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The Absolute Sound
Issue 280   February 2018
The Human Element
Editorial By Robert Harley

 

The Absolute Sound Issue 280 February 2018

 

  I've long been filled with a sense of wonder at the phenomenon of listening to music. A sequence of variations in air pressure strikes a tiny diaphragm in our ears and sets off a staggeringly complex process that results in a musical expression appearing in our consciousness—and sometimes even hijacking it. Although recent advances in neuroscience have begun to shed some light on how this happens, the brain is still very much a "black box" when it comes to understanding how we hear. Even today's innovative research doesn't attempt to answer the deeper question of how and why we find music so emotionally and intellectually rewarding.

The air-pressure variations striking our eardrums are a two-dimensional phenomenon, as are the electrical signals driving loudspeakers—it's nothing more than a voltage that varies over time. Yet we miraculously transform that flat two-dimensional waveform into a three-dimensional space populated by individual objects. In a recording of a string quartet, for example, we hear the violin on the left with a harmonic structure attached to it; the cello's attached to the cello, and so on, and surrounding all the instruments is room reverberation. Yet each instrument's complex harmonic series, and the reverberation, are encapsulated with the rest of the sounds in that two-dimensional signal. Somehow our minds, without conscious effort, sort it all out to present us with a coherent picture.

Sometimes when I've made a change to my system and heard a small sonic difference that translated into a large difference in musical perception, I've marveled at the sensitivity of our hearing. Say you install an isolation footer beneath a DAC and readily hear its effect. Think of how miniscule the objective difference is in the air-pressure variations striking your eardrum. If it could be measured it would likely be in the parts per billion or even trillion. Yet we not only detect this difference, we sometimes find that difference musically meaningful.

It's a cliché of high-end audio reviewing to say that a certain change to a system is akin to washing dirt from a window. But that analogy is particularly apt in many ways. Imagine looking at a beautiful landscape through a window that's covered with a very thin film of dirt. Relative to the window's mass, the dirt's mass is objectively miniscule, yet it makes an outsized contribution to our perception. Concomitantly, the dirt is meaningful only in the context of the window; that same amount of dirt anywhere but on the window is entirely outside our discrimination. And the dirt's significance is very different if the window is overlooking the Grand Canyon or a junkyard.

 

The Absolute Sound Issue 280 February 2018

 

Distortions in audio systems are like the dirt on a window. Infinitesimally small objective differences in an audio signal are meaningful, but only in the context of the signal itself, and only in the context of human perception. It's a mistake to dismiss the audibility of a certain phenomenon simply because the distortion artifact, when considered in isolation, appears to be insignificant. A good example is clock jitter in digital-audio reproduction. A clock controls the timing of the conversion of each digital sample to an analog value. Jitter is variations in that clock's timing precision. There's no standard for measuring jitter, and manufacturers routinely throw out wild specs for their products, but let's consider the example of 10 picoseconds (ps) versus 5ps of jitter. Designers working at the cutting edge of digital tell me that this five-billionths of a second is audible. Yet consider the apparent insignificance of that timing error. Five ps is the time it takes light to travel a little over half an inch. It's difficult to even comprehend such a short amount of time, much less believe that our hearing system is able to discriminate such a small variation. But in the contexts of the musical signal and of our exquisitely sensitive perceptual system that converts that signal into a simulacrum of reality, five ps could be like that molecules-thin film over a double-paned 1/4"-thick picture window.

This is why dogmatic ideas about "objectivity" in audio are destined to fall short of offering a complete picture of what matters and what doesn't in the reproduction of music. If our knowledge of audio signals and of how the brain's auditory system works were infinite, then objective analysis would surely triumph. But understanding the immense complexity of a biological system that converts air-pressure variations into musical meaning is a long way off. Until then, we'll continue to use the most accurate tool available to judge what's audible and what isn't: our listening skills.

 

 

 

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