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Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

It’s easy to make snide remarks like “yes- I do the opposite of what he says.”  And in some respects I agree, but if you do that, this is just going to be taken down. So I’m asking a serious question. Has ASR actually changed your opinion on anything?  For me, I would say 2 things. I am a conservatory-trained musician and I do trust my ears. But ASR has reminded me to double check my opinions on a piece of gear to make sure I’m not imagining improvements. Not to get into double blind testing, but just to keep in mind that the brain can be fooled and make doubly sure that I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing. The second is power conditioning. I went from an expensive box back to my wiremold and I really don’t think I can hear a difference. I think that now that I understand the engineering behind AC use in an audio component, I am not convinced that power conditioning affects the component output. I think. 
So please resist the urge to pile on. I think this could be a worthwhile discussion if that’s possible anymore. I hope it is. 

chayro

Showing 1 response by tosch

tosch
1 posts
 

Did ASR change my opinions?

It changed my opinion on DACs. There is very little difference. I did some prikitive blind-testing at home and can't hear differences.

I never had the feeling of audible differences between cables and solid-state amplifiers. There are exceptions (TotalDAC and Devialet Class-D sounded strange and ASR measurements afterwards confirm it).

What disturbs me at ASR (mostly the users not Amir only): SINAD as a fetish, not looking at other measurements more. Anything above 90dB is inaudible. Benchmarking on 120dB or more is theoretical. Even the low performance of 60dB of record players is irrelevant for sound differences.


I also differ from ASR's view on room acoustics and loudspeakers. There are big differences in data and perceptions, where ASR insists that research suggests, that people don't care. Also I agree with Magico, that resonances and diffraction need to be minimized. More focus should go there, to me it's very audible.

Loudspeaker measurements on Klippel is an important source. It should be mandatory for high end speakers, because in demo rooms one can't discern well the room from the speaker and they sound different at home. Why don't Magico and Wilson disclose their data?

 

I prefer ASR over the always positive reviews of Guttenberg, absolute sound, Stereophile. 

And finally: ASR gets facts back in HiFi, which was lost for more than 25 years. The ears are very bad sensors compared to the eyes and other senses, it's the brain which extracts the sound using imagination and other senses. That's why it can be easily fooled. Everybody can see differences between TV screens side by side, audio is harder.

 

 

 

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