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ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret things. One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is v

ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret things. One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That people’s tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience differ wildly. That while a loudspeaker pair or headphone may measure or perform objectively well, it may not pair up well with your particular taste, or with your music. As an example Sennheiser’s HD800 is a well regarded high end headphone that does particularly well with the fine details of orchestral music, but lacks the low end punch required for Hip-Hop or other styles of bass heavy music, and it’s elevated treble can make the heavily distorted guitar of Black Metal incredibly grating on the ear. Of course everyone is different. If you know the equipment you like, and how it’s sound signature translates to graphs you can use the measurements and commentary on ASR to discover other equipment knowing how it differs within that context.

electrograv 5y ago
This trope that ‘the best audio product for you is a highly subjective personal choice’ directly contradicts decades of well-established science, and is a long-standing myth that plagues this industry — and not coincidentally, serves to sell a ton of over-expensive garbage to under-educated (by design, via marketing bunk) consumers. If you read ASR’s materials on headphone science and the HD800S review in particular, it will become entirely clear why it sounds the way it does, and what you need to do to EQ it to fix its tonal character issues out of the box. I own the HD800S and if it wasn’t for the scientifically derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the sound signature dramatically changes from unlistenably painful (for metal music, for example) to perfectly balanced sound. I should add though that headphones are definitely more subjective than speakers. This is because we are shoving a speaker 1 inch from our ears and hoping it will sound like the music is in the room around us instead of actually shoved right up against our ear — and the way this sounds actually does differ from person to person due to different ear canal geometry! This limitation is not the case for speakers, though! The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people), whereas for headphones this number is not as high (though I don’t know that number off the top of my head). And you know what’s great about ASR? They explain all this! All you need to do is read their resources and understand what the science does and does not help with.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people) Are there some product(s) that you can name off the top of your head as examples?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - electrograv 5y ago
    For the absolute best, cost is no object? Genelec 8351B + W371A, Revel F328Be, Dutch & Dutch 8C, Kii Three BXT, and many others. But you really don’t need to pay this much unless you want the absolute best quality AND quantity (capable of going extremely loud, which is an engineering challenge that requires expensive solutions). You may find the “Speaker Attr Comparison” tab here useful to explore the price vs performance spectrum: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/SpeakerTestData/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe... I would recommend learning to read the individual reviewed speaker measurements though, since there definitely is some information lost when compressing these incredibly rich measurements down to a single number, and the science still has some room to improve since there are some dimensions (e.g. the importance of low distortion at high SPL, or beam width) that this fairly old aggregate score model does not currently incorporate. There definitely is some subjective taste involved, but the important thing is that we can measure these dimensions objectively and understand which is subjective (and why), and which is not a matter of subjective personal taste. We can explore these personal preference tradeoffs without completely surrendering to the subjective nonsense that ‘anything goes’. For example, it looks like the most subjective factor remaining in speakers is the overall beam width — whether you want a more directional sound, or a more omnidirectional one that fills the room more broadly. This topic is at the edge/fringe of the established science, but the general consensus here is that the objective best would be a multichannel surround sound system of medium beam speakers, where you can either replay recordings meant for multichannel systems, or for traditional stereo recordings at least dynamically select how frontal vs surround you want a particular stereo recoding to be reproduced (just as you can e.g. easily adjust bass boost to taste depending on what you’re listening to, if it wasn’t recorded/mixed the way you like). But given that most people want to minimize the number and size of speakers in their room, there does tend to be a practical challenge of preference here if you can only pick one style (wide vs medium vs narrow beam) for stereo recordings (which while not an ideal format, constitute 99.999% of all music people enjoy).
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
> One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That people’s tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience differ wildly. We do in fact know how subjective preferences correlate to objective measurements. Here's the paper to start with: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12794 https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12794
patentatt 5y ago
Then you haven’t read ASR much, as there are plenty of discussions and references to some well established objective criteria that correlate with subjective preferences. It’s not entirely subjective.

electrograv 5y ago

This trope that ‘the best audio product for you is a highly subjective personal choice’ directly contradicts decades of well-established science, and is a long-standing myth that plagues this industry — and not coincidentally, serves to sell a ton of over-expensive garbage to under-educated (by design, via marketing bunk) consumers. If you read ASR’s materials on headphone science and the HD800S review in particular, it will become entirely clear why it sounds the way it does, and what you need to do to EQ it to fix its tonal character issues out of the box. I own the HD800S and if it wasn’t for the scientifically derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the sound signature dramatically changes from unlistenably painful (for metal music, for example) to perfectly balanced sound. I should add though that headphones are definitely more subjective than speakers. This is because we are shoving a speaker 1 inch from our ears and hoping it will sound like the music is in the room around us instead of actually shoved right up against our ear — and the way this sounds actually does differ from person to person due to different ear canal geometry! This limitation is not the case for speakers, though! The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people), whereas for headphones this number is not as high (though I don’t know that number off the top of my head). And you know what’s great about ASR? They explain all this! All you need to do is read their resources and understand what the science does and does not help with.

throw0101a 5y ago
> The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people) Are there some product(s) that you can name off the top of your head as examples?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- electrograv 5y ago
  For the absolute best, cost is no object? Genelec 8351B + W371A, Revel F328Be, Dutch & Dutch 8C, Kii Three BXT, and many others. But you really don’t need to pay this much unless you want the absolute best quality AND quantity (capable of going extremely loud, which is an engineering challenge that requires expensive solutions). You may find the “Speaker Attr Comparison” tab here useful to explore the price vs performance spectrum: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/SpeakerTestData/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe... I would recommend learning to read the individual reviewed speaker measurements though, since there definitely is some information lost when compressing these incredibly rich measurements down to a single number, and the science still has some room to improve since there are some dimensions (e.g. the importance of low distortion at high SPL, or beam width) that this fairly old aggregate score model does not currently incorporate. There definitely is some subjective taste involved, but the important thing is that we can measure these dimensions objectively and understand which is subjective (and why), and which is not a matter of subjective personal taste. We can explore these personal preference tradeoffs without completely surrendering to the subjective nonsense that ‘anything goes’. For example, it looks like the most subjective factor remaining in speakers is the overall beam width — whether you want a more directional sound, or a more omnidirectional one that fills the room more broadly. This topic is at the edge/fringe of the established science, but the general consensus here is that the objective best would be a multichannel surround sound system of medium beam speakers, where you can either replay recordings meant for multichannel systems, or for traditional stereo recordings at least dynamically select how frontal vs surround you want a particular stereo recoding to be reproduced (just as you can e.g. easily adjust bass boost to taste depending on what you’re listening to, if it wasn’t recorded/mixed the way you like). But given that most people want to minimize the number and size of speakers in their room, there does tend to be a practical challenge of preference here if you can only pick one style (wide vs medium vs narrow beam) for stereo recordings (which while not an ideal format, constitute 99.999% of all music people enjoy).

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

> One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That people’s tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience differ wildly. We do in fact know how subjective preferences correlate to objective measurements. Here's the paper to start with: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12794 https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12794

patentatt 5y ago

Then you haven’t read ASR much, as there are plenty of discussions and references to some well established objective criteria that correlate with subjective preferences. It’s not entirely subjective.