andy_c wrote:
> That quote is a satire of itself! Poe's Law is in effect here.
IOW, it is so flawed that it is hard to tell how serious the author is
about it. Sort of like reading the collected works of Michael Fremer, or
most of the rest of the Stereophile and The Absolute sound staff.
>
> I must admit though, I used to fall for that stuff at one time. I
> actually bought a Linn Sondek LP12 from Havens and Hardesty in
> Huntington Beach in the early 1980s. When I picked it up, I saw a few
> copies of what looked like a cross between a comic book and a Linn
> advertisement on the counter. Thinking it was promotional material, I
> took two different ones with me when I took the turntable home. When I
> got home, I looked at it and saw there was a price tag of something like
> $5.00 for each issue. So, unbeknownst to me, I had shoplifted two
> copies of The Flat Response!
>
Ditto. In fact HP at The Absolute Sound can credit himself for the
invention of The ABX Test. Testing his dogma about SS power amplifier
design was believable enough for me that I had to test it for myself,
and ABX was the methodology that was invented to perform the listening
tests in a bias-controlled scientific way.
>
> I read them both and they were completely nuts! The cover of one of
> them, which was apparently accusing Martin Colloms of being in cahoots
> with Japanese manufacturers, had a racist depiction of a Japanese guy
> that looked like WWII propaganda.
>
Well, Colloms is a hired gun (independent consultant), and he's more or
less in cahoots with the last guy to write a check for him. People I
know who have worked with him say that if you can keep him away from
rubbing his audio weirdness bone, he's a pretty good engineer.
>
> There were quotes from Ivor Tiefenbrun saying that you couldn't have
> any speakers in the room other than the ones you were using, not even a
> telephone!
>
Dubunked with his personal assistance here:
http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx_testing2.htm
>
> At the time, I wrote it off as just Tiefenbrun being a highly eccentric
> character. Little did I know that this kind of thing would become the
> norm in high-end audio, and Tiefenbrun would be thought of as some sort
> of genius.
>
If you qualify that to be "Marketing genius" then I am forced to agree.
>
> Even now, thinking about "The Flat Response" still makes me laugh.
> There used to be a site that had scans of every issue, but it appears to
> be gone now. I wish I had downloaded them all.
Sample here:
http://thetomtomclub.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-flat-response-magazine
Sometimes I wonder where all this weirdness comes from, and here it is:
"Noel admitted that just stating that CD had 40% distortion was about as
meaningful as trying to say that it had negligible distortion, but he
pointed out that digital differs in one vital way from analogue. And
thatÂ’s in the fact that with analogue, as the signal level gets louder
distortion goes up, whereas with digital distortion drops as the level
goes up. At full volume, it is very low indeed, around 0.001%. But at
the levels we mostly listen at, distortion is far from low. His tests
showed that the ear can easily hear signals recorded at a level of -65dB
below full output (0dB) where he measured distortion on the CD player at
around 4% – a far cry from 0.001%! At -90dB, we got a distortion level
of 38.5% THD [total harmonic distortion]. He also pointed out that where
with analogue distortion harmonics are 'even order' and pleasing to the
ear, all of the significant distortion on digital is 'odd order' and
extended right up to 20kHz, which is particularly nasty to the ear."
So here we have one of the classic lies of the vinyl brigade:
"...but he pointed out that digital differs in one vital way from
analogue. And thatÂ’s in the fact that with analogue, as the signal level
gets louder distortion goes up, whereas with digital distortion drops as
the level goes up. At full volume, it is very low indeed, around 0.001%.
But at the levels we mostly listen at, distortion is far from low."
In fact a properly designed digital channel (and most are well enough
designed) has no distortion at all. If one makes naive measurements of
THD one observes the claimed increase pf distortion at low levels, but
if one is moderately well trained and actually looks that the residual
with an educated eye, one finds that the distortion is either all noise,
or that the test signal is improperly generated without dither. The
latter gross error may be found in virtually every technical test of a
digital product in the pages of Stereophile, for example.
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