4 ms·

> 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 enti

> 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.
  - amluto 9y ago
    > "Material" is just a way of dismissing the current imperfections that we can't economically do anything about. I said material nonlinearities, not material imperfections. I've never researched this for real, but I would imagine that your average imperfect set of headphones is mainly imperfect in that it has poor (or inconsistent) frequency response, poor transient response, and/or poor noise characteristics. But maybe headphones do commonly have significant nonlinearities -- I don't really know.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      I said material nonlinearities, not material imperfections. Precisely what I said. But maybe headphones do commonly have significant nonlinearities Dynamic drivers have these. Most cases and housings introduce these. Amplifiers have these. Until recently we could only determine if people can consciously hear things or not. Determining if something affects your perception is something else entirely. Also, with something you wear like a headphone, it's more expensive to do blind comparisons. Basically, the system we're dealing with (including the human hearing apparatus) is pretty complex. While we've made significant inroads into the science, we still don't understand everything that goes on when someone listens to reproduced music. I think this is about to change, however. There are some things coming down the pike, where we are going to have unprecedented control of variables we didn't even think to address. Here's one of the first baby steps: A headphone that does a frequency sweep inside the cups to compensate for the acoustic filtering of your particular ear! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10
- davidrhunt 9y ago
  > 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. You can using a properly structured log sine sweep but not with a linear sine sweep. This is why the paper mentions "Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent." You can read up more on why here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abc8/3f1297e5c033b8322f3d90d7c26423b6cc61.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abc8/3f1297e5c033b8322f3d90...
davidrhunt 9y ago
> 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... I second this recommendation. Chapter Two of Dr. Toole's book is titled "Preserving the Art" and directly addresses the concerns you're raising. He uses a great quote at the end of this chapter: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". - Einstein Dr. Toole then spends 500 pages addressing how you can correlate objective and subjective evaluation of loudspeakers. It's a great read.

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.
- amluto 9y ago
  > "Material" is just a way of dismissing the current imperfections that we can't economically do anything about. I said material nonlinearities, not material imperfections. I've never researched this for real, but I would imagine that your average imperfect set of headphones is mainly imperfect in that it has poor (or inconsistent) frequency response, poor transient response, and/or poor noise characteristics. But maybe headphones do commonly have significant nonlinearities -- I don't really know.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    I said material nonlinearities, not material imperfections. Precisely what I said. But maybe headphones do commonly have significant nonlinearities Dynamic drivers have these. Most cases and housings introduce these. Amplifiers have these. Until recently we could only determine if people can consciously hear things or not. Determining if something affects your perception is something else entirely. Also, with something you wear like a headphone, it's more expensive to do blind comparisons. Basically, the system we're dealing with (including the human hearing apparatus) is pretty complex. While we've made significant inroads into the science, we still don't understand everything that goes on when someone listens to reproduced music. I think this is about to change, however. There are some things coming down the pike, where we are going to have unprecedented control of variables we didn't even think to address. Here's one of the first baby steps: A headphone that does a frequency sweep inside the cups to compensate for the acoustic filtering of your particular ear! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55tJzO-_D10
davidrhunt 9y ago
> 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. You can using a properly structured log sine sweep but not with a linear sine sweep. This is why the paper mentions "Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent." You can read up more on why here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abc8/3f1297e5c033b8322f3d90d7c26423b6cc61.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abc8/3f1297e5c033b8322f3d90...

davidrhunt 9y ago

> 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... I second this recommendation. Chapter Two of Dr. Toole's book is titled "Preserving the Art" and directly addresses the concerns you're raising. He uses a great quote at the end of this chapter: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". - Einstein Dr. Toole then spends 500 pages addressing how you can correlate objective and subjective evaluation of loudspeakers. It's a great read.