Harman listening test

On wbf, there was a discussion on where one guy was saying the Harman listening test (Google it) helps increase our ability to identify the differences between audio components, and is essential to develop your expertise in auditioning. My contention was that a better way is to go to live concerts as this test does not cover for timbre and tonality of violins or brass, or how piano incorrectly plays through crossovers, or the separation of instruments when 50 plus are thrown through a component in a full symphony. You guys can try the test and see what you think.

I paste one of his posts below:

" The tool is a bit like a video game where levels keep going up and difficulty increases with it. At every stage, a change is made to the frequency response and you are asked to identify which EQ band may have created. The difficulty level is proportional to the width ("Q") of the filter.

Harman does not use this test for testing speakers. This is a training tool to get people to recognize colorations and be able to identify them accurately and objectively so that product design decisions can be made.

The actual test is with music tracks and ABCD comparison between say, four different speakers. You listen to music on each one of them and give score of 1 to 10. I created a thread for the tracks the use here: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...-Music-Tracks-for-Speaker-and-Room-EQ-Testing (out of separate posts in this thread).

And this is the training software: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...e-in-How-to-Critically-Evaluate-Sound-Quality

I found that until I took the training and follow on blind test, I lacked the vocabulary to quantify in my mind what was good or bad about the sound I was hearing. Can you tell with certainty if one voice is boomier than others? You might think you can when you hear sample 1 and 2 by when 3 and 4 play, you all of a sudden realize how weak your ability was to identify the correct sound in that regard."

Sounds like parametric EQ which you can apply manually to anything in JRiver in real-time. Much more flexible than this.

But with JRiver you can play with bit depth and sample rates. Doing that might just change your opinion of high def recordings.

JRiver - use it to realise, not conceptualise, about digital audio and what you can and cannot hear.

Didn't look at the WBF thread or links. On a phone. Will do later.

Try JRiver bonzo. Get a measurement mic too.

It's a test to see if you can identify the difference in the EQ. It has levels. Most of us will be at 2 to 3. The listening is supposed to build you up to 6 to 12. My point is does that increased level help in.judging hifi as compared to attending live shows

Playing with frequency and Q values leads you to know where in the frequency range various changes actually take effect audibly.

You could argue such "training" makes you wiser but a more astute/better listener? Not sure about that.

The best way to become a good listener is to have a great system in the first place. Paradox?

Or just go to loads of non-amplified gigs.

Bonzo, I believe that any training and exposure to variances in setting like User211 suggest are all helpful in understanding the impacts of all the many factors that go into audio. Just attending a live concert will teach me nothing about comb-filtering, nor issues with early reflections vs echo. It just gives me a good baseline for what an orchestra should sound like in a (hopefully) decent venue from a (hopefully) good seat.

I was able to incrementally improve the sound from my system as I incrementally increased my knowledge of the many factors that influence in-room performance. For instance, let's talk about comb-filtering, since our ESL's are the speaker topology most subject to it in the real world. This phenomena is easy to see on both FR measurements and impulse response measurements, so one can corroborate just how pronounced the effect is in a given configuration. By modifying the parameters that influence this, such as pulling the speaker further out into the room, or changing the toe-in, you get both audible and visual (i.e. looking at the impulse response) feedback of how this affects what you hear.

So any training, whether formalized FR awareness such as the Harman kit, or self-taught using REW, JRiver and multiple positioning and treatment experiments all will help an audiophile tune their system much more effectively than attending concerts.

I should know, my dad was Julliard grad concert pianist, so heard *tons* of live music at home and in concert halls growing up, none of it taught me what I needed to know to make my system perform at it's best.
I know better than most what a good vs. bad piano reproduction is like, which is why I own MartinLogan Monoliths, as they are (so far) the only speakers to get close. But it took more than a decade of tuning my system to make them sound significantly better thanks to the increase in my knowledge about psychoacoustics, sound reproduction an audio technology and then putting that to work in my system. And it's still not ideal.

Jon, you are referring to setting up your own system. For that I agree. I am talking about judging a system. The background of this thread was, who is better suited to judge if say, your full range monolith can reproduce a piano better than a Logan hybrid or a Wilson? The Harman test taker or the live concert goer?

bonzo, I believe a well trained listener (harman test taker) will able to better characterize the strengths and weaknesses of non-live reproduction systems. I have plenty of musician friends who can't tell their audio setups are incredibly flawed and are amazed at the changes once I tweak them. When asked if they heard the problems, most say it just sounds so different than live that they don't know if that's as good as it gets or if a change would improve things.

A frequent live concert goer can tell you 'this is not a good as live', but can't necessarily tell you why. Now, they can say system A is better than B, but that just characterizes their preference, not necessarily which is the more accurate system.

So, to answer your question specifically, I beleive trained listeners that have also heard enough live piano can better identify whether the ML or a Wilson is more accurate reproducing that instrument. A trained listener that has never heard a piano would likely not render a valid verdict if all they got to hear was piano music

So bottom-line, for me, it takes both skills to be able to reliably pick the better performing rig.

Jon, before I started this thread I had posted this conclusion on the WBF thread, exactly what you are saying:

"Btw, in defence of what Amir was saying, I have been to the places of those who have set up MCH systems with Datasat dirac auro 3d. They never said a word about music, just about frequency response and bass control. The music in their rooms was among the best that I have heard, though they could care less and did not even pretend to be a judge of music, but these are complimentary skills and one needs to cross both"

Training is exactly what happens when one either works in a stereo store, or has the means to buy and try speakers on a regular basis. Speakers are just like the variable EQ in the Harman training, except they also introduce phase, resonance, impedence dips, and other colorations. I guess I'm suggesting you learn faster by owning multiple speakers

^^ What I found helped me learn the fastest was the combination of a measuring system and a speaker processor. Seeing and hearing the changes to phase, delay, EQ and gains while setting up active multi-way speakers in a multichannel setup. Faster and cheaper than swapping speakers ;-)

JonFo said:

^^ What I found helped me learn the fastest was the combination of a measuring system and a speaker processor. Seeing and hearing the changes to phase, delay, EQ and gains while setting up active multi-way speakers in a multichannel setup. Faster and cheaper than swapping speakers ;-)

Click to expand...

+1 million

How many of you have gone through the Phillips Golden ears challenge?
Pretty easy?

https://www.goldenears.philips.com/en/challenge.html#