On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 11:07:21 +0000, Rob
wrote:

Stewart Pinkerton wrote:
On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 12:48:46 -0000, "JustMe" wrote:

snip

But, as I have explained repeatedly, any discussion of a subjective issue
is, by its nature, merely opinion and not fact and, therefore, there is no
need to insert the qualifying "IMO".


Actually no, as level-matched DBTs are by their very nature
subjective, but do give us true information regarding what is *really*
audible.

And the DBTs, by nurture, do for some (you obviously) create an
objective realm. A couple of things:

Is what is audible all that counts? Not a troll (really!) but I'm afraid
I've been reading HFW. Without going in to the merits or otherwise of
that organ I'm loosely curious - not the extent of actually buying any
of the stuff they mention to bolster their argument - by the notion of
sound outside the audible range having an effect on 'the act of
listening' - vibrations especially, and a specific reference to
supertweeters and subwoofers. You can't 'hear a note' but 'sense a
presence'.

I see where you're going with this, and infrabass can certainly affect
your perception, even though your ears are not in the loop. Very deep
bass in the low 20s is often used by movie sound producers to generate
unease and even fear, while a good dose of genuine high-level 6-7 Hz
will have you throwing up - literally!

OTOH, there's no real evidence that any *musical* content above the
22kHz cutoff of CD can be perceived - even it the studio microphones
could pick it up, which most can't. The only known studies which show
humans perceiving above the audible range have used very high SPLs of
ultrasonic waves, which simply don't occur in musical instruments -
and would destroy most tweeters in seconds!

And I think, from distant memory, that 'Which?' use DBTs and they (their
panel) quite readily find differences between amplifiers, CDPs and DVDAs
- devices of (to all intents and purposes) identical measurement.

Nope, read it carefully. They use blind listening panels, so that's
just single blind, and they write up notes on each presentation
separately, so they never do repeated trials to check if they can
actually hear any differences. While it seems at first sight to be
somewhat scientific, it actually isn't at all - especially if the
listeners compare notes while they're listening!
--

Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering