Jud

So here’s another twist: I’ve had the same brand of speakers since 1988 or thereabouts. These speakers have linear phase crossovers. That helps to keep phase/timing linear across the frequency spectrum, which helps with imaging/soundstage. The problem with this is that with such crossovers there’s a small but unavoidable bump in response where the drivers overlap. Over thousands upon thousands of hours of listening through 3 1/2 decades, I’ve had a pattern imprinted on me where strictly flat frequency response is not as important as imaging and soundstage. So now that’s what sounds correct to me, even though strictly speaking it isn’t. And of course there’s the flip side, where the reaction to something that sounds new and different is that it’s better, though that isn’t necessarily so. The summary I guess is there’s enough uncertainty that we should probably just leave it at what sounds good to us is fine, and what sounds good to others is fine for them.

Or let’s say they play back the same passage. Make it a short one, 10 seconds. What was the absolute worst situation for memory of tones in Deutsch’s experiment? When there is intervening music. So in our example, by the time you get to the identical part of the short passage for the second time, you’ve got 10 seconds of intervening music sitting in your echoic memory store, the very worst conditions to try to recall what it sounded like the first time.

Deleted - duplicate.

Turn in your audiophile card immediately! 😊

Yes, and there’s also the well known one published in the Audio Engineering Society Journal, regarding failure to distinguish hi-res from RedBook. Now either all these things really do sound the same and we audiophiles are totally wasting our money, or there are scientific experiments showing blind testing as normally done isn’t effective to distinguish differences that do exist and can reach us emotionally (or perhaps some of both). Why anyone would want to insist they were wasting their money by saying we live in a world where the best musicians on the planet are utterly inconsistent in their playing from day to day, I don’t know.

The fact that blind tests of audio equipment, music resolutions, etc., pretty much never give better than chance results wouldn’t seem to square with a long term memory for those sound characteristics. (This involves not only echoic memory but the ability to consciously realize and verbally express any differences. Regarding this, see the description on Wikipedia of the experiment known as the “Iowa Gambling Task.”)

Because it’s not echoic memory, it’s pattern matching. You know what does or doesn’t match the familiar pattern. Have a look sometime at the Wikipedia article on New Coke. Tl:dr - Pepsi beat Coke in taste tests (short term memory for taste) because it was sweeter. So Coke changed its formula to make it sweeter. It completely bombed with Coke drinkers. Why? Because it didn’t “taste like a Coke” (didn’t match the pattern built up over long years of drinking Coke). So two different mental abilities, one very short term (sensory memory), one long term (pattern matching). This is also why more people who speak tonal languages have perfect pitch. They’ve been matching pitches mentally all their lives to derive the correct meaning when someone speaks to them, or when they speak to others.

I agree that it’s tiresome when people continually insist that others who hear differences must be wrong. Yet I also think that people who continually insist they do hear differences are tiresome as well. In other words, I think it’s a mistake to have so much of one’s self-worth bound up in winning an argument, when our hobby is all about enjoyment. I’ve tried to adhere mostly to reasonable logic when putting together my system, working toward objectively lower noise and distortion (past the point where strong objectivists would say it was audible). But I also enjoy the subjective aspect of our hobby. For example, the player software I primarily use just came out with a beta version on Linux. Subjectively I feel I’m getting better sound from a minimal Arch Linux install with no desktop than from another distribution that I run with a GUI. Since the connection from player software to DAC is via optical Ethernet, there’s no reasonable explanation I can think of for any difference in sound. I’m very likely imagining things. And that’s just fine with me. There’s a joke about a father whose son thinks he’s a chicken. A psychiatrist describes to the father how he’ll cure the son. The father hesitates, and says “But we like the eggs.” Well, I like listening to the setup I think sounds better, even though it’s probably just my imagination. About power cords, since you mentioned them: I caused a company selling expensive power cords to change its website when I pointed out in a Stereophile comment that their description of part of their manufacturing process was complete scientific BS. And there was another power cord manufacturer who claimed in these forums that his power cord was a room temperature superconductor (he also claimed on his own website that the same material was a super-lubricant for truck engines). For myself, about 35 years ago I bought some MIT power cords that are heavy gauge with built-in ferrites, and that’s been my only foray into that area.

And how does he understand the sound to be new? Because it is different from the old, i.e., the pattern.

Read the book I recommended - it has quite a bit on perfect pitch. Only a small minority of Westerners have perfect pitch. People who speak tonal languages like Chinese or Vietnamese display perfect pitch somewhat more frequently. But the vast majority of people don’t have that ability. And I don’t know anyone who displays “perfect jitter recognition,” do you? I used the pitch experiment to illustrate how difficult it is to recall for any period of time past a few seconds even something as trivial as what note is being played, let alone the subtle differences we listen for between items of (hopefully) very good or excellent audio equipment.

Just checking Audirvana for Linux on various distributions, and thought I'd share a few of the tracks I've been playing. My favorite distro for SQ so far (entirely subjective) is a minimal install, no GUI, of Arch Linux. Sound quality is excellent. Ottmar Liebert: Sand (Apophenia) Peter Gabriel: Shock the Monkey Peter Gabriel: The Court (Dark-side mix) The Shins: 40 Mark Strasse The Beach Boys: Marcella (original 1972 mix) The Rolling Stones: Love in Vain (Stripped version) The National: Crumble Morphine: Dawna/Buena

Long term memory is fallible under various circumstances, but although you almost certainly haven't heard "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in a very long time, I bet if you heard even a short passage now you'd recognize it right off.

There's a vast difference between echoic memory (short-term memory for sounds) and pattern recognition (something you've heard hundreds of times and can recognize even when distorted). Short-term memory for subtleties like timbre (essentially all characteristics of a note aside from pitch), or even pitch itself will last perhaps 4 seconds under good conditions, according to scientific experiments that have been published in peer reviewed journals and corroborated. Still skeptical? Try it yourself: https://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=209 On the other hand, if I heard even a poor recording of the voice of my mother, who passed away more than a decade ago, I'm confident I'd recognize it instantly, because that pattern was ingrained in me from the womb and for nearly 6 decades thereafter. Humans are so good at pattern recognition that they have been used to discern patterns in radio waves from Jupiter when computers utterly failed to separate patterns from noise. The examples you're giving are of pattern recognition born of long practice. Are you familiar with the aphorism "10,000 hours to become an expert"? That's the instant grasp of some skill or information you attain when spending many, many hours laying down a pattern. But disrupt the pattern, and we're back to echoic memory. There's a famous experiment where college music majors were asked to identify instruments with the attack and release portions of the notes removed, so essentially just the pure tones and harmonics from each instrument. These students had spent thousands of hours in orchestra practice listening to those instruments, but their performance in the experiment was pretty dismal - the familiar patterns had been disrupted. A really wonderful book about these and other aspects of the human auditory system, including classical composers' use of auditory illusions and techniques to affect your emotions, is this: https://www.amazon.com/Musical-Illusions-Phantom-Words-Mysteries/dp/0197672280/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AO7JTMH3EIVP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.iaFc8-F_V4cF48re2zOSSeV6FEhPDZUByr8a3q3wlSDFInS30o_49XrICo6_fwWny-pQshh8oB-baQbrwMioFb4YlCaI0bduEBqQRPy3Li3WTZn05JA3WMko6_4ueG3COoqMlLyaBiFJ_ggCgdnExggFzyi0xEKMKZ9RzXDeDflDL96rUpjFVhGkP5j6wxaD-KTGiq_69lVd91PkoNmPhvR-VhJmEYo55vfttdIrLM0.c0O-KQFaSaz1rJTxM1CS17LddSTM9wJCVryEwq1oCGg&dib_tag=se&keywords=diana+deutsch&qid=1713480622&sprefix=diana+deutsch%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-1

Don’t know for sure how an i3 compares, but people have reported it running on DietPi and a Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM. So I’m guessing the answer is yes.

Someone else has. Be sure you have avahi-daemon installed and running.