pabloman said:
Ok.....I'll bite, please axplain to me how I might be naive. Where in the effing video does he say anything like "PIO sounds better than ceramic" or anything close to that? All he says is there's a lot of talk of them sounding different, see for your self if they do.
After which he describes an approach that is absolutely worthless. And you can read the reviews on the site with all sorts of glowing reviews of the "high-end" caps. So, first you undermine the people who know how caps work ("No one can tell you!"), then you offer up a testing procedure that, lacking basic controls, lends itself to misleading results.
And would you say the same thing if he was a high end home audio guy selling expensive audiophile grade power receptacles (i.e. the thing on the wall you plug your power cord into) or audiophile grade network cables? Those are real products by the way, and I suppose the people who buy them will "just use their ears" and decide for themselves.
Being pro knowledge you should understand how difficult a truely objective test would be to perform. I'm guessing that's why they aren't done. There's just way too many variables. I mean a strings tone degrades with every pluck right? No two guitars are the same. Barometric pressure will affect vibration from a scientific stand point too right?
Actually it's reasonably easy - it's just an electronic signal hitting the cap so you could take a recording, do some reasonable level and impedance matching of the signal, and then you can test it through both quantitative measurement and double blind audio tests with all of the necessary controls.
Drew I gotta say I don't think you are as "pro-knowledge as you'd like to think. It is absolutely idiotic to try and quantify sound.
Lots of things can be (and are) quantified. All sorts of noise, distortion, level, frequency and phase measurements are made all the time. The limits of human hearing are also well established from careful research done over a very long time.
Interestingly, there's this amazing coincidence where the stuff people claim they hear that's out of line with everything that's known from decades of careful research is the very stuff they can no longer hear when subjected to controlled listening tests. This coincidence is of course blamed on the "stress" of the test, among various other things.
IOW it turns out that the subjective stuff that "can't be quantified" almost always fails under more carefully controlled subjective testing.
Of course I'm talking about technology, not art. I wouldn't argue that you can quantify beauty or exhilaration in music, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were people out there trying.
You realize by nature sound is subjective right? It's a perception. Most learned folks understand this. So again, in the video he says "sound". Thats it.
The word "sound" both refers to the transmission of pressure changes through a medium such as air as well as something subjectively perceived. Now generally those two things coincide as the perceived "sound" is triggered by the sound wave entering the ear, getting shaped and filtered by the ear and then triggering auditory nerves going to the brain. But unfortunately the brain messes with things at a low level and at times things are consciously perceived that have nothing to do with what entered via the auditory nerves. I don't much care about the imaginary "sound" itself, but it does bother me when people try to charge objectively real money for imaginary stuff. Or argue about it as if the imaginary stuff wasn't imaginary.
And there are ways of getting objectively valid data from subjective tests.
From a practical standpoint it depends onwhat we are doing - if we are listening to two
different sounding things to determine which we
prefer, that's a purely subjective decision and casual methods are fine.
But if we are involved in some way in a discussion about differences that - oops - might not be real based on lots of objective knowledge or research, then we have entered objective reality and either need to be not pretend we are talking about something objectively real (and worth spending objectively real money on it) or else behave objectively. Do we talk about the dreams we had last night as if they were real world occurrences?
ccasion14:
