Quote:
Originally Posted by nickynicknick  I really don't need science (although science is extremely helpful) to prove what is good and what is not |
Just to be clear, I'm not here to start trouble or pick fights. And we
do need science to separate fact from fiction. Time and again I've seen people express beliefs that, when put to the test, turn out not to be true. I've experienced this enough times personally to know that hearing and perception are very fragile.
The last time this happened was only a few months ago, after I burned a CD of a mix. I put the CD in my computer's CD drive and it sounded soft and muffled compared to the Wave file source I had played only five minutes earlier. I'm thinking WTF, why does this sound so different? So I extracted the Wave file from the CD, and lined up both Waves files in a DAW. Then they sounded identical. The problem was simply that the CD playing software was much softer. It sounded muffled! But it really wasn't different at all from the source file.
This is why level matching is critically important when doing A/B tests. So often I see people say that switching to this mic pre or that A/D/A converter was like lifting the proverbial veil. But when compared properly the differences disappear. I'm not saying that all gear sounds the same! But without a "scientific" comparison you can't know for sure.
--Ethan