Are you a Subjectivist or an Objectivist?

[ahofer]

I have achieved a quantum existence where I can be simultaneously subjectivist and objectivist, either or neither.

When you look at how we actually buy equipment we are all subjectivists to some degree. If you don’t look, objectivist!

 

[ZolaIII]

When you look at how we actually buy equipment we are all subjectivists to some degree. If you don’t look, objectivist!

Person can not become object (actually it can but that excludes person in the first place).

 

[Momotaro]

View attachment 173264

This was the option which most closely represented my position but I don't specifically regard myself as an objectivist. Subjective evaluation is incredibly valuable to me and is the means by which we have determined all preference curves and audibility thresholds. ...

In that case "only" excludes you from the hard subjectivist category (as defined by the OP). My approach/position spanned "objectivist" to "subjectivist" so I chose neutral. Excluding the qualifier the position is no longer "ultra" and I'd agree with it too.

 

[Suffolkhifinut]

I suspect I’m missing something here, but I got to thinking about why these categories matter. In the end, we are mostly talking about how we evaluate gear to be put in our own systems.

The perfect way to compare and select gear (nearly impossible):
Put it all in the same room, level match, get people to rapidly move different speakers into place and switch wires incredibly quickly, perform controlled double blind tests between all combinations with the same wide variety of program material and choose what you like best.

The way the industry structure forces you to audition gear (we all get pressured into some of this):
Go around to various showrooms, or buy one incredibly heavy and expensive piece of gear at a time. Listen mostly in different places, different moods, different music, looking at the gear and getting primed by salespeople about what you will hear and subtly dissed for your previous choices. Use the music they select. Get confused by worries of “synergy” and “burn-in” that you haven’t really experienced the equipment yet. Let inertia prevent you from completing an annoying (and maybe physically demanding) return process.

Optimizing with current possibilities:
Use measurements and an understanding of the available science to winnow down the gear you want to try. Develop an audition playlist that you are familiar with and use it over the salesman’s objectives. Include demanding and complex music with dynamic range, not just string trios and breathy vocalists with ukeleles. Do a few level-matched blind tests with electronics and be honest about when you can hear a difference. Be a stickler for good measurements with electronics, and buy plenty of power in amplification. Eliminate speakers with too high distortion, badly non-linear FR, wacky directivity, or over-demanding impedance/phase curves. Audition some of the rest with as much control as you can. Ignore the salespeople, or wave your wallet, say you are dead serious about purchasing, but only want to hear evidence-based claims. When it is all done, add room EQ and treatment (I suppose if you know what you are doing, you might want to do some treatment before auditioning in your own home).

I used to think there was room for subjective reviews, but in my return to the hobby I‘ve come to believe they are truly useless. However, once you have what you like, you can go look up the subjective reviews for your equipment. They will be pretty good, no doubt, make you feel better about your purchase, and add some positive confirmation bias to your listening.

I welcome ASR (thank you @amirm ) as it makes the latter method increasingly possible and less painful. I despair of many audiophile (sonicsolipsist) sites that heedlessly push us into the second model, and pretend that it’s only the subjectivity of the first model that counts, rather than the controls, therefore the second model is somehow what we wanted all along.

Don’t recognise how you describe and diss HiFi dealers. Over the last 50+ years have dealt with many HiFi retailers, never felt pressured or been required to listen to their choice of music. When going to listen before buying, always take my own vinyl and CDs the dealers seem to like listening to their equipment especially if the music is something they aren’t familiar with. So at least they’ve got one satisfied customer. Then I go home at look at the graphs?

 

[Momotaro]

Don’t recognise how you describe and diss HiFi dealers. Over the last 50+ years have dealt with many HiFi retailers, never felt pressured or been required to listen to their choice of music. When going to listen before buying, always take my own vinyl and CDs the dealers seem to like listening to their equipment especially if the music is something they aren’t familiar with. So at least they’ve got one satisfied customer. Then I go home at look at the graphs?

Yes. Sometimes I take my own amp, once I took my own speakers. We've also cranked up the volume on gear none of us could afford and listened for hours (ok, not cranked up the whole time). The HiFi dealers I go back to are quite the fun time to hang out with.

 

[ahofer]

Don’t recognise how you describe and diss HiFi dealers. Over the last 50+ years have dealt with many HiFi retailers, never felt pressured or been required to listen to their choice of music. When going to listen before buying, always take my own vinyl and CDs the dealers seem to like listening to their equipment especially if the music is something they aren’t familiar with. So at least they’ve got one satisfied customer. Then I go home at look at the graphs?

That’s good to hear. It wasn’t my experience in NYC. There was one dealer in NJ who really seemed to enjoy listening to stuff, and was some fun to hang out with, but he still got into the synergy/burn-in/upsell stuff at nearly every opportunity. The ones in the city - two started with ’negging’, only one would pull my playlist, and all were pretty inflexible, and were clearly trying to figure out what I can afford around my attempts to make that a little difficult.

 

[Suffolkhifinut]

That’s good to hear. It wasn’t my experience in NYC. There was one dealer in NJ who really seemed to enjoy listening to stuff, and was some fun to hang out with, but he still got into the synergy/burn-in/upsell stuff at nearly every opportunity. The ones in the city - two started with ’negging’, only one would pull my playlist, and all were pretty inflexible, and were clearly trying to figure out what I can afford around my attempts to make that a little difficult.

Sorry to read about your negative experiences with dealers. Maybe we are lucky over here?

 

[ahofer]

Sorry to read about your negative experiences with dealers. Maybe we are lucky over here?

New York may have it’s own vibe.

I also have to admit I grit my teeth in audio stores due to my somewhat shocking experience working in one as a kid. The salespeople where I worked exceeded the stereotype by a country mile, and the manager was abusive.

 

[Suffolkhifinut]

New York may have it’s own vibe.

I also have to admit I grit my teeth in audio stoes due to my somewhat shocking experience working in one as a kid. The salespeople where I worked exceeded the stereotype by a country mile, and the manager was abusive.

Been to New York a few times and maybe your HiFi dealers are related to your taxi drivers?

 

[Momotaro]

New York may have it’s own vibe.

I also have to admit I grit my teeth in audio stoes due to my somewhat shocking experience working in one as a kid. The salespeople where I worked exceeded the stereotype by a country mile, and the manager was abusive.

The negging types are pretty fucked up. I don't go back to them.

 

[Newman]

There exists almost a century of peer reviewed studies which converge upon the same outcome. I wouldn't take that bet.

Tell him that he will have to pay you back double the airfare and hotel costs if he doesn’t ace the test.

 

[Newman]

Looking at the noise floor measurements of the Naim NAIT 5si it has a pretty bad 60Hz tone in the left channel output, so who knows he might succeed

Exactly! Both amps have to pass a test that suggests inaudible distortions, response error, noise and damping.

 

[Deleted member 21219]

Many people here seem to forget the most basic function of measurements: VERIFICATION OF CLAIMS. Before anyone listens to anything, tests can either verify that claims are valid or verify that claims are specious and/or impossible. Weed out the dishonest and disreputable, and THEN go ahead and listen all you want.

Yes, I know that there are people here who want more than that. I understand that, and I sympathize. But ....... you can't build a solid building unless you first provide a solid foundation. Jim

 

[Longshan]

I am neither a subjectivist nor an objectivist, but am a materialist.

 

[MattHooper]

Exactly! Both amps have to pass a test that suggests inaudible distortions, response error, noise and damping.

Still wondering if you'd clarify the following: How do your beliefs about the best way to evaluate audio gear depart from this description?:

OBJECTIVIST: believes informal subjective listening impressions in of themselves are neither reliable enough nor sensitive enough to understand how audio gear performs. Therefore the objectivist holds that we can only “KNOW” how equipment performs by appeal to objective measurements, and by correlating measurements to listening tests, especially listening tests using scientific controls for bias.

If you don't agree with anything there, which is it and why? Thanks.

 

[hvbias]

If I go by my reputation on the subjective forums, I'm a raving objectivist (always defending the relevance of science to high end audio, defending blind testing, casting skepticism on purely subjective inferences, on snake oil etc).

If I come here, apparently I'm a snake-in-the-grass subjectivist.

I find myself somewhat caught in a no-man's-land in this respect:

1. I am a nut about reason and consistency, with philosophical leanings, a heavy emphasis on empiricism, hence science. In fact I was just on another (small) podcast defending science as our best response to the most basic problems of epistemology. It is absurd to me to try to seal off my pet hobby, high end audio, as if everything we've learned about audio technology, human perception, and the influence of confounding variables somehow magically don't apply to audio. As if you can just pretend your subjective inference is the gold standard for knowing what is true. That to me is just nuts. And I see how it has led to an essentially religious-type dogmatism among the "purely subjective" folks in audio "if I hear it, it's true." It's a closed epistemic door, like faith. By carefully correlating measurements to perception, we can actually settle some questions, rather than be stuck in this subjective mud.

So I run to places like this where audio can be discussed without this purely subjective epistemology, without this constant layer of bullshit. It's like breathing fresh air.

On the other hand:

2. I'm much more comfortable with subjective talk about audio than many here. This is because ultimately everything comes to us via subjective experience so it makes sense to exchange notes on the nature of that subjective experience. Everything that comes through our sound system "sounds LIKE something." A measurement may tell us there is a sharp 4dB peak at 2K but insofar as it is audible it therefore SOUNDS like "something." After all, why would we care...if it didn't change the subjective character of the sound? So a significant peak in the frequency affecting vocal sibilance will "sound like something" different than a flat response, so we can endeavour to describe to one another it's subjective effects, e.g. "sibilance sounds artificially exaggerated, sharp, bright, piercing" or whatever in our grab bag of descriptors we can reach for. When listening to music through a sound system it's a subjective smorgasbord, there is so many different aspects of the sound one could seek to describe. And I love that aspect of subjective experience.

I'm a self admitted "foodie" and love, for instance, those long chef's menu experiences at a restaurant. The people I dine with are way in to it as well and we love to exchange our subjective impressions and descriptions of the food "wow, did you get this effect from that dish?" etc. I have tried dining this way with people who have zero interest in talking about the food, and for me it just sucked. Similarly, I need to be among people who really enjoy exchanging intersubjective notes about "how this SOUNDS."

So my problem is that, on web sites that tend strongly towards the "objective/measurements" side, it's not that people think "the subjective aspect doesn't matter." Clearly we all here think it does; we just note that it is much more reliable when correlated with measurements, along with subjective controls. Nonetheless, there is STILL a sort of allergy to subjective descriptions. It seems a mix among different people. Some just have no use for it "just gimme the measurements." But even those who allow in principle for subjective expression may only want to see it restricted to accompanying measurements, and even then there is a sort of sheepish limiting of subjective description. Nobody wants to feel like they are straying in to what everyone here decries as the subjective review morass.

So...there's just very limited exchange of subjective descriptions in a place like this. It feels a bit sterile to me in that way, given just how much there seems to be happening subjectively when I listen to a sound system. I need more.

If I want to be among those who are in to this, I have to go to the subjective-based forums. But of course, then I also have to wade through all the anti-science, subjectivist woo-woo stuff, and I then come running back here for a cold shower.

And so it goes...at least for me.

Matt I see your posts on the SH forum as well, it's always a pleasure reading your posts, you are without question one of the sane ones over there ( @tmtomh as well, who has the patience of a saint)

(I'm there for the classical and jazz discussion, but sometimes can't help popping into the hardware section. More and more I find myself just sticking to a classical only forum, GMG)

 

[MattHooper]

Thanks hvbias!

 

[Newman]

Matt I thought I answered you above in post #132. And what happened to Subjectivist? Turned out to be illusory?

 

[JJB70]

Think your first sentence defines synergy rather well.
Copland amp + either Kudos or Neat speakers good synergy, Naim amp + Kudos or Neat speakers = headache.
How would you define ‘coloured sound?’

If you define synergy as meaning that amplifiers have to be appropriately specified for the load they're intended to drive then I apologise. If you have very hard to drive headphones or speakers and like to go LOAD then you clearly need a meaty amplifier with a lot of power. Output impedance is also worth considering in the case of headphones. Even then, if you listen at moderate volumes then it is surprising how quite modestly powerful amplifiers can work pretty well. I sometimes listen using my DT1990 using smartphone dongle, the DT1990 isn't the most efficient headphone to drive and does benefit from an amplifier with reasonable power but at modest volumes (one might say sensible volumes) a dongle is fine.
My comment was aimed at the idea of synergy being to compensate for shrill highs or kooky FR by trying to find a component with a dead response to tame the signature. That strikes me as silly. Either buy equipment with a signature you like (i.e. if doesn't need to be tamed) or use EQ. For coloured sound, my own use if tuning which is too bright or bass heavy or with a FR that I think is not neutral and which I flatten out with EQ. To be clear there are some genres where I like a bass boost (I listen mainly to classical and like flat, but when I do listen to pop I quite like a bass kick) and other applications where exaggerated highs can be useful (I used to be an an amateur sound desk operator) but for the most part I like a pretty flat and neutral response. It may be easier to highlight what I think is non-coloured if I say my preferred music listening tool is the Etymotic ER4SR.

 

[MattHooper]

Matt I thought I answered you above in post #132. And what happened to Subjectivist? Turned out to be illusory?

No, that's of course why I asked the question again.

You said the definitions I supplied for subjectivist and objectivist do not capture the essence of the two camps of thought that are usually so at odds. Which suggests they are inaccurate definitions.

So...using yourself as an example, please explain what is inaccurate about the definition I gave for "Objectivist" as to YOUR OWN position on evaluating audio gear. I'll show it again:

OBJECTIVIST: believes informal subjective listening impressions in of themselves are neither reliable enough nor sensitive enough to understand how audio gear performs. Therefore the objectivist holds that we can only “KNOW” how equipment performs by appeal to objective measurements, and by correlating measurements to listening tests, especially listening tests using scientific controls for bias.

Does that fairly represent your general view...or not? And if not, why not?

If you don't like the label "objectivist," fine.... please just ignore the label for a moment, and address the description. Thanks.