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Under the microscope

Paul's Posts — 26 June 2012

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Under the microscope

Not that long ago in the scope of our evolution did we question if there were life forms smaller than could be seen by the human eye.  Our collective answer was “no”.  Yet enough people asked an even simpler question “how do we know that?”

One questioner invented the microscope and our view of the world changed overnight.  We could finally see.

When our collective group of high-end enthusiasts hear that which the scientific/measurement community has determined is incorrect do we then simply accept the “facts” or do we question their understanding of the measurements?

There are hundreds, no thousands of examples of those that are so trapped in our physical space that they cannot accept what we feel or find emotionally correct.

Many of us feel vindicated when measurements corroborate our intuitive truths about our perceptions.  That’s fine but never be swayed away from your attachment and beliefs system to your senses and intuitions just because the physical world doesn’t yet support them.

We may not always be able to explain them but that doesn’t make them any less real.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(17) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    June 26, 2012 at 6:13 am

    To this very day in the scope of our evolution do audiophiles question if there are aspects of musical sounds acoustic science doesn’t understand yet? Their collective answer is “no. Yet you can ask an even simpler question “how could you know that?” There is a simple answer. Go to a concert hall and hear a symphony orchestra play or go to a large church or cathedral and listen to an organ concert or a large choir and then go directly to the best sound system money can buy while the music you heard is still fresh in your memory. If what you hear from the equipment doesn’t sound the same or at least similar, something is very wrong. And it is. That something is the things the scientists haven’t measured and so the engineers haven’t taken into account in their designs. It’s not the execution of the designs that are wrong, it’s the underlying scientific concepts, the understandings they’re based on. This is something people who make, sell, review, and buy this kind of equipment don’t want to hear. It gets them very angry. Unless you are going to rethink it and reinvent it for yourself there’s little you can do about it. It leads to nothing but frustration. But it also leads to the conclusion that the enormous price gap between the very best equipment by whatever measure you consider best and lesser equipment is not great enough to justify the cost difference because those missing dimensional elements are still missing.

    “When our collective group of high-end enthusiasts hear that which the scientific/measurement community has determined is incorrect do we then simply accept the “facts” or do we question their understanding of the measurements?”

    Evidently they accept the facts. They seem completely convinced that if they just put the right combination of equipment together they will get what they are looking for. And so they are constantly swapping out every element again and again trying to find the weak link in the chain and replace it. Manufacturers seeing the oppportunity have been very accomodating.

    “never be swayed away from your attachment and beliefs system to your senses and intuitions just because the physical world doesn’t yet support them.”

    It’s like when you go from doctor to doctor and they can’t find out what’s wrong with you so they tell you it’s all in your head. How many decades did people who suffered with peptic ulcers get sent to psychiatrists where they paid thousands to lie on a couch to tell everything they could remember about their entire lives including their early toilet training or their Oedipus complex before it was discovered that most peptic ulcers are caused by the bacteria e-pylori and that the effective treatment was just the right antibiotic pills? They speak with authority, have university degrees and honors conferred upon them, are paid for lectures, publish papers, sell lots of equipment they are constantly reinventing, and are recognized by their “peers” as experts but when you put their pudding to the proof if tasting, it just isn’t at all right because the bottom line is that they don’t really know. We have a name for such people, we call them priests.

    • June 26, 2012 at 6:20 am

      I am in general agreement with you Mark – especially the first paragraph of what you write here – it’s been a constant theme in what I write that in fact we are very far away from the “real deal” and I am sure part of it is in the measurements – but much of it is in the fact that we haven’t adequately figured out how to reproduce anything properly.

      I do think the only thing we have that works, ironically enough, is the recording medium – but where we fail miserably is in the input and output transducers to make and playback the recordings as well as overcoming the room they are played in.

      Not a trivial set of tasks.

      • Soundminded

        June 26, 2012 at 6:39 am

        What do you mean WE kimosabe? :-)

        • June 26, 2012 at 8:19 am

          Oops. Sorry. :) Meant me.

          • Soundminded

            June 26, 2012 at 8:37 am

            As you know Paul I’ve been experimenting with this problem for a very long time. I like to think I’ve made some progress. That there’s been no commercial interest in my ideas hasn’t deterred me. It’s been a lot of fun exploring acoustic space, the final frontier and going where no audiophile has gone before.

    • Tom Devey

      June 26, 2012 at 7:18 am

      So what is “that something” which scientists haven’t measured?

      • Soundminded

        June 26, 2012 at 7:42 am

        “So what is “that something” which scientists haven’t measured?”

        The sound field due to the acoustics of the room mostly. It’s important because it is the overwhelming preponderance of what you hear when you hear live music. The reason they can’t successfully measure it is because they don’t fully understand it, their models of it are crude, inadequate. That’s the heart of the problem. The science is barely much more than 100 years old. It’s viewed principally in two ways, as a collection of parameters that form a complex incoherent and at times self contradictory tapestry and as a perfect wave equation that can’t be applied successfully to real world cases because the problem is too complex from that point of view. Also the understanding of how these missing dimensions are perceived is barely understood as well. Take my word for it, the second problem, the one of perception is much harder to understand than the first. So what is the net result? Most of the sound you hear live never gets on the recording. What little of it does is not in a usable form. And the equipment to play recordings is not designed with recreating that aspect of it in mind. So if you have only 10% of what you hear on the recording, you take that and play it 10 times louder ignoring the missing 90% that is qualitatively very different. That’s the current strategy. And then they tell you it’s just as good. So Paul’s question is, since your ears and brain tell you something is missing why do you believe them when they say it doesn’t matter? The answer is that there are no alternatives being offered for sale that work. What alternatives are being explored that are public knowledge such as Ambiophonics, 3D sound, Wave Synthesis haven ‘t been shown to work either. IMO Quadraphonic Sound, the grandfather of Home Theater today failed in the 1970s not because of the multiplicity of systems but because all of them were technical failures. They demonstrated a basic lack of understanding. What to do? I suppose enjoy what you have and reconcile yourself to the fact that the art and science of sound recording and reproduction is still in an early stage. It’s also barely much more than 100 years old. Perhaps in time much better ideas will prevail but not yet.

    • Bobby Lozada

      June 26, 2012 at 9:55 pm

      I know many say that mathematically, FLAC and WAV should sound the same. But the music coming from my stereo set proves that WAV sounds better.

  2. hahax

    June 26, 2012 at 6:30 am

    I am a measurements person meaning I believe there are measurements for anything physical. The only problem is we often don’t know all the measurements.

    How do you measure the recording?And you can’t really lcheck it subjectively by listening by your arguements today since we have already decided we’re not there yet. A good example of Percy Wilson’s Zanzibar Fallacy.

    Still thank goodness “good’ recordings and equipment seem to combine to allow ourselves to make believe and to enjoy the music.

  3. firedog

    June 26, 2012 at 6:54 am

    Paul, I don’t think your analogies really apply here.

    The problem is that our senses deceive us. Audiophile activities are especially prone to this. So sure, if you think you hear something, you do hear it in a certain sense. But saying, “never be swayed”, etc. is the height of an unscientific and even somewhat ignorant approach.

    Do I think there are aspects of listening that science doesn’t know how to measure. Sure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some physical phenomenon there that CAN’T be measured. And does that mean that every perception I have is actually based on something that’s actually there? No.

    One of the worst/weakest aspects of audiophillia is that audiophiles tend to never even run basic simple blind tests on themselves. So can I really hear the difference between those 2 sets of cables, or am I just imagining I do?

    Maybe you should test yourself and you’ll find out that you can’t hear the difference. That’s okay. It just means you can save yourself some money. Nothing wrong with that.

    Note: I didn’t say that all cables sound alike. Just that you shouldn’t conclude a different setup is better or worse if your evaluation is “sighted”.

    • June 26, 2012 at 8:23 am

      Well, let me challenge your basic thought here for a moment when you suggest we can measure everything – we just don’t always have the tools. How do you measure intuition? How do you measure your connection with the greater universe? The answer I believe is you don’t because it would require non physical means to do so.

      Measuring works well when we are judging things within our physical sphere – but there is much we are connected to that is not part of our physical universe: love, emotions, the connection we have with music and other people’s feelings and thoughts.

      It may sound whacky but I would challenge the basic idea that we can measure “everything”.

      • hahax

        June 26, 2012 at 8:57 am

        Music is not just physical but sound is. So some time(probably a long way off) we should be able to measure sound. Music is a combination of the individual and the sound field and that will always be singular.

        In the meantime we do the best we can with the physical. Sometimes I can fool myself into feeling we are doing Ok and other times – yuck.

  4. Tom

    June 26, 2012 at 6:54 am

    “…they tell you it’s all in your head.”

    Of course when it comes to hearing and appreciating music, it is all in your head…or at the very least ultimately in your head.

    • Soundminded

      June 26, 2012 at 7:25 am

      “…they tell you it’s all in your head.”

      So is the pain of a peptic ulcer. Knowing what causes that pain, that is the real underlying cause is the key to curing it. The assumption that it was purely psychological stress related that caused your stomach to secrete too much acid turned out to be dead wrong. That’s why the cure didn’t work. A lot of psychiatrists made a lot of money on their phoney cures. Believing that if you just got the right preamplifier, the right wire, the right connector that you’d hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Boston Symphony Hall from a recording instead of sound coming out of a pair of boxes in a small room isn’t going to work either. The best photography in the world cannot duplicate the visual experience of standing near the rim of the Grand Canyon and looking out at the vista nor the impact it has on your mind. But then nobody ever promised that it would and nobody ever claimed that looking at the photo however advanced the technology to create it was just as good an experience. They’d be the first to admit it’s a poor second best but it’s as good as they can do.

  5. Rob Hughes

    June 26, 2012 at 7:06 am

    In the specific case of audio, I would tend to agree with your general statements, but mainly because listening to music is governed more by tastes than any purely logical fact. In other words, it’s an emotional thing, and so if you feel a system playing a particular piece of music sounds good, then it does. You can no more dictate via logic and facts someone’s enjoyment of a musical reproduction than you can use reason and logic to dictate who someone will fall in love with.

    In the larger context in which you’re applying this logic, I can’t disagree strongly enough. Relying on your feelings, not facts, it what got us such wonderful moments in history as, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the eternal war in the Middle East, and the attempt by South Carolina to legislate how much sea levels will rise over the next century. So in the larger context, if the facts contradict what we feel, we need to re-examine those feelings, not just dismiss the facts because they disagree with what we think and/or feel. And any time we find ourselves starting a statement with the words “I can’t believe that …”, we need to stop right there, because whatever we say next is very likely to be very wrong. This is basically the root cause for the current anti-science movement going on in the world, but especially in the US. on a final note, the specific cases you cite were not started with the words “I can’t believe that …”, they were started with “I wonder if …”. “I wonder if …” is the most glorious phrase in any language. Or so I believe, that is. ;)

  6. Bassman23

    June 26, 2012 at 7:28 am

    Getting back to the subject at hand, I am reminded of the first “moving picture” experience witnessed by crowds over 100 years ago. A movie of a train coming toward the camera was projected on walls. Some people panicked because their senses and their understanding of “reality” resulted in the “feeling” that they were in danger. As audiences became more sophisticated, it became easier to differentiate the illusion from the reality.
    As audiophiles, we understand that we are experiencing an illusion. We are not sitting in an opera house. We are not listening to actual instruments. That great audio systems can capture a significant enough of the necessary audio cues from the actual performance and render them well enough to suspend our disbelief is a technological marvel. Those who do not have “golden ears” can’t hear (or can’t be bothered to hear) minute differences in the retrieval of these audio cues.
    I expect an audio system to deliver the identical experience of being in front of a live orchestra in a great hall as much as I expect an IMAX film to make me believe that I’m in front of the Great Pyramid. Neither can, neither will. But I expect to come as close to the real experience as is possible with today’s technology. And it is worth pushing the boundaries.

  7. oliver T. Finch

    June 26, 2012 at 9:35 pm

    In the sixties and seventies audio equipment with vanishingly low distortion figures( solid state) were being produced yet they sounded awful. Then people started tailoring the sound to make it musical. The emphasis on measurements became less important. Now you do not see much stress on measurements. Its the sound that decides the sale.Till we are not in the position to measure every aspect of sound reproduction measurements will remain something that can act as a sense of security for the insecure.Unfortunately the current state of measurements is only capable of giving a very general idea at best. The ear will remain the final judge of quality of sound. Just think perfect sound with perfect measurements was introduced in the early eighties and it is still being perfected .Regards.

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