Ronny wrote on Thu, 24 November 2005 17:25 |
maxdimario wrote on Thu, 24 November 2005 07:06 | some people trust numbers more than their ears.
I don't.
do you?
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Numbers are consistant, do you think that your ears are consistant and always perfect from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute? Are they not affected by caffeine, humidity, temperature, mood, what SPL or tonal element is listened to prior to an evaluation, whether you are horny, had a fight with your wife, are calm and releaxed or uptight? Are all ears clean? Does the amount of wax in the ear affect what frequencies one person hears over another? What about the effect of the sinuses, do your ears feel clogged when you have a cold and accenuate the mids, while atteunating highs and lows, much like the cold affects the taste buds and makes all foods taste bland and the same? Do your ears operate exactly the same at the end of a 12 hour mastering or mixing day as they might in the morning when they are fresh? Have you ever experienced ear fatigue and not realized it until the next day when you relistened to what you did the day before and noticed more detail that you missed the day before? Do you know what the term cottonear means? Are any of your humans sense reliable and accurate 100% all of the time. Can you make long term audio evaluations without having a perfect memory?
No, I don't trust numbers more than my ears, but they are useful to confirm what "I think" my ears are perceiving. It's not either analytical devices "or" your ears, but the combination of both that allow the most valid evaluations for my personal applications.
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It's not just the physical aspect, you touched on the other problem when you mentioned confirming what you *think* your ears are perceiving.
Suggestion can have a HUGE effect on our perception, as has been shown many times, and not just in audio. That's why blind tests and numbers are vital, but here's how it should work...
1) Listener says they hear a difference
2) Engineer/Scientist devises blind test to confirm they really can hear it
3) Engineer investigates and isolates the difference that is being picked up.
4) Engineer devises way to measure that difference
5) More blind tests to establish when the difference becomes perceptable
6) Now you have a way to measure and values which are acceptable, use them to design and test new gear.
But the truth is that in many cases this sequence would end at point 2, because many of the differences people say they can hear are imagined, or they are completely different differences which are already known (e.g. someone might think that they can hear the difference between two sample rates and thus nullify the 20kHz hearing range theory, when in fact they are hearing the differences between two input filters).