Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

Has ASR actually changed your opinion on anything?

There are hundreds of posts there. This is like asking if the New York Times changed my opinion about anything.

He has measured many things and explained many things. What he infers from these facts sometimes hits and sometimes misses, for me.

Claims here that he is a "clown" or some kind of Svengali just betray dogmatism and intolerance. He is a serious person with a point of view. Deal with it.

@chayro "I think that Amir, in a round about way, reminds us of how powerful our biases are."

This is true. The notion that subjective listening is not without serious problems is something that ASR may take too self-righteously, but it is part of science to realize that careful analysis requires self-scrutiny and scrutiny of others "tastes." Not baseless suspicion but a critical attitude.

@jasonbourne71 We agree that there is something of value in the enormous amount of work that Amir has put into his site.

@charles1dad I have found many, many things of value there. Descriptions of products, tests, measurements, photos, and other information.Some have decided that because they don’t agree with his product conclusions or his disposition toward measurement and against listening tests (as too subjective) there is nothing at all there. This is the kind of partisanship that drives people apart and -- perhaps more important -- keeps us from learning from the valuable parts of what others turn up.

FYI, I posted my review of the Ascend speakers at ASR and some dismissed it because there were no measurements. Very discriminatory against my approach. But others on the site jumped in to defend me, even though it was not measurement based. So, there are a variety of people at ASR, I found.

Amazing to see this thread still going.

If Amir is worthless or a charlatan as some here claim, why are you bothering to read and post about him? Are you trying to protect people from him? Are you St. George slaying the dragon? Or, perhaps you have too much time on your hands and this is the best you can come up with for amusement?

My voice would be completely lost on the Internet if people didn't see value in my work and didn't talk about it.  And continue to support the activity by sending me huge volume of audio gear to test. 

Pretty much nails it. I'm not an active participant on ASR, but for pete's sake, the notion they are all zealots following a cult leader...come on. This is not the 118th Congress!

+1 @reg19

However, after studying electronics engineering for 4 years and later working in a ‘measurements and calculations are everything’ world for a few decades, I still feel that they are necessary but not sufficient. ASR asks to prove it. As a hobbyist who likes to listen to music to relax, I’m not interested in the effort.

Well said -- and I agree. Necessary but not sufficient.

I can make out differences between *certain* speaker cables though they measure identically (with our current measurement set), for example. 

The Achilles' heel of their approach; well said.

There are several possibilities which might be responsible for identically-measuring things sounding differently:

(a) User error (lack of careful testing, distraction, bias, etc.)

(b) Inadequate measurement metric (we don't yet have measurements for the experiences heard). Umami was tasted before it was measured and classified. People tasting umami didn't have subjective bias; they had an experience for which there was not yet a scientific description or analysis. Happens all the time.

If someone tells me I’ve said something "fallacious," I don’t take that as a put down. They are doing me a service -- helping direct me to what is false. Because I prefer not to believe or claim false things. @amir_asr then goes to explain why it is fallacious. Those who interpret this as a personal attack just prove Amir’s point that some here are not interested in facts. (You don't agree with his argument that it's fallacious? Fine. Then rebut him. But don't take it personally.)

The test of this would be to point out to Amir that he has made a mistake and see if he takes it personally or if he tries to verify it or rebut it -- with facts. Dispassion is the mark of science. If one cannot live up to that virtue, then they are not being scientific.

We’re all after audio quality, right?

Audio quality costs money. Any money one is saved by successful tests and measurements, and borne out in listening, is money which can be directed to the true weak links rather than the false weak links.

That’s how Amir advances the audiophile project.

@texbychoice

Well, since the posts in questions have apparently been deleted, I cannot go back and show you that there was a claim at issue.

I would not have agreed with the use of the word "fallacious" if a mere preference was at stake. Not because that's necessarily insulting, but because it's a category mistake.

If I say red is my favorite color, and someone says that's fallacious, either I'm wrong about my own preferences (which is impossible) or what that person has said is nonsense -- a category mistake. That's why I thought that a factual claim was at issue.
 

I can't believe this is still going on.

Thank you. When I was in law school, we asked our constitutional law professor for an exam review.

Didn’t know this was an exam. 

Didn’t know we were restricted about how to answer.

Thank goodness for hall monitors.

+1 @prof

If you are going to slag someone publicly, don’t complain if they show up to set the record straight.

Note too that he's taking this abuse. He's not calling the mommy-moderator to get their comments deleted, as has happened to some of us. Agree or disagree with the guy, he wears big-boy pants. 

@bato65

In audio, we are still measuring rudimentary stuff.

A key point. Because we don’t fully understand the brain, let alone the complex mechanisms of perception -- and then interpretation of all that, and (still further) the language we use to describe the interpretations -- measurement is neither complete nor foolproof. This does NOT say it does not help. But it has its limits.

@ossicle2brain -- +1 Calling someone a troll is a kind of trolling, especially when the person in question is coming back with replies again and again. You’d expect more from an educated adult, but keyboards are too easy to use these days.

@mahghister -- you post an extraordinarily long article, 4 times and you’re wondering about no replies? Perhaps you see that this is a medium built for brevity, not long briefs. You write, "You dont get my points..." -- my guess is that people mostly skip your posts because they're too long. If you cannot control this, you're going to get ignored. Free advice, not meant as a personal attack, Sir.

@ghasley Why is this a thing, indeed? Probably because we like binary choices and the "objectivist OR subjectivist" dilemma has speared people. Something Mahgister gets at nicely (if obtusely) in his emphasis on the room-listener aspect of psycho-acoustics.

@decooney

Again, the majority here at Audiogon do not need a meter or graph to know what sounds good. Listen, then measure.

There’s a lot of confidence expressed here in listening skills, that’s true. Too often, these skills are reported out without much in the way of detail about rooms, preferences, etc. So, there’s a lot of miscommunication here.
My prefer method is listen-measure-listen-measure-listen. It’s a long and iterative process. And I’m an amateur; I don’t measure gear, just room acoustics. But by alternating between those, I have learned to better correlate what the SPL or Impulse or RT60 graph means in sensory results for my space and how to aim for certain measurements which then are tested, again, by listening.

@piaudiol

Some people hear.
Some people listen.
Some people measure.
Some people know the difference.

Is this supposed to be profound? Some people do multiple things.
As @amir_asr pointed out, "That is not what we do with the tool. The tool gives you data. A human interprets it against psychoacoustics research which is based on listening."
And of course, after that, the end consumer gets to be a king and pronounce whether it’s good-for-them or not.
So what the eff is the problem here?

A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

You say this to me till the first day...

English is not my first language ...

Perhaps you must SPOKE and DISCUSS the truth and depth of the psycho-acoustic points and articles i submitted , instead of repeating that my posts are too long for 2 years now... No more longer than Amir posts here by the way...

And remind this, i am not here to win a popularity contest about my posts..

@mahgister YOU were the one complaining that you posted something 4 times and didn't get a response. You seemed confused as to why you seem to be lecturing in a void. (And who cares what your first language is? The content goes on and on and on. I can write more briefly in non-native languages. It's not hard.) Clearly, you're too sensitive for constructive criticism. Forget it. I will just scroll past your 1000 word posts.