I respectfully disagreeFabienTDR wrote:Indeed. This anecdote just impressed me a lot, given the results he achieved. I grabbed this over at GS, where this quote definitely seemed to trouble several high end "fans". They definitely expected more crystals, meditation and golden ear superpowers being involved.sascha wrote:That might be ok considering the type of gear he designs, as most of this stuff can be measured objectively and doesn't need any perceptive or empirical approach. But can you imagine him doing a reverb this way? I can't.FabienTDR wrote:This musical knowledge becomes a problematic distraction in engineering. I remember reading an interview with Daniel Weiss (maker of very high quality digital processors), stating that he doesn't value listening tests during product design! He simply doesn't allow his ears to decide.
It depends on what kind of dsp you are creating. Sometimes you need to understand what you are doing and what the recording engineer needs, it is not just a matter of magnitude /phase/ harmonic dist/ time constants, but a relationship between a lot of variables. Go figure if rupert was deaf.
Problem is if you need to create a surgical tool or a musical one. The reverberation example is good: you could create a perfect clone of a plate or a true space and maybe the math alone is helpful, or a new musical one and you need proper listening skills.
I think today you need to be "complete" in order to understand complex processes and to be competitive in a market where the team size is pretty small, unless you want to stick on a specific kind only because the business allows that
My listening skills helped a lot in the past, this is my specific case and experience. Today I could judge an eq just looking to a bode diagram, but just because I know what kind of phase/magnitude is required for a specific task, and in most of cases I'm still wrong (everything is good on the math side but the filter just doesn't sound as much good as expected)