Only One Problem

A few years ago, I read an interesting article about how Dunkin’ Donuts intended to update its marketing plan to target Starbucks customers, based on a very simple idea: offer the same quality of coffee, but more quickly and at a lower price. There was only one problem. These weren’t the reasons that Starbucks customers were buying coffee from Starbucks. They didn’t want it cheaper or more quickly.

What they did want was the Starbucks experience—the club chairs, the subdued lighting, the fancy woodwork, the ridiculously overpriced accessory products, and whatever else they’re seeking. For this, they’re willing to wait (part of the experience) and pay more (another part of the experience).

Although it could be argued that they would appreciate the coffee being less expensive, it’s been proven over and over that there is usually a “right price” associated with a brand experience, and if the price is either too high or too low, the brand will lose credibility.

So what does all of this mean in terms of audio and the Subjectivists versus Objectivists? For one thing, different people perceive things differently, period. What’s important to some is not important to others, and visa versa.

For some, a slightly lower noise floor in a mic is not worth either the extra cost or the resulting lack of perceived resolution, while for others, it might be just the ticket for their application. Thus there can be no consensus on whether or not a lower noise floor is always “better.”

One thing I firmly believe is that both approaches are important for the improvement of audio (or anything else that is part of someone’s experience).

The Accidental Designer

Sure, there are stories where accidental discoveries made improvements in design. For instance, the story of the German broadcast engineer in the late 1930s that inadvertently left a high-frequency oscillator “on” while recording an orchestra.

The result? For the first time, there was playback fidelity beyond 10 kHz. This accidental discovery lead to the implementation of an AC bias for analog tape recorders, and it also pushed the envelope of what was possible with this type of system.

However, despite the muddled beginnings of AC bias, a scientific approach was required to produce repeatable, reliable and predictable results. The required circuitry had to be thoroughly understood by analog design engineers, and the right frequency and right amplitude had to be identified.

Then the right combination of these factors for each different tape formulation had to be developed in order to realize the full potential of the bias signal. It took until the 1950s before this was well understood, resulting in improvement of both subjective and objective experiences for the listeners of tape recordings.

One real problem with measuring various changes in audio quality and attempting to both attribute them to specific causes and simultaneously predict how they will be perceived is that – in the first place – we often don’t know exactly what to measure. Of course, we know the basics such as amplitude response versus frequency, phase response, distortion in its various forms and the like.

But it’s exceedingly difficult to get detailed measurements with real source material in place of standard testing signals. (Meyer Sound) SIM and (Rational Acoustics) Smaart are measurement tools in this direction, and they’ve greatly benefited sound reinforcement.

At the same time, there is no solid standard for transient response measurements and the resulting perceived effects. Several manufacturers claim that by extending frequency response of a system well past the “audible” limit (say, to 50 kHz) and maintaining phase accuracy through that range, that transient response and distortion will be improved in the audible band.

But even so, is this necessarily the way to predict that the system will sound good? Perhaps it could be argued that all other things being equal between two systems, the one with the lower distortion will “sound better.”

But then again, an interesting experiment done long ago by Bell Labs resulted in the conclusion that for a limited-bandwidth system, the one with more distortion was perceived as sounding “better.”