Please don't lump Phillips in with Sony; they aren't at all the same. Sony has been a major player in trying to drive down recording quality standards via lossy compression algorithms (in addition to having abysmal quality control in their own electronic products), whereas Phillips has been one of the few big-league defenders of audio quality. I will grant that recently Sony has seen fit to promote SACD, which is excellent but the jury is still out on the fate of this format. It could well be another Beta.
Re Stereophile, I can't stand their marketing people but I still will support them as one of the few audio publications devoted to the high end and to improvement in audio standards. And I disagree strongly with the above statement that measurements don't matter-- Some measurements don't, others definitely do. The challenge is trying to find measurements which correlate with what you hear and are thus useful. Please don't condemn measurement as useless simply because mankind hasn't been able to measure everything yet. That is every bit as ignorant as stating that medicine is useless because we don't yet know how to cure cancer 100% of the time. And Stereophile has been the only mag that is not only willing to perform measurements, but more importantly, is trying on a continuing basis to figure out which measurements are actually useful. This has been the most helpful in the loudspeaker arena, where the biggest problems still exist. Measurements of the step response and spectral decay of a speaker are tremendously useful, because they directly address an issue of tremendous importance, that is, time-domain behavior. And yes, they very convincingly correlate with what you can hear. In addition, even the impedance and phase plots of a loudspeaker are useful indirectly as an indicator of how well the crossover has been refined, cabinet and port resonances, etc. And I am sure that twenty years from now, those efforts will pay off in even better measurements. Just because we're not there yet is no reason to stop trying.
Re Stereophile, I can't stand their marketing people but I still will support them as one of the few audio publications devoted to the high end and to improvement in audio standards. And I disagree strongly with the above statement that measurements don't matter-- Some measurements don't, others definitely do. The challenge is trying to find measurements which correlate with what you hear and are thus useful. Please don't condemn measurement as useless simply because mankind hasn't been able to measure everything yet. That is every bit as ignorant as stating that medicine is useless because we don't yet know how to cure cancer 100% of the time. And Stereophile has been the only mag that is not only willing to perform measurements, but more importantly, is trying on a continuing basis to figure out which measurements are actually useful. This has been the most helpful in the loudspeaker arena, where the biggest problems still exist. Measurements of the step response and spectral decay of a speaker are tremendously useful, because they directly address an issue of tremendous importance, that is, time-domain behavior. And yes, they very convincingly correlate with what you can hear. In addition, even the impedance and phase plots of a loudspeaker are useful indirectly as an indicator of how well the crossover has been refined, cabinet and port resonances, etc. And I am sure that twenty years from now, those efforts will pay off in even better measurements. Just because we're not there yet is no reason to stop trying.