Oh completely. Nobody should take my word for it that a concert grand sounds magical and a digital piano sounds like a digital piano. I have a digital piano in my living room only because my ex-wife has custody of my upright.
I have not presented one shred of credible evidence on piano sound. Neither have you. But I am not claiming a mystical ability to make silk purses out of sows ears by some magical approach that came to me one night.
I have not presented one shred of credible evidence on piano sound. Neither have you. But I am not claiming a mystical ability to make silk purses out of sows ears by some magical approach that came to me one night.
Hmmm ... let's take this apart, phrase by phrase:
"claiming a mystical ability": Certainly not mystical, I'm using sensible, engineering type approaches - which anyone else can duplicate. What's different in me is that I persevere - I know what I'm after, so I keep plodding at it - and this has proven to be highly effective.
"silk purses": No, just 'correct' sound - too many people are used to flawed sound, they expect the latter, their expectations don't rise beyond that. However, exposure to the "good stuff" opens the eyes, you don't see things the same from then on.
"sows ears": Surprisingly, even very ordinary electronics is capable of producing 'correct' sound,
, but usually is severely handicapped by all sorts of cheap and nasty, cost-cutting implementation decisions. Sort out or bypass the latter, and you experience a little bit of 'silk' ..."magical approach": See ""claiming a mystical ability" ...
"that came to me one night": One day actually - I'm one of those funny people who get annoyed when something that they're using is not quite right, to them, and want to fiddle with it, to make it better. I did that a few times, and what I was dealing with kept getting better - ho, ho, ho, I'm on a roll here, says me to myself. Not being smart like some here and stopping at a certain point
, I kept on doing it, just for the hell of it - and "good sound" fell out of the beast, landing in my lap.Guess I should have pretended that it never happened, so I could be nice and normal, like everyone else ...
Of course, it may, actually be significant that a few people here understand what I'm going on about ...
No, you're not Frank. We already saw from your appreciation of modern colour printing techniques that you're incapable of following a simple list of instructions. You like to tweak the settings.
You're a dyed-in-the-wool subjectivist masquerading as an objectivist whenever somebody puts you on the spot, a sheep in wolf's clothing. A kind of glib audio-engineering 5th. columnist. You'd probably write viruses if you had the wit.
We went from an Aldi TV to "modern colour printing techniques"? - not bad going, I have to say,
.Actually, I love instructions - that's why I spent the major part of my working life creating sets of instructions, called programs,
. And, I get really, really bugged by poor sets of instructions - think Microsoft here, 
- I am a perfectionist, so when the instructions don't produce a result I'm comfortable with, that I think could do better - well, then, I do tweak the settings; the result is everything ...And how do you know I haven't,
?The objectivists have part of the answer, as do the subjectivists - they should all get together, have a big
, and everyone will live happily ever after ...
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And how do you know I haven't,
You should be careful what you say, somebody might believe you.
Don't worry, I've always been a goody two shoes - my interest in the computing world has been in creating "correct" software - zero bugs IOW. Betrand Meyer, the man behind the Eiffel programming language, has been an inspirational figure for me - read one of his books to get a sense of where I'm coming from ..
,
And how do you know I haven't,
So clearly you are not writing software seriously or you would have a specification to work from and test cases that is it measured against. Either that or people will get really peeved when the software doesn't meet spec despite you being 'comfortable' with it.
Bill, those days are well gone for me ... and you obviously have little experience of the computer industry. Most software is written in an uncontrolled fashion, because the sheer complexity of firstly specifying exactly what is needed, and secondly confirming that it indeed is correct overwhelms the situation - every time. Almost no software is written "properly", because the cost of doing that would be astronomical, and it would take years to happen - the term "engineering" should be used extremely lightly in IT, the industry has been faking it for decades now, and mostly gets away with it ... .
Good programmers are good, because they have an instinct, a natural talent for getting programs working well enough to be usable quickly - there is an Art of Programming, just like in Electronics,.
.Good programmers are good, because they have an instinct, a natural talent for getting programs working well enough to be usable quickly - there is an Art of Programming, just like in Electronics,
.Maybe the people promoting these myths should back them up with facts...that's the scientific way... doing a bit of basic research into the subject is a good start.
Your comments says much....
Nope, not really. A theory is a theory is a theory... it may or may not make a "claim" as such... what do you mean by "claim"!?
The title of the thread is "funniest snake oil theories"... THEORIES... not funniest snake oil claims, but THEORIES!
What does "falsifiable" have to do with anything? Just because something is not falsifiable today does not mean that it will not be falsifiable in the future. You can try to falsify a theory... that's lovely... but that doesn't mean that a theory is not a theory simply because it isn't falsifiable. And even if a theory is falsified, millions of so called "experts" will simply refuse to believe it and carry on regardless.
So what's the point in trying to falsify theories when the "experts" are all too often too cowardly to face up to the fact that their theory, that they are infatuated with, is a dead duck and deserves to be buried!?
"Experts" at university sell plenty of crap! It pays the mortgage and it keeps the wife, and the politicians, happy.
The main thrust of this website seems to be to impede progress and to continue to run around in circles for a long, long time!
No, I'm not going to get into an argument about theory versus hypothesis versus some other semantics. I've got better things to do, like make my dinner!
And this says so MUCH more.....
Bill, those days are well gone for me ... and you obviously have little experience of the computer industry. Most software is written in an uncontrolled fashion, because the sheer complexity of firstly specifying exactly what is needed, and secondly confirming that it indeed is correct overwhelms the situation - every time. Almost no software is written "properly", because the cost of doing that would be astronomical, and it would take years to happen - the term "engineering" should be used extremely lightly in IT, the industry has been faking it for decades now, and mostly gets away with it ...
Good programmers are good, because they have an instinct, a natural talent for getting programs working well enough to be usable quickly - there is an Art of Programming, just like in Electronics,
Any programmer who thought it was an Art would be straight out my team and preferably out the company. A programmer who cannot follow the process and thinks only they know the secret is of no use in a team.
Ahhh, a good programmer will feed the boss what he requires, but can still produce competent programs - luckily there are enough around of such people, they're the backbone of successful development projects. There have been appalling disasters, costing staggering amounts of money, which have ended in total failure - the entire effort is thrown in the rubbish bin ... full of processes, methodologies, training regimes, the whole shebang - but insufficient competent people ... kills a computing project every time ...
The killer problem in software development is complexity, of the job to be done, and to this day this has not been solved - it barely is starting to be dealt with in any significant fashion. Luckily, audio doesn't have this problem ...
Yes, anyone can write a Mickey Mouse program, to get something done . And usually quite successfully. The trouble starts when a system requires 100, or a 1,000 or 10,000 Mickey Mouse programs - and they all have to perfectly co-ordinate, every time, all the time - never at cross-purposes. This gets tricky, especially when someone says, test that this combination of individual efforts never, ever gets anything wrong - those with mathematical skills might get a sense of where this is going ...
Yes, anyone can write a Mickey Mouse program, to get something done . And usually quite successfully. The trouble starts when a system requires 100, or a 1,000 or 10,000 Mickey Mouse programs - and they all have to perfectly co-ordinate, every time, all the time - never at cross-purposes. This gets tricky, especially when someone says, test that this combination of individual efforts never, ever gets anything wrong - those with mathematical skills might get a sense of where this is going ...
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Not quite that sophisticated, no. More like Eliza, with a limited palette of canned responses that are strung together at random.
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