For the Hi-Fi enthusiasts among us...

djmusicman

By the time you switch out the DAC’s you’ll have forgotten the sound. Most of the differences people think they perceive are a bias towards the more expensive one. You’d need to plug them both in and have some kind of A/B switch with no pause in-between to test them.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...-shaw-of-harbeth-on-audio-comparisons.327924/

Alan Shaw wrote about this extensively:

The ordinary ear has a completely reliable memory about as long as a goldfish memory: a couple of seconds. Any remembered sonic events separated by a gap greater than a second or two cannot be considered objective. This is because of a conversion process from short to long term memory storage which condenses, simplifies and packages a sensory input into a 'ghost' impression. These impressions are entirely personal to the listener. They rapidly fade and/or take on modifications and restructuring with the passage of time. I would not trust the objectivity of my own audio memory more than a second or two for making business-critical, time separated comparisons. I would not expect others to have significantly better objective audio memory, even if they have a subjective memory of sonic impressions over a lifetime

djmusicman

By the time you switch out the DAC’s you’ll have forgotten the sound. Most of the differences people think they perceive are a bias towards the more expensive one. You’d need to plug them both in and have some kind of A/B switch with no pause in-between to test them.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...-shaw-of-harbeth-on-audio-comparisons.327924/

Alan Shaw wrote about this extensively:

The ordinary ear has a completely reliable memory about as long as a goldfish memory: a couple of seconds. Any remembered sonic events separated by a gap greater than a second or two cannot be considered objective. This is because of a conversion process from short to long term memory storage which condenses, simplifies and packages a sensory input into a 'ghost' impression. These impressions are entirely personal to the listener. They rapidly fade and/or take on modifications and restructuring with the passage of time. I would not trust the objectivity of my own audio memory more than a second or two for making business-critical, time separated comparisons. I would not expect others to have significantly better objective audio memory, even if they have a subjective memory of sonic impressions over a lifetime

djmusicman

Quite a few assumptions made in above statement. However if there is ANY difference between subjective and objective then there is insanity. Have you ever met someone possessing 'photographic recall'. It's actually an ability we ALL possess but rarely use.

Archer

Well, you can believe whatever you wish obviously. But this line of thinking would suggest that I cannot listen to music playing from the small speaker on my iPhone, then to the same music on my main audio system, and tell which one sounds better if I wait more than a few seconds...

Let me ask you this - if 3 people in the room all independently came to the same conclusion that the sound is better, then are well all having some type of shared hallucination? If none of us can remember what something sounds like for more than a few seconds, wouldn't it be more likely that we all come up with different conclusions after the switch?

madjestikmoose

Been thinking about establishing a thread for this for a while, as I suspect I’m not the only member on here who appreciates fine audio as well as fine watches - so a page to share hifi preferences, setups, advice or general chitchat. I’ll start off with the story of how I got into it, if you’ll indulge me...

It’s basically my Dad’s fault. He is a big classical music fan, particularly organ, which doesn’t float my boat at all but that didn’t stop me being impressed by the quality of his 1960s Quad 33/303 amps and electrostatic speaker setup whenever he piped that stuff out, usually at volume bordering on the uncomfortable. Nobody ever forgets their first album - mine was REM’s Automatic for the People and I’ll never forget playing it through that system the day I bought it and just being totally blown away. So when I turned 14 and CD was fast becoming the norm (1992 I think), I asked for and got a player for Xmas. Naturally I needed amps and speakers and, perhaps unbelievably, dad had a spare 33/303 combo knocking around in the loft which he agreed to lend me for the next however-many years, along with a pair of home-made speakers.

The speakers weren’t great so I quickly upgraded them to a set of Mission 752 floorstanders, and that setup served beautifully until a couple of years ago, when my wife got fed up with the cables and old boxes and instructed me to sell up and find something more compact. I did so and then turned up to the Bristol hifi expo where I discovered, being a Quad fan, the newly-released Artera Solus one-box system. It was like my R.E.M. moment all over again; I went to several booths that day but must have returned to Quad at least three or four times. I knew there and then I had to have it and had ordered it within weeks along with a set of S1 bookshelf speakers.

So now I’m enjoying my back-catalogue all over again! Which is great. And even Dad is jealous; he’d never admit it, but the fact he reclaimed his 33/303 amps after all these years says it all! Thanks for reading. Enjoy the

Archer

I understand bias certainly, and I have no problems with that concept - psychoacoustics. That is why double blind testing is the gold standard.

But the claim made (via the post linked to previously) is that humans are incapable of determining differences in sound quality with sounds that are not heard within just seconds of each other. That is a completely different thing from potential biases.

I know that this wasn't your claim so I don't mean to pick on you, but can you see how that claim is problematic?

That claim would make pretty much any HiFi expenditure useless because seconds after you hear music you would be unable to tell if another source/system is any better or worse. Any differences in the sound between an echo filled ice hockey arena (where most large concerts are here) and the sound inside a purpose built concert hall would be indiscernible based on this claim, because you cannot physically get from one venue to the other in s second or two. This is a claim that goes to the foundation of listening to music and trying to improve the sound reproduction or acoustics of a concert hall or even your own listening room.

In regards to biases, they are based on expectations. But anyone who has been into HiFi for any length of time, and has listened to a wide variety of systems, will tell you that results sometimes go with expectations and sometimes against expectations. They have for me over and over again, so expecting a very expensive system to sound great and having it not sound great is something I've had happen to me many times. I've also had seriously big improvements when I expected very little (just like the aforementioned DAC upgrade that I was told that I couldn't hear because too much time had passed).

Cheers...

gatorcpa

Any reason why you cut and pasted directly from the link I provided above?
gatorcpa