10 ms·

"Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent." And with that

by beat 9y ago

"Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent." And with that, this study is bullshit. Human beings don't listen to linear sine sweeps. We listen to music. Recorded music has 8+ octaves of frequency range (the bottom octave plus a little extra is almost always rolled off in real-world recordings, to ease stress on downstream components that can't reproduce such low frequencies anyway), and 20-50db of useable dynamic range. Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals. Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners. Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure. It's like looking in the wrong place, because the light is better there. And the results? It's like measuring a car's performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. Acceleration, braking, and turning are too hard to measure, so we ignore them... I'm a musician and record producer. I've engineered and produced numerous albums, and rely on multiple different types of headphones for different purposes. The article's claim that one headphone can be easily morphed into another through mere equalization is, frankly, bullshit. The two headphones I rely on the most (Beyerdynamic DT880 and AKG K240) sound wildly different. Neither is "accurate". Neither are the Tannoy System 12 DMT midfield studio monitors I use for mixing, or the stock Subaru car speakers I use for reference to check the mixes from the Tannoys. Audio reproduction is incredibly complex and difficult stuff. Trying to isolate one factor and saying "That explains everything!" is bad thinking.

baq 9y ago
Comments like this are why I don't even go to articles anymore. Thanks.
- sho 9y ago
  This attitude might have served you well this time, but who's to say every other time will be the same? I detect a far too eager appetite to embrace the brisk dismissals of others. It won't serve you well in the long term. There are many articles posted here it will improve your very personality to read. Read them and don't make excuses not to. There will always be someone saying "XYZ article is bullshit". Many people here are actually pretty smart, and more than a hundred of them felt otherwise. Make your own decision.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Most articles don't have someone calling them bullshit. Upvotes on an article don't mean endorsement of all the claims.
    - sho 9y ago
      > Comments like this are why I don't even go to articles anymore I stand by my assertion that this is an unhealthy, and lazy, attitude. > Upvotes on an article don't mean endorsement of all the claims It's pretty close. Certainly if I upvote an article I am basically endorsing it. What else do you think people upvote for?
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        I upvote a lot of things I think are interesting but would not state full confidence in. I'm not an expert on most things.
        sho 9y ago
        Me neither of course. And an upvote is not an ironclad endorsement. But at least you look at what you upvote - or at least I hope you do. You're not exactly disagreeing with me, are you? The stupid thing is I actually happen to agree with "beat" that this study is basically bullshit. I just can't condone the attitude of the first replier. It worked this time but he or she has learned the wrong heuristic IMO. I guess I don't know how to express myself well but I think it's the wrong lesson to learn from criticism of the articles we see here - even if the criticism is (currently) right.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        > You're not exactly disagreeing with me, are you? I definitely disagree with "Many people here are actually pretty smart, and more than a hundred of them felt otherwise." An article upvote is not necessarily a statement of "this is not bullshit". Most of those people have likely not performed a critical analysis and decided on that issue. And there are no article downvotes, so there's always the possibility of an invisible majority against the article's conclusion.
- ArlenBales 9y ago
  Why do you trust the OP's claims? How about all the people disagreeing with the OP? Don't be so quick to think the top post is always right. The top comment of many HN threads are usually critical and sensationally written, and the child comments are usually in argument against the parent.
  - beat 9y ago
    Good advice, even though in this case it's totally wrong, because I am absolutely right and not to be questioned. :) To generalize more, those critical/sensational top comments are often written by experts with a very different perspective on the subject (as was mine), and most of the child comments are ignorant, angry howling about someone's sacred cow getting gored. On the other hand, a good child comment (and there are several here) can be really enlightening.
derefr 9y ago
Question: when checking the reference output, do you sit in the Subaru, or do you just have the speakers in a room with you? I would imagine the acoustics are fairly different.
- beat 9y ago
  In the Subaru. Mixing music is very, very difficult. You have to deal with the inaccuracy of your equipment, the inaccuracy of your ears, and the ability to drift into boiled-frog mode, making something terrible that sounds good to you because you got here gradually. Another kind of related tool I use extensively while mixing is reference recordings - listening to someone else's music on the same system, in alternation with what I'm mixing, to make sure I'm not boiling my frog. But yes, listening to other reproduction systems - especially bad ones, like my Subaru speakers and older iPod earbuds - is critical. It helps me insure that what sounds good on my multi-thousand $$ studio monitors in a decent room sounds good everywhere else, too.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Another question: if it comes down to a choice of making something sound worse on consumer hardware, vs. sounding worse on studio hardware, you'll favor the consumer listening experience at the expense of the monitor output, right? So, does this mean that it's a bad idea to use studio-grade equipment for personal listening of commercially-released (and so, presumably, mastered for consumer equipment) tracks? And, if so, are alternate mixes of the same tracks that are sometimes released any better? A "club mix", for example (assuming you don't care about the changes to the track itself)? And, one more question—given that mastering somewhat distorts the pre-master for a particular listening profile... is there any way for someone who wants to sample a track in their own production, to get access to the pre-master copy of the track they want to sample from, so they don't "accumulate mastering artifacts" the way that JPEG-recompression accumulates compression artifacts? I've seen, every once in a while, a band that has a "remix competition" release e.g. a Garage-band project with all the raw tracks embedded. Is it common to make a deal with a producer to get access to something like this on a one-off basis? Is it even technically feasible, or is pre-master track data lost/discarded after completion of mastering often enough that such requests don't make sense? (Sorry, I never realized there were so many of these questions on my mind. Is there a sound-engineer Quora?)
dep_b 9y ago
Why and when would you pick the 880's and when the 240's? I have the 880's and they're pretty good so far, I compared them to a few AKG's in the store and I liked them a lot better for mixing.
- beat 9y ago
  Comfort and fatigue. I can listen to the 240s for longer, and they sound subjectively "flatter" to me. I actually like the sound of the 880s better. Plus the 880s are almost total isolation, which is really useful when tracking in the studio, or when working in a cubicle.
angersock 9y ago
If you can't back your accusations here up with math, instead of handwavy "but it's so complicated and human ears are just, like, different, maaaaan", you're in no place to call the article bullshit. This is signals and math, nothing more complicated. Sorry if that means that your prejudices are bullshit--but that's how most audiophile stuff goes.
- radiowave 9y ago
  Beat is criticising the specific (and sole) measure used in the article, and has provided a list of specific measurable properties that also have bearing on the issue of sound quality. I think your criticism is unfounded. The complicated, handwavy stuff occurs when you try to map the measurements on to what people think is good. Maybe some day we'll have a good enough handle on that (psychoacoustic perceptual models, and so on) to call it just "signals and math", but right now it isn't.
  - astrange 9y ago
    We have excellent knowledge of psychoacoustics; it's why audio compression works so well. It's pretty straightforward actually. Psychovisual tuning, that's the one we're not good at.
    - radiowave 9y ago
      Excellent knowledge of one specific aspect: frequency masking.
- beat 9y ago
  Give me enough data points, and I could explain it all with the math. We don't have enough data points. At a certain point, we perhaps can't have enough data points, just because the interactions are so complex. Try reading Dekker's Drift into Failure. It's about failure analysis in complex systems (and why reductionist thinking is often a bad idea when trying to understand such failures), but it certainly applies to trying to "explain" the audible behavior of real-world sound reproduction with mere math. edit: As a for-example... a speaker driver (like a headphone) is basically an electric motor attached to a spring (the diaphragm suspension). The suspension (spring) holds it at a zero point, and the motor moves it from the zero point, pushing air in the process. An electric motor consists of an AC-charged coil moving against a magnetic field. Now, if you look the other direction, a coil moving inside a magnetic field is an alternator, generating AC power. So when the signal from the amplifier drives the motor that moves the speaker driver, energy gets stored in the spring - and then released back into the alternator, and pushed back into the terminals of the amplifier. That back signal is subject to serious nonlinearities from the suspension, including distortion, frequency response variations, and frequency-dependent group delay and phase shifts. Most - but not all - of the back current from the speaker is absorbed by the output devices from the amp (which have high but not infinite impedance). What gets through is then picked up by the global negative feedback loop that is supposed to keep the amplifier linear, injecting it as phase-reversed signal into the input. Um. This has a number of effects. First and foremost, it makes the amp/speaker interface much more sonically colored that it seems on the surface. Second, it blows up amplifiers when under enough strain - this is a real-world effect that any PA engineer has observed. But go on, tell me again how my objections are just unscientific mystical hand-waving.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
You are way over-reacting. Sine sweeps are a good method to measure frequency response. That's what they were trying to do after all: measure frequency response. That was the stated goal of the test: find a correlation between frequency response and another parameter. They were playing a signal into a dummy, capturing the sound and measuring it; they were not trying to determine how pleased the dummy would be with the beautiful music. However, I share your overall assessment that present-day transducers are far from perfect accuracy.
- PatentTroll 9y ago
  Sure, but the non-linear effects he's listing are probably not an issue for headphones. First, they're generally crossover-less and usually single-driver designs and they have very low moving mass which eliminates a host of issues that loudspeakers have. All those things are still there, and probably quantifiable, but I'd imagine that they're all low enough in headphones to be inaudible or 'not a problem.' What absolutely is a problem is manufacturer fuckery with frequency response ala 'megabass' and the like which is what really moves headphone sales. So it makes sense to me that that is what this study focuses on
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    > What absolutely is a problem is manufacturer fuckery with frequency response ala 'megabass' Yep. Now, that happens in any industry where consumers don't have an easy way to quantify what they're buying. TV screens in showrooms all have color saturation turned way up. Etc. It should be said, however, that "megabass" or a V-shaped frequency response tends to be the case with intensely advertised, mass produced brands. The kind of stuff you find at Best Buy. It is much less of an issue, or not an issue at all, with brands aimed at people who pick transducers specifically for accurate sound. E.g. I would expect to encounter "manufacturer fuckery" with Bose or Beats phones, and the like. I would not expect to encounter that with Sennheiser (at least their top models), AKG, Beyerdynamics, Audeze, Hifiman, Stax, Focal, Mr. Speakers, Oppo, etc. Okay, maybe a bit with Beyer. :) That's not to say that some of these brands are not messing with the response at all. But when they do it, they do it in very subtle ways. The frequency response might be super-flat (or, rather, following the Harman curve which is appropriate for transducers placed on your ears). But they might "brighten" the sound a little, very subtly. And then when another manufacturer comes along and says "screw those tricks, let's aim for perfect honesty instead", they sound a bit "veiled" in comparison. I'm talking about this in much greater detail here: https://florin.myip.org/blog/audeze-lcd-2-compared-sennheiser-hd600-i-now-officially-do-not-believe-anymore-audeze-veil https://florin.myip.org/blog/audeze-lcd-2-compared-sennheise... Anyway, we are still pretty far from perfect accuracy when it comes to transducers. All other parts of the audio chain have been figured out long ago. But transforming sound into electricity and vice-versa is still a hard problem.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dgacmu 9y ago
I'm not going to disagree with you on the technical details, since I'm not knowledgeable enough in the area. But I'm going to take issue with one thing: "Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners" I think you're noting the difference between good and bad science -- science is certainly capable of putting together a picture of the factors that matter to human listeners. It may not have done so, but it's not a failure of the scientific process, it's a failure of the study(ies) involved.
- PatentTroll 9y ago
  Yeah, OP swerves towards subjectivism there at the end, which the audio industry loves because it's not quantifiable or easy to compare.
  - beat 9y ago
    I'm swinging to subjectivism not because I'm buying audio industry fluff (frankly, the self-styled objectivists are far more guilty of that), but rather because it at least covers the observed data. I'm listening with my ears. Making up important-sounding quasi-science "objective" data (like the ever-popular THD) is an industry marketing ploy. People are insecure and want the "best", so pretend-science lets them think they're buying "best", rather than actually listening and judging subjectively, which is scary and hard and full of weird biases.
    - PatentTroll 9y ago
      That's true too, good points. And let's face it, this whole endeavor is about entertainment and artistry, so the subjectivist viewpoint is totally valid!
    - nkozyra 9y ago
      > Making up important-sounding quasi-science "objective" data (like the ever-popular THD) is an industry marketing ploy. People are insecure and want the "best", so pretend-science lets them think they're buying "best", rather than actually listening and judging subjectively, which is scary and hard and full of weird biases. To be fair, the far more common trap is when people believe they're getting a better experience via the price-quality relationship. Or due to false authenticity. Or general brand marketing, etc. Often these things fail the sniff test, and people who swear their $500 headphones are noticeably better will pick the cheaper headphone in a blind test. The entire "audiophile" industry is more quasi-quality than quasi-science, though there's a healthy dose of whatever it takes to make the people with $ spend $.
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
> And with that, this study is bullshit. I... don't know what you're talking about. Apply a log scale to linear data and it too represents a log scale. > Recorded music has 8+ octaves of frequency range (the bottom octave plus a little extra is almost always rolled off in real-world recordings, to ease stress on downstream components that can't reproduce such low frequencies anyway), and 20-50db of useable dynamic range. So? We all know that listening to an instrument live sounds "different" from a recording, and it's up to us to figure out how to improve both recording and listening fidelity. Now an argument can be made that because audio formats today tend to have caps on fidelity that headphones only be measured against the maximum fidelity that the recording produces, but that is neither the argument that you are making nor is this a weakness in the data presented by the paper. > Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure. Yes and what should we measure? Phase graphs? Third order components? You're not making a meaningful argument here. > The article's claim that one headphone can be easily morphed into another through mere equalization is, frankly, bullshit. First of all this paper used novel methods to back the original assertion made in [1]. Also, let me quote the exact line from the conclusion: "PCA can account for 90% of the variance across all measured headphones with six eigenvectors. The first eigenvector is similar to published target responses, while the second eigenvector represents a global spectral tilt." > Audio reproduction is incredibly complex and difficult stuff. Trying to isolate one factor and saying "That explains everything!" is bad thinking. And so is your appeal to non-authority. The gist of your entire argument is that linear sine sweeps are useless, and therefore the entire validity of the paper is moot and your non-scientific opinion is now superior. [1]: http://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.4984044# http://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.4984044#
microcolonel 9y ago
They do justify their methodology, I didn't think it sounded that unreasonable. They flat out say that out of the two easily-measured factors, distortion and linear response, linear response correlates the most with subjective measures of audio reproduction according to prior research. I don't think they said that they had developed a foolproof methodology for absolutely determining the subjective reproductive quality of a headphone. I think your description of the performance of headphones is based on soft, unscientific nonsense. Sure, there's more to headphones than single frequency response curves, but frequency response between the ear canal and the headphone is the only differing factor in audio reproduction quality. If anything is flawed with the methodology, it would surely be with the lack of broad spectral testing or something equivalent. The fundamental characteristics of the driver are the diaphragm geometry, the mass of the driver, and the resistance of the suspension. The suspension changes, probably not linearly, with temperature. Frequency sweeps completely miss the point that the movement of a headphone driver is linear actuation, not some mystical frequency-domain process.
- beat 9y ago
  Oh, it's soft, unscientific nonsense. It is also direct experience as a semi-pro in the field. Subjective experience is not science, but neither is it irrelevant. If someone's "science" does not explain observed subjective experience very well, then it shouldn't pretend that it does - and it really is not grounds to dismiss the subjective experience of experts by saying "BUT THOSE DUDES HAVE NUMBERS AND STUFF!!!!"
  - rhizome 9y ago
    So just to try to drag this back to apples-to-apples comparisons, what measurable criteria would you say correlates with price?
    - Floegipoky 9y ago
      There may not be a measurable criteria that drives price in all cases. Headphones are manufactured and priced for wildly different reasons. For instance, Beats are expensive because they're a status symbol. It has little to do with sound quality.
yk 9y ago
> It's like looking in the wrong place, because the light is better there. Yes, and actually one of the challenges physicists face, is that looking by the lamp is not self evidently reasonable for most people. Of course you start with the easy case and then you build on that foundation, otherwise your analysis just hangs in thin air. (Plus you have to deal with the easy case anyhow if you want to do comprehensive work, you can as well start were you have a chance.)
- beat 9y ago
  Well said.
Matthias247 9y ago
The frequency response and the impulse response are correlated. You can just get one from the other through fourier transformation. Therefore it's perfectly fine to measure whatever is easier to measure, which is frequency response through sine waves for audio equipment. Phase shift can also be measured through this approach (and is required for calculating impulse reponse). Sure, nonlinear distortions are not covered and also sure that the measurements won't cover everything which will influence the perceived sound. But nevertheless frequency response measurements are a very solid tool which allows objective comparions between various systems.
- derstander 9y ago
  Came here to respond with something similar to the first paragraph. I was wondering if perhaps audio engineers mean something different when they're talking about impulse response, since my expertise is in signal processing for electromagnetic signals (vs. audio).
  - beat 9y ago
    Yeah, I think we do. When audio engineers talk about impulse response, we're really talking about how accurately components can reproduce sharp-attack sounds. Snare drums, acoustic guitar strings, some synth sounds - these are examples of fast impulse response. Microphones really struggle with this. So do mic preamps, recording media, amplifiers, and especially speakers. Recorded instruments sound wildly different from live-in-a-room instruments. edit: I should add here that fast impulse response isn't necessarily what we want. Consider the common use of the relatively sluggish Shure SM57 on snare drums, rather than the much faster response of a small diaphragm condenser. The condenser usually just sounds harsh. The SM57 smooths out the sound. This is good, because nobody in their right mind actually sticks their ear one inch from a snare drum.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      No, you're not talking about different things. You're talking about exactly the same thing in two domains: a signal which is transduced from air pressure to voltage in real time, and then later goes back in the other direction. Audio engineers should know that, and many of them do. "Recorded instruments sound wildly different from live-in-a-room instruments." Yes, they do. In the best case, you have two nearly perfectly accurate transducers located inside the not-quite-ear-canals of a dummy head doing the recording, and you play those two signals back to transducers located similarly in the head of your listener. This is the best case for accurate reproduction of instruments. You can get a recording that sounds nearly the same as being in the room where it happened. In the most common "purist" method, recording engineers are using two or three mics arrayed in free space somewhere near where the audience would be, and hoping to capture the sensation of being in the room. This is problematic because the instruments are complex, moving three-dimensional shapes producing sound in a field which interacts with all sorts of things before being sampled by those 2-3 points. That throws away nearly all the available information. Then playback emanates from two not-really-point sources in a completely different room. In the normal non-purist methods, engineers close-mike each of the instruments, take direct input from some electronic instruments, and may or may not try to capture some room ambience. Then they process everything to the point where they are as much a performer as the recorded players, and work on it over and over again until (hopefully) everyone is happy with it as a work of art. There should be no pretense that this is going to get you an accurate rendition of the feeling of being there, though.
twhb 9y ago
It absolutely looks to me like you're just trying to keep this field unscientific. Misrepresenting the article, then throwing out a bunch of jargon without explanation, then coming to the conclusion that people here shouldn't even try to understand. The study doesn't say "that explains everything!". It measures one component in isolation. That's what good science does. The existence of other factors in headphone performance is irrelevant. Besides, would you really not consider it news if 0-60 time in cars didn't correlate with price? Yes, a luxury car can justify its price in many other ways, but, on average, there should still be a correlation.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > It absolutely looks to me like you're just trying to keep this field unscientific. By naming a bunch of things that should be measured, but aren't? > Besides, would you really not consider it news if 0-60 time in cars didn't correlate with price? What they said was "how well it drives at 60mph". Acceleration testing would be akin to the untested impulse response.
  - betenoire 9y ago
    Granted, it's the middle of the afternoon, so I might be braid dead... but which "bunch of things that should be measured" are listed in that comment?
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      "Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals." Plus discussion of dynamic range; I don't think they were tested at different volumes.
      - bigiain 9y ago
        Note that the article make no claim to be determining which headphones "sound better when stuck in human hears listening to music". And the article draws some specific conclusions and points out some of it's known limitations. Humour me - what are some/any of the "bunch of things that should be measured" that were not, for a study titled "No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price"? I notice they also failed to test for "soundstage" "musicality" "warmth", or waterproofness, taste, and availability in a range of colours to suit your decor. Another "bunch of things" they didnt set out to test nor made any claims about.
rhizome 9y ago
Trying to isolate one factor and saying "That explains everything!" is bad thinking. Is this what they're doing, though? Seems to me their conclusion is that frequency response doesn't explain price.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
shawnz 9y ago
> It's like measuring a car's performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. It's not sufficient that a car can drive well in a straight line, but it's necessary. Isn't that at least one of the things you should measure?
viraptor 9y ago
> impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other I get the rest, but phase shift? Are you taking about the shift between different frequencies producing a fake doppler, or something else?
- dri_ft 9y ago
  Some systems reproduce waveforms with a small delay that varies by frequency--i.e. high frequencies are slightly delayed relative to low ones, or vice versa, so the frequencies are out of phase with each other, relative to the original. Phase isn't intrinsically audible (though the brain does use it in stereo imaging) but it could be indirectly perceivable when it interacts with other aspects of a system, especially nonlinear aspects.
deelowe 9y ago
They're doing a comparative study. To a large extent, it doesn't need to reflect reality. It just needs to be good enough to make a determination within the given sample. > It's like measuring a car's performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. No, it's like comparing several cars and their MRSP based on their 0-60 performance, which is certainly a reasonable thing to do. Just because they didn't measure stopping distance, it doesn't invalidate the entire comparison.
chiph 9y ago
So you use your Subaru instead of using a pair of the Yamaha NS-10's like many studios use? For the curious - here's the story of how the budget NS-10 ended up as a reference standard: http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
- beat 9y ago
  That is an awesome article! And this quote from it I find rings true relative to my criticism of the OP article... "Why have I included a frequency-response curve here? I mentioned earlier that the frequency-response curves in a sales brochure are typically meaningless in terms of providing information that's useful to an end user. Actually, though, I'd go further than that, and suggest that in many respects making any judgment about the worth or likely value of a monitor by examining its frequency-response curve is not far short of pointless." His science-based analysis of why the NS-10 is successful and popular is very enlightening, and a much better example of how to do audio science, imho. I learned a lot. I really wonder how it compares to the Tannoys that I use? My biggest gripe with the Tannoys is that they're too nice. In particular, they have a very sweet, non-fatiguing upper midrange. I worry that nasty things are sneaking by me.
  - chiph 9y ago
    I'm not an expert - I was into car audio back in the late 90's so some things got remembered.. But one thing about sine-wave frequency sweeps was that you'd have standing waves from interaction with the car environment (the famous Honda Civic "buzzing trunk" scenario). So they're really only good for first-pass level setting, and you should quickly go onto real music.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  Wow, that was interesting. I've never liked ported speakers -- now I have a better idea why!
- thirdsun 9y ago
  It's always helpful to listen to your mixes on a very familiar system, regardless of (or particularly due to) its inaccuracies. You have to remember that your music will be listened on almost everything - from alarm clock radios over default iPhone earplugs to the occasional proper system.
jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
> Human beings don't listen to linear sine sweeps. We listen to music. ... This is irrelevant. They're measuring frequency response, not trying to map the entire world of psychoacoustics. Log sin wave sweeps are a perfectly adequate way of measuring a transducer. > Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals. No, when you do a sin sweep and measure the impedance you can recover all that. Pick up a basic textbook on loudspeaker testing. > Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners. You are completely mistaken. Here's the research itself: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12847 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12847 You can find blog posts covering a lot of the same material informally on Sean Olive's blog: http://seanolive.blogspot.com/ http://seanolive.blogspot.com/ I strongly recommend you pick up the book Dr Toole wrote for a non technical audience: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092 https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... Learning from it will require you to shed the chip on your shoulder, but it will put you miles ahead of your peers in understanding what's actually going on when we listen to music vs all the commonly repeated mythology.
- amluto 9y ago
  > No, when you do a sin sweep and measure the impedance you can recover all that. Pick up a basic textbook on loudspeaker testing. Can you really quantify nonlinearities from a sin sweep of any sort? Not that I'd expect a decent set of headphones to have material nonlinearities unless seriously overdriven.
  - someguydave 9y ago
    You can characterize the degree of nonlinearity in the transducer by injecting two tones and looking at the strength of the intermodulation products.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Can you really quantify nonlinearities from a sin sweep of any sort? It seems like JBL thinks one can, and has started to build hardware that tries to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10 Not that I'd expect a decent set of headphones to have material nonlinearities unless seriously overdriven. "Material" is just a way of dismissing the current imperfections that we can't economically do anything about. Headphones and speakers are certainly good enough to let us enjoy music. But listening to recordings on them is like watching cinema. It's certainly enjoyable, but no one thinks it's a duplicate of the real thing. They're just the performance hardware of particular media.
cnnsucks 9y ago
>> Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure. We've evolved our senses around the signal components the pay off the best: the "easy" ones. Thus it isn't surprising that "subjective quality is mostly correlated with linear (spectral) attributes instead of non-linear (distortion) metrics," a claim supported by peer reviewed papers that have vastly greater credibility than you and your anecdotal vitriol.
rangerunseen 9y ago
I'm trying to understand what "Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent" actually means. I understand that a log sine sweep means that the set of frequencies that are tested is itself logarithmic; e.g. you'd check 20Hz, 200Hz, 2KHz, 20KHz instead of 5Hz, 4005Hz, 8005Hz, etc. That makes sense to me. But I don't understand why log sine sweeps would allow you to check for non-linear distortion?
friendzis 9y ago
I once heard a story in audiophile community, I don't recall the particularities, though. Guy went to audio exhibition and there was one booth with curtains covering the actual product. This is a new WIP product, we want to hear feedback without you actually seeing what it is to get a bit more objective response. Audience listened to some music playing from behind the curtains, discussed various strengths and weaknesses of the audio system. After a while curtains were raised to reveal live acoustic band playing. Instruments themselves are imperfect, there is long chain of devices (recording, mixing, playback) until the signal reaches speakers (and then room until signal reaches ears), at higher quality levels it is quite often the case of how well all the inaccuracies of the system interact with each other, rather than how accurate certain components of the system are.
pmarreck 9y ago
> The two headphones I rely on the most (Beyerdynamic DT880 and AKG K240) sound wildly different. Former Psych major here whose studies specialized in perception (audio and visual)... Without validation using the scientific gold standard of a double-blind listening test, this is merely a belief that can easily be attributed to confirmation bias (see: popularity of Beats headphones)

by beat 9y ago

baq 9y ago

Comments like this are why I don't even go to articles anymore. Thanks.

sho 9y ago
This attitude might have served you well this time, but who's to say every other time will be the same? I detect a far too eager appetite to embrace the brisk dismissals of others. It won't serve you well in the long term. There are many articles posted here it will improve your very personality to read. Read them and don't make excuses not to. There will always be someone saying "XYZ article is bullshit". Many people here are actually pretty smart, and more than a hundred of them felt otherwise. Make your own decision.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Most articles don't have someone calling them bullshit. Upvotes on an article don't mean endorsement of all the claims.
  - sho 9y ago
    > Comments like this are why I don't even go to articles anymore I stand by my assertion that this is an unhealthy, and lazy, attitude. > Upvotes on an article don't mean endorsement of all the claims It's pretty close. Certainly if I upvote an article I am basically endorsing it. What else do you think people upvote for?
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      I upvote a lot of things I think are interesting but would not state full confidence in. I'm not an expert on most things.
      - sho 9y ago
        Me neither of course. And an upvote is not an ironclad endorsement. But at least you look at what you upvote - or at least I hope you do. You're not exactly disagreeing with me, are you? The stupid thing is I actually happen to agree with "beat" that this study is basically bullshit. I just can't condone the attitude of the first replier. It worked this time but he or she has learned the wrong heuristic IMO. I guess I don't know how to express myself well but I think it's the wrong lesson to learn from criticism of the articles we see here - even if the criticism is (currently) right.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        > You're not exactly disagreeing with me, are you? I definitely disagree with "Many people here are actually pretty smart, and more than a hundred of them felt otherwise." An article upvote is not necessarily a statement of "this is not bullshit". Most of those people have likely not performed a critical analysis and decided on that issue. And there are no article downvotes, so there's always the possibility of an invisible majority against the article's conclusion.
ArlenBales 9y ago
Why do you trust the OP's claims? How about all the people disagreeing with the OP? Don't be so quick to think the top post is always right. The top comment of many HN threads are usually critical and sensationally written, and the child comments are usually in argument against the parent.
- beat 9y ago
  Good advice, even though in this case it's totally wrong, because I am absolutely right and not to be questioned. :) To generalize more, those critical/sensational top comments are often written by experts with a very different perspective on the subject (as was mine), and most of the child comments are ignorant, angry howling about someone's sacred cow getting gored. On the other hand, a good child comment (and there are several here) can be really enlightening.

derefr 9y ago

Question: when checking the reference output, do you sit in the Subaru, or do you just have the speakers in a room with you? I would imagine the acoustics are fairly different.

beat 9y ago
In the Subaru. Mixing music is very, very difficult. You have to deal with the inaccuracy of your equipment, the inaccuracy of your ears, and the ability to drift into boiled-frog mode, making something terrible that sounds good to you because you got here gradually. Another kind of related tool I use extensively while mixing is reference recordings - listening to someone else's music on the same system, in alternation with what I'm mixing, to make sure I'm not boiling my frog. But yes, listening to other reproduction systems - especially bad ones, like my Subaru speakers and older iPod earbuds - is critical. It helps me insure that what sounds good on my multi-thousand $$ studio monitors in a decent room sounds good everywhere else, too.
- derefr 9y ago
  Another question: if it comes down to a choice of making something sound worse on consumer hardware, vs. sounding worse on studio hardware, you'll favor the consumer listening experience at the expense of the monitor output, right? So, does this mean that it's a bad idea to use studio-grade equipment for personal listening of commercially-released (and so, presumably, mastered for consumer equipment) tracks? And, if so, are alternate mixes of the same tracks that are sometimes released any better? A "club mix", for example (assuming you don't care about the changes to the track itself)? And, one more question—given that mastering somewhat distorts the pre-master for a particular listening profile... is there any way for someone who wants to sample a track in their own production, to get access to the pre-master copy of the track they want to sample from, so they don't "accumulate mastering artifacts" the way that JPEG-recompression accumulates compression artifacts? I've seen, every once in a while, a band that has a "remix competition" release e.g. a Garage-band project with all the raw tracks embedded. Is it common to make a deal with a producer to get access to something like this on a one-off basis? Is it even technically feasible, or is pre-master track data lost/discarded after completion of mastering often enough that such requests don't make sense? (Sorry, I never realized there were so many of these questions on my mind. Is there a sound-engineer Quora?)

dep_b 9y ago

Why and when would you pick the 880's and when the 240's? I have the 880's and they're pretty good so far, I compared them to a few AKG's in the store and I liked them a lot better for mixing.

beat 9y ago
Comfort and fatigue. I can listen to the 240s for longer, and they sound subjectively "flatter" to me. I actually like the sound of the 880s better. Plus the 880s are almost total isolation, which is really useful when tracking in the studio, or when working in a cubicle.

angersock 9y ago

If you can't back your accusations here up with math, instead of handwavy "but it's so complicated and human ears are just, like, different, maaaaan", you're in no place to call the article bullshit. This is signals and math, nothing more complicated. Sorry if that means that your prejudices are bullshit--but that's how most audiophile stuff goes.

radiowave 9y ago
Beat is criticising the specific (and sole) measure used in the article, and has provided a list of specific measurable properties that also have bearing on the issue of sound quality. I think your criticism is unfounded. The complicated, handwavy stuff occurs when you try to map the measurements on to what people think is good. Maybe some day we'll have a good enough handle on that (psychoacoustic perceptual models, and so on) to call it just "signals and math", but right now it isn't.
- astrange 9y ago
  We have excellent knowledge of psychoacoustics; it's why audio compression works so well. It's pretty straightforward actually. Psychovisual tuning, that's the one we're not good at.
  - radiowave 9y ago
    Excellent knowledge of one specific aspect: frequency masking.
beat 9y ago
Give me enough data points, and I could explain it all with the math. We don't have enough data points. At a certain point, we perhaps can't have enough data points, just because the interactions are so complex. Try reading Dekker's Drift into Failure. It's about failure analysis in complex systems (and why reductionist thinking is often a bad idea when trying to understand such failures), but it certainly applies to trying to "explain" the audible behavior of real-world sound reproduction with mere math. edit: As a for-example... a speaker driver (like a headphone) is basically an electric motor attached to a spring (the diaphragm suspension). The suspension (spring) holds it at a zero point, and the motor moves it from the zero point, pushing air in the process. An electric motor consists of an AC-charged coil moving against a magnetic field. Now, if you look the other direction, a coil moving inside a magnetic field is an alternator, generating AC power. So when the signal from the amplifier drives the motor that moves the speaker driver, energy gets stored in the spring - and then released back into the alternator, and pushed back into the terminals of the amplifier. That back signal is subject to serious nonlinearities from the suspension, including distortion, frequency response variations, and frequency-dependent group delay and phase shifts. Most - but not all - of the back current from the speaker is absorbed by the output devices from the amp (which have high but not infinite impedance). What gets through is then picked up by the global negative feedback loop that is supposed to keep the amplifier linear, injecting it as phase-reversed signal into the input. Um. This has a number of effects. First and foremost, it makes the amp/speaker interface much more sonically colored that it seems on the surface. Second, it blows up amplifiers when under enough strain - this is a real-world effect that any PA engineer has observed. But go on, tell me again how my objections are just unscientific mystical hand-waving.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

You are way over-reacting. Sine sweeps are a good method to measure frequency response. That's what they were trying to do after all: measure frequency response. That was the stated goal of the test: find a correlation between frequency response and another parameter. They were playing a signal into a dummy, capturing the sound and measuring it; they were not trying to determine how pleased the dummy would be with the beautiful music. However, I share your overall assessment that present-day transducers are far from perfect accuracy.

PatentTroll 9y ago
Sure, but the non-linear effects he's listing are probably not an issue for headphones. First, they're generally crossover-less and usually single-driver designs and they have very low moving mass which eliminates a host of issues that loudspeakers have. All those things are still there, and probably quantifiable, but I'd imagine that they're all low enough in headphones to be inaudible or 'not a problem.' What absolutely is a problem is manufacturer fuckery with frequency response ala 'megabass' and the like which is what really moves headphone sales. So it makes sense to me that that is what this study focuses on
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  > What absolutely is a problem is manufacturer fuckery with frequency response ala 'megabass' Yep. Now, that happens in any industry where consumers don't have an easy way to quantify what they're buying. TV screens in showrooms all have color saturation turned way up. Etc. It should be said, however, that "megabass" or a V-shaped frequency response tends to be the case with intensely advertised, mass produced brands. The kind of stuff you find at Best Buy. It is much less of an issue, or not an issue at all, with brands aimed at people who pick transducers specifically for accurate sound. E.g. I would expect to encounter "manufacturer fuckery" with Bose or Beats phones, and the like. I would not expect to encounter that with Sennheiser (at least their top models), AKG, Beyerdynamics, Audeze, Hifiman, Stax, Focal, Mr. Speakers, Oppo, etc. Okay, maybe a bit with Beyer. :) That's not to say that some of these brands are not messing with the response at all. But when they do it, they do it in very subtle ways. The frequency response might be super-flat (or, rather, following the Harman curve which is appropriate for transducers placed on your ears). But they might "brighten" the sound a little, very subtly. And then when another manufacturer comes along and says "screw those tricks, let's aim for perfect honesty instead", they sound a bit "veiled" in comparison. I'm talking about this in much greater detail here: https://florin.myip.org/blog/audeze-lcd-2-compared-sennheiser-hd600-i-now-officially-do-not-believe-anymore-audeze-veil https://florin.myip.org/blog/audeze-lcd-2-compared-sennheise... Anyway, we are still pretty far from perfect accuracy when it comes to transducers. All other parts of the audio chain have been figured out long ago. But transforming sound into electricity and vice-versa is still a hard problem.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dgacmu 9y ago

I'm not going to disagree with you on the technical details, since I'm not knowledgeable enough in the area. But I'm going to take issue with one thing: "Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners" I think you're noting the difference between good and bad science -- science is certainly capable of putting together a picture of the factors that matter to human listeners. It may not have done so, but it's not a failure of the scientific process, it's a failure of the study(ies) involved.

PatentTroll 9y ago
Yeah, OP swerves towards subjectivism there at the end, which the audio industry loves because it's not quantifiable or easy to compare.
- beat 9y ago
  I'm swinging to subjectivism not because I'm buying audio industry fluff (frankly, the self-styled objectivists are far more guilty of that), but rather because it at least covers the observed data. I'm listening with my ears. Making up important-sounding quasi-science "objective" data (like the ever-popular THD) is an industry marketing ploy. People are insecure and want the "best", so pretend-science lets them think they're buying "best", rather than actually listening and judging subjectively, which is scary and hard and full of weird biases.
  - PatentTroll 9y ago
    That's true too, good points. And let's face it, this whole endeavor is about entertainment and artistry, so the subjectivist viewpoint is totally valid!
  - nkozyra 9y ago
    > Making up important-sounding quasi-science "objective" data (like the ever-popular THD) is an industry marketing ploy. People are insecure and want the "best", so pretend-science lets them think they're buying "best", rather than actually listening and judging subjectively, which is scary and hard and full of weird biases. To be fair, the far more common trap is when people believe they're getting a better experience via the price-quality relationship. Or due to false authenticity. Or general brand marketing, etc. Often these things fail the sniff test, and people who swear their $500 headphones are noticeably better will pick the cheaper headphone in a blind test. The entire "audiophile" industry is more quasi-quality than quasi-science, though there's a healthy dose of whatever it takes to make the people with $ spend $.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

> And with that, this study is bullshit. I... don't know what you're talking about. Apply a log scale to linear data and it too represents a log scale. > Recorded music has 8+ octaves of frequency range (the bottom octave plus a little extra is almost always rolled off in real-world recordings, to ease stress on downstream components that can't reproduce such low frequencies anyway), and 20-50db of useable dynamic range. So? We all know that listening to an instrument live sounds "different" from a recording, and it's up to us to figure out how to improve both recording and listening fidelity. Now an argument can be made that because audio formats today tend to have caps on fidelity that headphones only be measured against the maximum fidelity that the recording produces, but that is neither the argument that you are making nor is this a weakness in the data presented by the paper. > Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure. Yes and what should we measure? Phase graphs? Third order components? You're not making a meaningful argument here. > The article's claim that one headphone can be easily morphed into another through mere equalization is, frankly, bullshit. First of all this paper used novel methods to back the original assertion made in [1]. Also, let me quote the exact line from the conclusion: "PCA can account for 90% of the variance across all measured headphones with six eigenvectors. The first eigenvector is similar to published target responses, while the second eigenvector represents a global spectral tilt." > Audio reproduction is incredibly complex and difficult stuff. Trying to isolate one factor and saying "That explains everything!" is bad thinking. And so is your appeal to non-authority. The gist of your entire argument is that linear sine sweeps are useless, and therefore the entire validity of the paper is moot and your non-scientific opinion is now superior. [1]: http://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.4984044# http://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.4984044#

microcolonel 9y ago

They do justify their methodology, I didn't think it sounded that unreasonable. They flat out say that out of the two easily-measured factors, distortion and linear response, linear response correlates the most with subjective measures of audio reproduction according to prior research. I don't think they said that they had developed a foolproof methodology for absolutely determining the subjective reproductive quality of a headphone. I think your description of the performance of headphones is based on soft, unscientific nonsense. Sure, there's more to headphones than single frequency response curves, but frequency response between the ear canal and the headphone is the only differing factor in audio reproduction quality. If anything is flawed with the methodology, it would surely be with the lack of broad spectral testing or something equivalent. The fundamental characteristics of the driver are the diaphragm geometry, the mass of the driver, and the resistance of the suspension. The suspension changes, probably not linearly, with temperature. Frequency sweeps completely miss the point that the movement of a headphone driver is linear actuation, not some mystical frequency-domain process.

beat 9y ago
Oh, it's soft, unscientific nonsense. It is also direct experience as a semi-pro in the field. Subjective experience is not science, but neither is it irrelevant. If someone's "science" does not explain observed subjective experience very well, then it shouldn't pretend that it does - and it really is not grounds to dismiss the subjective experience of experts by saying "BUT THOSE DUDES HAVE NUMBERS AND STUFF!!!!"
- rhizome 9y ago
  So just to try to drag this back to apples-to-apples comparisons, what measurable criteria would you say correlates with price?
  - Floegipoky 9y ago
    There may not be a measurable criteria that drives price in all cases. Headphones are manufactured and priced for wildly different reasons. For instance, Beats are expensive because they're a status symbol. It has little to do with sound quality.

yk 9y ago

> It's like looking in the wrong place, because the light is better there. Yes, and actually one of the challenges physicists face, is that looking by the lamp is not self evidently reasonable for most people. Of course you start with the easy case and then you build on that foundation, otherwise your analysis just hangs in thin air. (Plus you have to deal with the easy case anyhow if you want to do comprehensive work, you can as well start were you have a chance.)

beat 9y ago
Well said.

Matthias247 9y ago

The frequency response and the impulse response are correlated. You can just get one from the other through fourier transformation. Therefore it's perfectly fine to measure whatever is easier to measure, which is frequency response through sine waves for audio equipment. Phase shift can also be measured through this approach (and is required for calculating impulse reponse). Sure, nonlinear distortions are not covered and also sure that the measurements won't cover everything which will influence the perceived sound. But nevertheless frequency response measurements are a very solid tool which allows objective comparions between various systems.

derstander 9y ago
Came here to respond with something similar to the first paragraph. I was wondering if perhaps audio engineers mean something different when they're talking about impulse response, since my expertise is in signal processing for electromagnetic signals (vs. audio).
- beat 9y ago
  Yeah, I think we do. When audio engineers talk about impulse response, we're really talking about how accurately components can reproduce sharp-attack sounds. Snare drums, acoustic guitar strings, some synth sounds - these are examples of fast impulse response. Microphones really struggle with this. So do mic preamps, recording media, amplifiers, and especially speakers. Recorded instruments sound wildly different from live-in-a-room instruments. edit: I should add here that fast impulse response isn't necessarily what we want. Consider the common use of the relatively sluggish Shure SM57 on snare drums, rather than the much faster response of a small diaphragm condenser. The condenser usually just sounds harsh. The SM57 smooths out the sound. This is good, because nobody in their right mind actually sticks their ear one inch from a snare drum.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    No, you're not talking about different things. You're talking about exactly the same thing in two domains: a signal which is transduced from air pressure to voltage in real time, and then later goes back in the other direction. Audio engineers should know that, and many of them do. "Recorded instruments sound wildly different from live-in-a-room instruments." Yes, they do. In the best case, you have two nearly perfectly accurate transducers located inside the not-quite-ear-canals of a dummy head doing the recording, and you play those two signals back to transducers located similarly in the head of your listener. This is the best case for accurate reproduction of instruments. You can get a recording that sounds nearly the same as being in the room where it happened. In the most common "purist" method, recording engineers are using two or three mics arrayed in free space somewhere near where the audience would be, and hoping to capture the sensation of being in the room. This is problematic because the instruments are complex, moving three-dimensional shapes producing sound in a field which interacts with all sorts of things before being sampled by those 2-3 points. That throws away nearly all the available information. Then playback emanates from two not-really-point sources in a completely different room. In the normal non-purist methods, engineers close-mike each of the instruments, take direct input from some electronic instruments, and may or may not try to capture some room ambience. Then they process everything to the point where they are as much a performer as the recorded players, and work on it over and over again until (hopefully) everyone is happy with it as a work of art. There should be no pretense that this is going to get you an accurate rendition of the feeling of being there, though.

twhb 9y ago

It absolutely looks to me like you're just trying to keep this field unscientific. Misrepresenting the article, then throwing out a bunch of jargon without explanation, then coming to the conclusion that people here shouldn't even try to understand. The study doesn't say "that explains everything!". It measures one component in isolation. That's what good science does. The existence of other factors in headphone performance is irrelevant. Besides, would you really not consider it news if 0-60 time in cars didn't correlate with price? Yes, a luxury car can justify its price in many other ways, but, on average, there should still be a correlation.

Dylan16807 9y ago
> It absolutely looks to me like you're just trying to keep this field unscientific. By naming a bunch of things that should be measured, but aren't? > Besides, would you really not consider it news if 0-60 time in cars didn't correlate with price? What they said was "how well it drives at 60mph". Acceleration testing would be akin to the untested impulse response.
- betenoire 9y ago
  Granted, it's the middle of the afternoon, so I might be braid dead... but which "bunch of things that should be measured" are listed in that comment?
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    "Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals." Plus discussion of dynamic range; I don't think they were tested at different volumes.
    - bigiain 9y ago
      Note that the article make no claim to be determining which headphones "sound better when stuck in human hears listening to music". And the article draws some specific conclusions and points out some of it's known limitations. Humour me - what are some/any of the "bunch of things that should be measured" that were not, for a study titled "No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price"? I notice they also failed to test for "soundstage" "musicality" "warmth", or waterproofness, taste, and availability in a range of colours to suit your decor. Another "bunch of things" they didnt set out to test nor made any claims about.

rhizome 9y ago

Trying to isolate one factor and saying "That explains everything!" is bad thinking. Is this what they're doing, though? Seems to me their conclusion is that frequency response doesn't explain price.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shawnz 9y ago

> It's like measuring a car's performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. It's not sufficient that a car can drive well in a straight line, but it's necessary. Isn't that at least one of the things you should measure?

viraptor 9y ago

> impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other I get the rest, but phase shift? Are you taking about the shift between different frequencies producing a fake doppler, or something else?

dri_ft 9y ago
Some systems reproduce waveforms with a small delay that varies by frequency--i.e. high frequencies are slightly delayed relative to low ones, or vice versa, so the frequencies are out of phase with each other, relative to the original. Phase isn't intrinsically audible (though the brain does use it in stereo imaging) but it could be indirectly perceivable when it interacts with other aspects of a system, especially nonlinear aspects.

deelowe 9y ago

They're doing a comparative study. To a large extent, it doesn't need to reflect reality. It just needs to be good enough to make a determination within the given sample. > It's like measuring a car's performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. No, it's like comparing several cars and their MRSP based on their 0-60 performance, which is certainly a reasonable thing to do. Just because they didn't measure stopping distance, it doesn't invalidate the entire comparison.

chiph 9y ago

So you use your Subaru instead of using a pair of the Yamaha NS-10's like many studios use? For the curious - here's the story of how the budget NS-10 ended up as a reference standard: http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story

beat 9y ago
That is an awesome article! And this quote from it I find rings true relative to my criticism of the OP article... "Why have I included a frequency-response curve here? I mentioned earlier that the frequency-response curves in a sales brochure are typically meaningless in terms of providing information that's useful to an end user. Actually, though, I'd go further than that, and suggest that in many respects making any judgment about the worth or likely value of a monitor by examining its frequency-response curve is not far short of pointless." His science-based analysis of why the NS-10 is successful and popular is very enlightening, and a much better example of how to do audio science, imho. I learned a lot. I really wonder how it compares to the Tannoys that I use? My biggest gripe with the Tannoys is that they're too nice. In particular, they have a very sweet, non-fatiguing upper midrange. I worry that nasty things are sneaking by me.
- chiph 9y ago
  I'm not an expert - I was into car audio back in the late 90's so some things got remembered.. But one thing about sine-wave frequency sweeps was that you'd have standing waves from interaction with the car environment (the famous Honda Civic "buzzing trunk" scenario). So they're really only good for first-pass level setting, and you should quickly go onto real music.
ScottBurson 9y ago
Wow, that was interesting. I've never liked ported speakers -- now I have a better idea why!
thirdsun 9y ago
It's always helpful to listen to your mixes on a very familiar system, regardless of (or particularly due to) its inaccuracies. You have to remember that your music will be listened on almost everything - from alarm clock radios over default iPhone earplugs to the occasional proper system.

jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago

> Human beings don't listen to linear sine sweeps. We listen to music. ... This is irrelevant. They're measuring frequency response, not trying to map the entire world of psychoacoustics. Log sin wave sweeps are a perfectly adequate way of measuring a transducer. > Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals. No, when you do a sin sweep and measure the impedance you can recover all that. Pick up a basic textbook on loudspeaker testing. > Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners. You are completely mistaken. Here's the research itself: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12847 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12847 You can find blog posts covering a lot of the same material informally on Sean Olive's blog: http://seanolive.blogspot.com/ http://seanolive.blogspot.com/ I strongly recommend you pick up the book Dr Toole wrote for a non technical audience: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/0240520092 https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... Learning from it will require you to shed the chip on your shoulder, but it will put you miles ahead of your peers in understanding what's actually going on when we listen to music vs all the commonly repeated mythology.

amluto 9y ago
> No, when you do a sin sweep and measure the impedance you can recover all that. Pick up a basic textbook on loudspeaker testing. Can you really quantify nonlinearities from a sin sweep of any sort? Not that I'd expect a decent set of headphones to have material nonlinearities unless seriously overdriven.
- someguydave 9y ago
  You can characterize the degree of nonlinearity in the transducer by injecting two tones and looking at the strength of the intermodulation products.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Can you really quantify nonlinearities from a sin sweep of any sort? It seems like JBL thinks one can, and has started to build hardware that tries to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10 Not that I'd expect a decent set of headphones to have material nonlinearities unless seriously overdriven. "Material" is just a way of dismissing the current imperfections that we can't economically do anything about. Headphones and speakers are certainly good enough to let us enjoy music. But listening to recordings on them is like watching cinema. It's certainly enjoyable, but no one thinks it's a duplicate of the real thing. They're just the performance hardware of particular media.

cnnsucks 9y ago

>> Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure. We've evolved our senses around the signal components the pay off the best: the "easy" ones. Thus it isn't surprising that "subjective quality is mostly correlated with linear (spectral) attributes instead of non-linear (distortion) metrics," a claim supported by peer reviewed papers that have vastly greater credibility than you and your anecdotal vitriol.

rangerunseen 9y ago

I'm trying to understand what "Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent" actually means. I understand that a log sine sweep means that the set of frequencies that are tested is itself logarithmic; e.g. you'd check 20Hz, 200Hz, 2KHz, 20KHz instead of 5Hz, 4005Hz, 8005Hz, etc. That makes sense to me. But I don't understand why log sine sweeps would allow you to check for non-linear distortion?

friendzis 9y ago

I once heard a story in audiophile community, I don't recall the particularities, though. Guy went to audio exhibition and there was one booth with curtains covering the actual product. This is a new WIP product, we want to hear feedback without you actually seeing what it is to get a bit more objective response. Audience listened to some music playing from behind the curtains, discussed various strengths and weaknesses of the audio system. After a while curtains were raised to reveal live acoustic band playing. Instruments themselves are imperfect, there is long chain of devices (recording, mixing, playback) until the signal reaches speakers (and then room until signal reaches ears), at higher quality levels it is quite often the case of how well all the inaccuracies of the system interact with each other, rather than how accurate certain components of the system are.

pmarreck 9y ago

> The two headphones I rely on the most (Beyerdynamic DT880 and AKG K240) sound wildly different. Former Psych major here whose studies specialized in perception (audio and visual)... Without validation using the scientific gold standard of a double-blind listening test, this is merely a belief that can easily be attributed to confirmation bias (see: popularity of Beats headphones)