About
Passion for audio combined with expertise and honesty.
Because what you want need and what you get are two completely different things...
Welcome to the missing chapters of audio science and technology. There is a lot of knowledge on these pages that you won't find anywhere else. This is guaranteed.
In addition to sharing refreshing and original ideas that may shed light on controversial topics, my other goal is to introduce a different, more rational and logical approach to audio science than usual. Something that has depth, not just "measures well".
My obsession with audio technology started with loudspeakers. Later my interest shifted to guitar amplifiers, guitar amplifier modelling, lossy audio compression, headphone measurements and concert hall acoustics (perception of surround sound). Fortunately, I also have a good understanding of music, which helped me a lot. (Playing an instrument can add such a new dimension to life that turntables and tube amplifiers can never provide... These old technologies are fascinating, but also outdated and should be left in the museum.)
I have a long list of unsuccessful projects and a short list of successful projects, but the ratio is still not bad. A few stops from the "the long and winding road" follows.
Initially I thought that high-order crossover filters in loudspeakers are a source of audible time smearing. My original idea was that if I built a loudspeaker with time-aligned drivers and transient optimized crossover, I would have the best loudspeaker on the planet... Transient optimized loudspeakers are not very common as they require special drivers, true first-order crossover filters and acoustical center alignment between the drivers (usually in the form of an angled baffle). Fortunately, I dropped the project in time. After running a number of tests with software-emulated crossovers and doing some background research (a classic: Group delay distortions in electroacoustical systems by Blauert & Laws), I let go of the idea of transient response optimized "linear phase" crossovers. (12th order Linkwitz–Riley at 2 kHz can be detected with pulses, but not the 4th and 8th order.)
Measuring headphones on a flat plate fixture is a great example of how simplicity can be a solution to complex problems. Flat plate measurements provide a good prediction of how headphones sound and the relevance of the response is not worse than that of dummy head measurements. Unfortunately, there is a lot of noise in this research field. There are plenty of preference studies without any attempt to understand headphone acoustics or headphone-ear acoustics. Scientific models are discarded, target curves are evaluated without modeling the acoustics of headphones, whereas studies filled with p-values are created similarly to products manufactured on an assembly line.
Many people confuse high fidelity with high-end audio. High fidelity means lack of audible coloration ("transparency"), whereas high-end audio is an unfair business based mainly on people's insecurity and gullibility. If we look under the hood of a high-end audio product or development, we will find either rather dumb solutions or the lack of real development wrapped in an extraordinary design (sold with the dumbest marketing). This is especially true for overpriced "audiophile grade" DACs, amplifiers, streamers... As for headphones and loudspeakers, there may be exceptions that can be labelled as high-end and not nonsense.
The marketing of overpriced audio jewelry is mostly accompanied by subjective nonsense. To me, subjectivism is nothing more than using our ears without understanding hearing, test methods, signal behavior, acoustics... So subjectivism is "ignorance is bliss" (self-perpetuating ignorance). Besides, subjectivism has never added any value to our knowledge, just overpriced products and lots of scams.
"Subjectivism" is wrong, but it doesn't mean that the objective approach is right all the time. Comprehension is not binary, it has gradients (from statistical analysis to real experimental methods and model validation). Besides, some objective methods are either questionable or rarely used correctly (for example blind testing, which is our next topic...). Reducing scientific research to the scientific method is also a mistake, as progress in science is deeper than the application of the scientific method. Sometimes someone has to sit down and think and not just follow certain rules. For example, the scientific method tells us nothing about how to use our imagination, how to find new ideas, how to find solutions to scientific problems, how to form a new theory by connecting existing ideas, etc.
One of the greatest misconceptions in audio is related to blind testing. Though confirmation bias and other types of self-deception are real problems and should be avoided, the idea that blind testing is the only way to eliminate bias is certainly wrong and very limiting. People believe in nonsense because they don't know how to brake down a complex problem into smaller, easily verifiable tasks, and not because of the lack of blind tests. In addition, without proper knowledge blind testing can be either misleading or may give us an illusory knowledge. Understanding the science behind audio technology does not require blind tests, just a reasonable understanding of hearing, signal behavior (analog, digital) and the complexity of real life signals and sound sources. That's all.
Csaba Horváth
Latest:
Headphone measurements: what outer ear measurements can tell us
Headphone measurements: with or without ear?
Lossy audio compression: principles, methods, misconceptions 🔊 🎧
How much noise and distortion can we hear in complex signals? 🔊 🎧
Speaker Driver Simulation With Room Response (online simulator)
Audio measurements & fidelity: the ten basic rules
NextLevelFun - A Huge Collection Of Music Videos 
