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What Hacker News says
- No mention of Toole? Obligatory considering the subject, even if it's about acoustics and not digital audio:
https://www.routledge.com/Sound-Reproduction-The-Acoustics-a...
And a talk by the author covering some of the material for those who prefer that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpUDuUtxPM
- >The best acoustic devices in the world have been made and tuned by hand for thousands of years.
Says who? You should really acquaint yourself with current research, starting with Toole's infamous "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms".
Sure, absolutely. Hope you've got time to read.Please cite actual research defining "objective audiophiles"First, I want you to consider for a moment how remarkable it would be if we had no idea how to objectively measure "good" sound considering that this is a multibillion dollar industry that has existed for over a century. A world where we can calibrate televisions and movie screens objectively by automated means but not, for some reason, their audio counterparts. As rational minds might expect we don't live in such a world.
You'd want to look into research by Sean Olive, Floyd Toole. Here's probably your best starting point: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo...
The TL;DR is that it turns out that most people prefer sound reproduction that (like video reproduction) is accurate to the source material, with a bit of a "house curve" that accentuates the bass frequencies that roughly corresponds to the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness curve. In the end, it's signal reproduction.
I don't realize it because it's not true. A person's hearing can change rather markedly from day to day due to factors like congestion, humidity, etc. This would be a remarkably laughable and irreproducible way to calibrate audio reproduction devices.Do you realize that all gear is tuned by ear - someone listens to it to adjust how it sounds?Audio technology companies that are serious about high quality sound reproduction make use of anechoic chambers: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/certifications-evaluations-standard...
...and/or measurement devices like the Klippel NFS to simulate anechoic measurements: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/u...
...and/or measurement devices like Audio Precision gear: https://www.ap.com/
Of course, audio companies do tinker with their sound to some extent for subjective purposes. A lot of brands try to achieve a bit of a house sound. Ultimately though, audio reproduction is not wine tasting. We can objectively measure what is good and isn't good.
There is also room for subjective personal preference. Everybody's hearing is a little different. And even Floyd and Toole's research reveals average listener preferences. But ultimately...
Well, everything. As you know, "sound" is pressure waves in the air. Those pressure waves can be objectively measured in terms of frequency and amplitude. And those 1's and 0's in a digital audio stream for example have objective meaning. They are not a series of opinions. They represent frequency and amplitude. Anybody telling you otherwise is simply uninformed, or trying to pull the wool over your eyes and sell you something.What is "objective" about sound?- https://www.diyaudio.com/community/ is the main online forum. There's a fair bit of discussion over at parts-express.com's forums as well.
There's a variety of books out there. Sound Reproduction by Dr Toole is a very comprehensive reference to the big picture, but doesn't really get into speaker and crossover design specifically. There's other books you can find for that, but I'm unaware of the most recent good ones as I read most of this stuff decades ago. In that era the Vance Dickenson book was a big one.
The main reasons DIY can rival hifi are: 1. Good components are available to DIY builders. Yeah there's some proprietary stuff that's cool you can't get. But there's a ton of very top quality stuff you can get. 2. Retail hifi has insanely restrictive costs. They'll save every penny possible. So simply by buying better capacitors, etc, or using a slightly more complex crossover, or building a bigger box than is fashionable you can gain an edge. 3. The digital room correction systems offered on most home AV receivers today do a lot to fix simple flaws in DIY designs, giving more slack.
- If you want to read "the" book on sound reproduction, this is rather indisputably it:
https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo...
The book is backed by quite a few decades of research and controlled listening experiments with trained and untrained listeners. It really is authoritative.
Dr. Toole is also very generous with his time on various audio forums and YouTube channels. So by all indications, you are also supporting a pretty decent human being.
- > 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 You can find blog posts covering a lot of the same material informally on Sean Olive's blog: 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-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.
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