illustrated a particular problem. What I was most interested in was examples of "questionable" or "desirable" behaviours of devices. The more, the better - a typical user may already know which problems he can ignore and which will drive him nuts.

    But if you're mentioning figures - well, they're important too, *if* used properly. The frequency response chart won't prove that one device produces "nicer" result than another, but may show problems due to notch filtering or poor bandwidth. A spectrum chart for muted input may easily illustrate that there is an obvious hum at -60dB. A correctly annotated waveform graph will make it easy for the semi-experienced reader to imagine how the sustain pedal envelope problem may sound like. Of course, audio snippets would work even better, but that's not always possible.

    Ears are surely the #1 tool of anyone doing anything with sound (be it a plugin developer, a musician or a sound engineer). Still, they tend are prone to various biases and taste differences. Also, explaining subjective observations in a way that would be fully understood by people reading the reviews... is pretty much impossible.
    I remember hearing the following from a rep of a well know US amp manufacturer.

    Their amp specs peak power was based on a sine wave running on minimum impedance for 24 hours.

    Another company's peak power was for .2 of a second on max impedance ... then the amp blew!!
    And that's a good example of something I'd want to read in the review. Not the impossible-to-interpret numeric score. Or meaningless, equally impossible to compare parameters like RMS/peak power without any extra information about how they were obtained.

    Yes, if you had a weekly review of power amps, each using exactly the same set of measurement environments - that could be at least half-useful. As in: "I currently have amp X, and the review for amp Y says it has roughly twice as much power as X". But it still may not translate to a particular real-life scenario (different speakers, different audio material, anything like that).
    Another classic is frequency response of speakers.
    I know of one reputable speaker company who released a model with a phenomenally flat speaker response.
    Heh... the same can be said about sampling rate conversion. If you compare the frequency response alone, you may end up with a converter that has a wonderful frequency-domain behaviour, but may suffer from other problems, like ringing.
    This 'flatness' was gained by some jiggery pokery that put a delay between the tweeter and woofer of something in the order of 8 metres !
    That's a bit weird. This kind of shift should at least cause some bad phasey/comb filtering problems, which should be well visible near crossover frequency in any proper frequency response graph. 100 ms of delay is totally disturbing.

    And this is also a kind of information I'd really want in any review! Not fluff OR numbers that don't take into account particular user's personal "feature weighting function", if you know what I mean.


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    #40
    dav nagle
    Registered Users Posts: 2,182 ✭✭✭dav nagle


    So I take it you disagree with building the ear gauge?


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    #41
    PaulBrewer
    Registered Users Posts: 7,790 ✭✭✭PaulBrewer


    kfoltman wrote: »
    Well, if all the reviews contained more of the "concrete" information like the examples above and less fluff, they would be more useful.


    I didn't mean figures like frequency response charts, though those would help in case they illustrated a particular problem. What I was most interested in was examples of "questionable" or "desirable" behaviours of devices. The more, the better - a typical user may already know which problems he can ignore and which will drive him nuts.

    But if you're mentioning figures - well, they're important too, *if* used properly. The frequency response chart won't prove that one device produces "nicer" result than another, but may show problems due to notch filtering or poor bandwidth. A spectrum chart for muted input may easily illustrate that there is an obvious hum at -60dB. A correctly annotated waveform graph will make it easy for the semi-experienced reader to imagine how the sustain pedal envelope problem may sound like. Of course, audio snippets would work even better, but that's not always possible.

    Ears are surely the #1 tool of anyone doing anything with sound (be it a plugin developer, a musician or a sound engineer). Still, they tend are prone to various biases and taste differences. Also, explaining subjective observations in a way that would be fully understood by people reading the reviews... is pretty much impossible.


    And that's a good example of something I'd want to read in the review. Not the impossible-to-interpret numeric score. Or meaningless, equally impossible to compare parameters like RMS/peak power without any extra information about how they were obtained.

    Yes, if you had a weekly review of power amps, each using exactly the same set of measurement environments - that could be at least half-useful. As in: "I currently have amp X, and the review for amp Y says it has roughly twice as much power as X". But it still may not translate to a particular real-life scenario (different speakers, different audio material, anything like that).


    Heh... the same can be said about sampling rate conversion. If you compare the frequency response alone, you may end up with a converter that has a wonderful frequency-domain behaviour, but may suffer from other problems, like ringing.


    That's a bit weird. This kind of shift should at least cause some bad phasey/comb filtering problems, which should be well visible near crossover frequency in any proper frequency response graph. 100 ms of delay is totally disturbing.

    And this is also a kind of information I'd really want in any review! Not fluff OR numbers that don't take into account particular user's personal "feature weighting function", if you know what I mean.

    The FWF is a sore dose ok !
    Thanks for your productive contribution kfoltman.


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    #42
    PaulBrewer
    Registered Users Posts: 7,790 ✭✭✭PaulBrewer


    dav nagle wrote: »
    Only if you will help me build it, would Richard from SSL allow us to do a radioaudiograph on his ear? Maybe drop him a line?

    He does have monster lugs ok .....

    Did he ever tell about the time he recorded part of a James Bond Film sound track ? ...........snoooze.


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    #43
    dav nagle
    Registered Users Posts: 2,182 ✭✭✭dav nagle


    PaulBrewer wrote: »
    He does have monster lugs ok .....

    Did he ever tell about the time he recorded part of a James Bond Film sound track ? ...........snoooze.

    I taught he just made the ham sambos and tea at that gig no? :eek:


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