@cleeds No, I haven't, but have helped run human subjects in experiments, so I hear you! Achieving accuracy with human subjects is very challenging.
Some thoughts on ASR and the reviews
I’ve briefly taken a look at some online reviews for budget Tekton speakers from ASR and Youtube. Both are based on Klippel quasi-anechoic measurements to achieve "in-room" simulations.
As an amateur speaker designer, and lover of graphs and data I have some thoughts. I mostly hope this helps the entire A’gon community get a little more perspective into how a speaker builder would think about the data.
Of course, I’ve only skimmed the data I’ve seen, I’m no expert, and have no eyes or ears on actual Tekton speakers. Please take this as purely an academic exercise based on limited and incomplete knowledge.
1. Speaker pricing.
One ASR review spends an amazing amount of time and effort analyzing the ~$800 US Tekton M-Lore. That price compares very favorably with a full Seas A26 kit from Madisound, around $1,700. I mean, not sure these inexpensive speakers deserve quite the nit-picking done here.
2. Measuring mid-woofers is hard.
The standard practice for analyzing speakers is called "quasi-anechoic." That is, we pretend to do so in a room free of reflections or boundaries. You do this with very close measurements (within 1/2") of the components, blended together. There are a couple of ways this can be incomplete though.
a - Midwoofers measure much worse this way than in a truly anechoic room. The 7" Scanspeak Revelators are good examples of this. The close mic response is deceptively bad but the 1m in-room measurements smooth out a lot of problems. If you took the close-mic measurements (as seen in the spec sheet) as correct you’d make the wrong crossover.
b - Baffle step - As popularized and researched by the late, great Jeff Bagby, the effects of the baffle on the output need to be included in any whole speaker/room simulation, which of course also means the speaker should have this built in when it is not a near-wall speaker. I don’t know enough about the Klippel simulation, but if this is not included you’ll get a bass-lite expereinced compared to real life. The effects of baffle compensation is to have more bass, but an overall lower sensitivity rating.
For both of those reasons, an actual in-room measurement is critical to assessing actual speaker behavior. We may not all have the same room, but this is a great way to see the actual mid-woofer response as well as the effects of any baffle step compensation.
Looking at the quasi anechoic measurements done by ASR and Erin it _seems_ that these speakers are not compensated, which may be OK if close-wall placement is expected.
In either event, you really want to see the actual in-room response, not just the simulated response before passing judgement. If I had to critique based strictly on the measurements and simulations, I’d 100% wonder if a better design wouldn’t be to trade sensitivity for more bass, and the in-room response would tell me that.
3. Crossover point and dispersion
One of the most important choices a speaker designer has is picking the -3 or -6 dB point for the high and low pass filters. A lot of things have to be balanced and traded off, including cost of crossover parts.
Both of the reviews, above, seem to imply a crossover point that is too high for a smooth transition from the woofer to the tweeters. No speaker can avoid rolling off the treble as you go off-axis, but the best at this do so very evenly. This gives the best off-axis performance and offers up great imaging and wide sweet spots. You’d think this was a budget speaker problem, but it is not. Look at reviews for B&W’s D series speakers, and many Focal models as examples of expensive, well received speakers that don’t excel at this.
Speakers which DO typically excel here include Revel and Magico. This is by no means a story that you should buy Revel because B&W sucks, at all. Buy what you like. I’m just pointing out that this limited dispersion problem is not at all unique to Tekton. And in fact many other Tekton speakers don’t suffer this particular set of challenges.
In the case of the M-Lore, the tweeter has really amazingly good dynamic range. If I was the designer I’d definitely want to ask if I could lower the crossover 1 kHz, which would give up a little power handling but improve the off-axis response. One big reason not to is crossover costs. I may have to add more parts to flatten the tweeter response well enough to extend it's useful range. In other words, a higher crossover point may hide tweeter deficiencies. Again, Tekton is NOT alone if they did this calculus.
I’ve probably made a lot of omissions here, but I hope this helps readers think about speaker performance and costs in a more complete manner. The listening tests always matter more than the measurements, so finding reviewers with trustworthy ears is really more important than taste-makers who let the tools, which may not be properly used, judge the experience.
1,166 responses
I have a friend that participated in a formal listening test when Infiniti (I think) introduced a new line of speakers after a period of dormancy. If I remember correctly they used shorts bursts of music in mono over a fairly long period. He commented on both the complexity and the tedium. I think he was the only one who was completely consistent in his preference. He was flown, picked up in a limo and lodging and meals were provided. I dont this he was paid for his participation. |
Why does Topping have so many DACs both in the past and currently? Because they sound different from one another. They are designing different sounding DACs with different designs and parts. But why? To stay relevant in this rapidly changing market where new is better? Or perhaps honestly attempting to make better and better DACs? Whatever the reason, my friends and I have found one of their DACs to be a superior quality one at now ridiculously low price as a discontinued item. No, the D70s is not as good as the Lampizators but is sells for 50X+ less than my Poseidon. It only revealed how excellent it was using a $5000 CD transport. Another inexpensive transport the Shanling ET3 was an inadequate match and there is a large number of satisfied listeners who are very happy with this top loading transport. Audio equipment designers have their own sound preferences. If the equipment owner cares about the sound quality (so many determine purchases based on price, appearance and other factors as well prior to or irrelevant to sound reproduction), they desire to match it. It becomes infinitely more complicated with a system approach with multiple separate components are involved as well as the room acoustics and the ancillary connecting equipment. I have found that even bending the upper fold of my left ear reveals greater air and presence on the left side of my hearing than it's current curvature. Imagine all the permutations of listeners with their different aural physical structures and nervous systems. While measurements can help in determining distortion and other performance aspects of equipment, they are generally inadequate alone to help build an audio system without just one manufacturer designing a specific "sound" preference for a full component line, ASR is a poor example for choosing audio equipment to create a high quality listening experience. It can point to adequacies and inadequacies of a single component, sometimes relative to a few other components. Dismissing entire sectors of equipment (cabling, fuses, anti-vibration devices, etc) negates essential components except for all in one systems (speakers with built in integrated equipment). So many great comments in this forum on hearing. I am a part time musician and recording engineer who has the advantage of also being an "audiophile." My audiophilia is limited (despite my recent funding of end game speakers, amps and DAC/pre-amp). I don't swap equipment often and sell what I don't intend to use again. Without DSP, a critical component is the room acoustics and is still inadequately considered by most audiophiles (I know of many who swap equipment on a quite regular basis). |
I borrowed a Topping D whatever it was with the balanced outs (their top model kinda from a couple of years ago). When you played dense tracks is when it started to fall apart, in comparison to my other dacs...(technics, denafrips...or even the Schiit Yggdrasil). If it is just one boring bird squealing to a single string in a simplistic manner, one may not catch stuff like that about the ASR Topping miracle. These Chifi engineers are fairly sharp though and maybe they’ve learned a thing or two (progressed over time, wouldn’t know until a newer dac is compared).. I would like to see Majidimehr design/build a dac from scratch though... show us all what a genius he is with his unfathomable bachelors degree n all (instead of dumping rudimentary output from a AP kit all day...that a 12 year old could be taught to do).
|
I tested two Schiit Yggdrasils, finding design errors in them. Company disputed that so a third person volunteered his unit. In doing so, he told me he had bought a Topping and it did not sound as good. He gave me the model number and precise tracks he had used for that testing, and the fact that he had used Stax headphones. I own Stax headphones, and said Topping DAC and same music in high-res (what he had used). First thing I had to do was match levels as out of box levels were not the same, invalidating any such listening test. After I did that, the two DACs sounded identical in AB tests. The Topping cost 10% of the Yggdrasils. I was also told that the Yggdrasils needs to warm up. So I left it on for days, measuring it along the way. Its performance never changed. Again, I duplicated his listening tests to the letter, except that I was careful to match levels when he had not done. If you all just learned how to properly test equipment so that only the fidelity is being evaluated, then these arguments would all go away. Instead, you keep doing faulty testing, with all manner of mistakes and biases and arrive at conclusions that are not supported by any science or engineering.
|
A few years ago, Schiit decided to take measurements seriously, put aside their lousy audio measurement and buy an Audio Precision analyzer like I have. In less than a year, they managed to produce superb performance and price as good as Chinese companies. Here is one of many examples, the Schiit Midgard:
As you see, it garnered the highest award from me (the golfing panther). The product like many others was sent to me by the company. They are not alone. Here is JDS Labs doing the same. Of course Benchmark Audio has been there longer than many producing excellent products. As a consumer, you need to celebrate the fact that companies are working hard to produce the most transparent audio products they can without charging you a premium. Not go on some racist tangent that if it is Chinese, it can't be that good or that they must have learned something from others. Topping has been and continues to be the only company that includes in its manuals complete set of measurements. They did this before I started reviewing anything. But this is audio where religion and beliefs dominate more than actual facts. |
I hate the audio hardware business so you are never going to see me get involved in it. I did grew up with electronics as my hobby and put myself through college repairing all manners of electronics from audio to RF radios. DAC design is not hard anyway as the IC companies provide full reference designs. What is hard is the implementation to keep noise down. That, is hard and I tip my hat at likes of Topping, SMSL, Schiit, etc. for having that hands on knowledge (I hired experts for that when I was managing engineering at Sony and others). Check out this review of Mytek Brooklyn Bridge II DAC and Streamer
It got the worst rating from me not just for performance, but for having DAC filter selections that did nothing! Same problem was found by stereophile months earlier in their review and they still had not bothered to fix it! There must have been a shortage of 12 year olds where they work per your statement to run this simple test and find the bug. I imagine, they went through changing the settings in the UI and picked the one that sounded best to them, not realizing that all the time nothing was changing in the unit!!! We are talking about a $5000 unit there. Now compare that to this review of Eversolo DMP-A6 Streamer and balanced DAC: As you see it is a gorgeous looking device with proper form factor, running Android. This is how well it performed:
Now compare its FFT performance on top right to that of Mytek:
You see all that power supply and interference noise in Mytek? This is what happens when there is a shortage of 12 year olds that know how to run Audio Precision! |
@deep_333 That's correct. I dislike nearly all other Topping DACs (I've heard 3 older ones). This unit has been extensively praised by reviewers and owners. This is the one two of my friends use, one is a spendthrift with limited funds and the other a very wealthy audiophile who probably has a dozen DACs he plays with. I especially enjoyed the D70s openness listening to complex acoustic orchestral and opera. No problem with heavy metal that my wife listens to occasionally. I understand you finding some other D model inferior. It could be. I am using a very high end audio system to evaluate it's potential. It will probably be used in my second system for occasional use for CDs and streaming.
|
Here is John Atkinson commenting on objective performance of Topping Pre90: The Pre90 preamplifier's measured performance is simply superb. The fact that that performance can be achieved in such a small chassis and for such a low price suggests that Topping has some serious audio engineering talent in-house.—John Atkinson On another Topping product: The Topping DM7's measured performance is superb, even without taking its affordable price into account.—John Atkinson
|
| Post removed |
"If you all just learned how to properly test equipment so that only the fidelity is being evaluated, then these arguments would all go away. Instead, you keep doing faulty testing, with all manner of mistakes and biases and arrive at conclusions that are not supported by any science or engineering." |
My initial read on the comment paper is that at sufficiently high sampling rates for the FFT, the effect goes away, though the authors are using a windowing Fourier x-form that I am not fully familiar with or the implications of the free gamma parameter that they set to the variance of the initial pulse. There's a rich literature on using accumulation methods in image processing to overcome Fourier uncertainty and one implication might be that it's not so much a nonlinear effect but just stimuli accumulation in our cochlea and the neural systems that process the data. I'll do a bit more digging but it looks increasingly like (a) might be untrue and (b) might also be untrue in my new syllogism. |
Dude (facepalm), the fact that you sat around with headphones comparing that Schiit with something else....no, you have a lot to learn. For starters, I could show you a comparison on a couple of dacs, a good one and a crappy one i have in storage with one of my rigs (NOT HEADPHONES) and it is flipping night and day obvious how one one of them produces a flatass soundfield and the other one doesn’t. You are too stuck in your hole with your headphones and sinad for anything to...., no, I am not going to waste effort bothering to explain anything. I’ll pass a blind comparison 25/25 times or 50/50 times or how many ever flipping times (done it before) in my room (not in your garage) on the test tracks I recorded/will provide. While you chase the dumb didi sinad, I’ll chase the software and dsp instead that’s more meaningful to me. On the same note, I certainly didn’t join this forum to try and flex intellectually all day against senior citizens from other lines of work....like you’ve doing for pages. But, since that is all you seem to wanna do, I’ve hinted here before that I am a business owner. I own a engineering firm (fab/test floors whatever dude), I’m in the business of producing precision electronics and electromechanical components for some entities. We use million dollars of test equipment, ndt, whatever, the likes of which you will never see or hear about in life. There is nothing you could possibly say that doesn’t sound like simpleton sht to me. I am sure you know about certain types of engg disciplines where you would get embarassed/get schooled very quickly. If I start talking to you about high F high V thermal runaway whatever crap black art circuit to you, nobody on this thread including you will have a clue. So, just simmer down with the flex. Do it on your forum instead. Y’know, there are guys on my payroll too (i know your kind) who are these younger engg grunts that would talk just like you, possibly. "How could two Fing circuits measure the same, sound different?! Wait, wait, circuits have a sound?!?!" while some of the phds may at least think amd try to keep their mouths shut. Once upon a time, I used to think that way a bit perhaps...But, i got schooled by some audio overlords and it opened my mind. NO, you will never see anything like that in your EE electives or your goofy lil text book. An older guy like yourself...you should have had opportunities in life to wisen up over time, gather the humility to admit that there is sht that’s hard to explain, I’d think.... but, you certainly havn’t or it is this fake facade you’ve been putting up all day. Either way, I’ll see right through it...I conclude that you have no field experience and it is a waste of time to try and say anything to you Carry on, try and dazzle the Agon senior citizens some more with a few more of your simpleton charts. |
@markwd ”Since I dove in, I have to deep dive! Not definitive, but an interesting data point:” - well done, markwd: after all the prevarication and paltering, you finally found something that allows you to question the 2013 article. I cannot say I fully understand the full substance of it, but I agree it appears to have basis for disagreement the study, and measurement has bought itself some breathing room. - in any case, have you tried diving deep enough on the other debate of what high fidelity actually means? We shouldn’t be selective over diving now…you know, once we have realised we did actually have a dog in the fight, no? : )
In friendship - kevin |
@kevn It's always a journey to savor learning new information. I really haven't a clue why you or the crew here are mildly to ragingly hostile. As I have mentioned previously, I have no investment in these topics. They are interesting, is all, and I have the luxury to treat them as such with no commercial, ego, or other interests. I hold them up like a jar of fireflies and they are tulips of fire against the background nothingness. I am, however, developing a series of micro-theses on how online communities shift over time, like enlarging the Overton window, and how certain media theorists apply framing theory or pumps/valve metaphors to the dynamics that shift and change online sensibilities. It's helpful to see it up close and rough-and-tumble rather than just in theory. (takes an additional note) Best, as always, and in your friendship. |
Kevin and Markwd I know I don't have your knowledge of electronics. I do know how to record something as simple as a piano quartet and make it sound at least as good (usually better) than issued recordings (I've been doing this for over 40 years). I start with a great recording venue, then a simple two mike digital recorder located within 15 feet from the performers, recorded even as low as 16/44 resolution, adding no reverb only music tracks and voila, a mastertape quality recording (it certainly helps when one has all professional touring performers). Most listeners of acoustic music do not get to experience live performances in great venues. It helps train one's ear. I've heard over 400 opera performances and either performed or heard 1000s of choral and orchestral performances. When I evaluate audio equipment, I require multiple types and recordings. There are an infinite number of variables beginning at the recording chain and then the final mastered product. Just using my simple recordings give me a reference for comparison. @deep_333 is incorrect in his analysis of the Topping D70s concerning an inability to reproduce dense, complex music which means either his (assumption of gender) recording(s) or his ancillary equipment are at fault (or he has a defective Topping unit). VERY IMPORTANT-apparently about 1/3 of these units come with inverted polarity. There is a built-in correction on the main menu. Huge difference. It may only effect XLR output though. I didn't test single ended output. |
It’s not the differences in viewpoint at stake here, but the way the argument is engaged - I see all these words games with amir, and you in fact, when faced with quite honest communication. I will not debate what your intentions are, but the comment on the study was the first relevant post you made the entire time, and I suspect you know that. You are clearly not thick, so it appears trollish to keep inserting obtuse points in your every reply just to confound and confuse the discussion. Let’s see where this takes us. In the meantime, do look up the definitions of high fidelity so that it’s not confused with signal fidelity.
In friendship - kevin |
The owner's experience was with Stax headphone and that is what I replicated.
Then go ahead and do that. Be sure to match levels, perform the test blind, and repeat at least 10 times and see if you get at least 9 right. With that kind of differentiation, it should be a walk in the park for you.
Do you also know how to shoot a video of the event? Because that is what we need.
Let's see you dazzle us with some facts rather than claims. When can we expect the above comparison video?
|
trust me fleschler, you know more about these matters than I do - everything sounding profound I posted earlier came from my reading of the article mahgister linked, with what I know of uncertainty principles, and my curiosity over why I often hear things with small changes in my system that cannot be measured. Confirmation bias is just a lazy inconclusive answer, and appears the only aspect of empiricism that pure rationalists acknowledge. I still stand by where high fidelity began and what it means. So your post makes all the sense in the world.
In friendship - kevin |
@kevn I see no such word games at all. I have been completely honest and my distilling down the discussion to the syllogism-like structure was an attempt to put you at ease since you like to write exceedingly long about issues like your distinction amongst fidelities and seemed ego-driven to dominate an animated and uncertain topic. You were also misunderstanding my points and I'm guessing I was some of yours. My points were from the beginning exactly what ended up in the clarifying syllogism, though they may not have been sufficiently refined at that early stage. They were exceedingly relevant it turns out: there was no clear way to engineer a product to take advantage of the hypothesized phenomena; there was no established evidence that listening can exceed measurements for engineered audio products; there might be some additional insights in certain bodies of scientific literature but remains an undiscovered country; etc. That's the gist: we don't know what is true until we discover it. We apply epistemic humility (sorry, I'm a champion of that phrase in this charged world). We sort through possibilities. I pretty much always operate in good faith and don't express certitude when it isn't warranted (attach your mildly uncomplimentary adjectives as you want...in good faith, I suspect you think! 🤣). I still say (a) might be untrue...the future is unknown. In the end, though, here's what we have: Amir's measurements are currently effective for determining the relative quality of sound reproduction across a range of audio devices. The mysterious "deepenings" that were ginned up out of a few preliminary scientific findings didn't dethrone the value of ASR reviews. Those reviews continue to be high quality and valuable to me and to a large population of online readers. |
@markwd ”That's the gist: we don't know what is true until we discover it.” - if you study it, you will find that discovery begins with empiricism, our experiences of life that begin with a hunch, not measurements, since one hasn’t a clue what to measure before it’s discovered. ; )
In friendship - kevin |
@kevn Sure! That's cool... I will contemplate! |
Did I mention that this was getting boring? All the best, |
@nonoise Wow, you put a lot of effort into that! |
@markwd Not really. |
As I mentioned earlier, I am a core engineer who got schooled by a few Japanese audio overlords. I sat at one of their facilities once and listened to a few iterations of some circuits. Guy varies the signal path distance... and the sound changes. A component he deems more thermally resilient vs non-resilient (external solution)...the sound changes . He had no engg explanation as to WHY himself. (Why Flippin why?).... But, he just knows...if I do this, it sounds like this or that, etc....years and years of accumulated empirical information by listening (in-house secrets, bizarre stuff) with no engg explanation. My closed mind opened a bit at that point. Couple that with the fact that the human is a very malleable/adaptive creature... There are DEAF musicians...clinically deaf (can’t hear nada) that play instruments. Can Majidimehr measure diddly on such a malleable creature? NO Let us look at a less extreme case. I have been tied to a violin for 40+ years. I own a few different violins. I could record a progression on 2 different violins I own. You play it back and I will pick out which violin is which without blinking. Would Majidimehr be able to do so? No, he won’t, they will sound the same to him. Deep went through a certain kind of adaptation with the sound of that instrument while Majid got stuck in a hole. They would all sound the same to him. His foolish self would want a blind test because he became the expert of my instrument after 1 hour of listening training he went through online on Harman’s website apparently. He became the expert of me in 1 hour that took me 40 freaking years. Freaking amazing, ain’t it? |
So your eyes were involved in that experience. It makes sense, right? That the longer distance would make things worse.
You don't know that the sound changed and neither does he or he would show it to you on an audio analyzer or scope.
Why indeed. Both of you perceived a change. No question there. The question is whether the output of that device changed or not. This is what we are interested in. After all, we don't listen to music through you two's brains. The explanation is that our hearing is dynamic and bi-directional. Your brain decides from moment to moment how much it cares about detail in the music. Most of the time, it has to throw away 99.999% of what it is hearing as recording everything would take infinite storage. But ask your brain to analyze things and it will then go into a different mode and listen much more carefully. When it does, you all of a sudden hear more air. More detail. The soundstage opens up. All of these things happen. But they happen with nothing changes in your system! You changed. Once you hear that change, now bias sets in. You listen to the "before" system and the magic is gone. You listen to "after" system, it comes back. What is incredible is that even full knowledge of this effect won't make you immune to it. It is so part of being human that it is just going to happen. This is why we test blind. That way, you don't know if a change has occurred or not due to randomness of selection. When I first started to test Marantz AV products, performance was worse than Denon. I asked the company why that is. They said they have a guy just like what you are describing making changes and a Golden ear guy makes decisions on what sounds best. I told them that process only works if the testing is done blind and repeated. Fast forward two years and Marantz products now have excellent performance with none of that degradation through the methods you describe. We (science) are not stupid. Doing blind tests is hard. But we have to do it to eliminate not only bias, but above elasticity of human perception. A great example of this: one of the ex-stereophile editors (now part of Absolute Sound) lives near us and he was kind enough to invite our local audiophile group to go to his house and listen to his system. While there, he had a new amplifier for review. Room was too small so we split up into two groups. First group went it and heard comparisons of his everyday amp against the amplifier under review. They come back and without saying anything, our group goes in. We are presented with different music samples played by both amps. At the end, he asked which amplifier sounded better. Majority (not including me), voted that one was. We come back as a group to meet up with the first group. As soon as we got there they asked us which amp our group said was better. Guess what? We had selected the exact opposite of what they had! Jaws fell on the floor in both groups. Both were so convinced they were right. The reviewer then said he knew why that happened. He said that he played the amps in opposite order for each group! In other words, merely changing which amp went first vs second, determined the outcome. Not the fidelity difference! He was partially right. As I mentioned above, it is often that the second sample sounds better due to us paying closer attention although this doesn't have to be this way. I didn't vote as I mentioned above because there was no way to make a proper comparison. And at any rate, both sounded similar anyway. While what you experienced makes lay sense, and you were impressed by an authority that you thought knew more than you, what I am explaining likely does not. But it is a proven fact not only in audio but in many other fields where blind testing is performed. So I am asking a lot. I am asking you to put aside your intuition and limited experience and trust the science. You do that to believe earth is round even though every bone in your body says otherwise. No way do you want to believe that time changes with speed yet we have GPS satellites that are calibrated for this based on Einstein's theory of special relativity. You have to trust the science in audio much like you do in other areas. Otherwise you live in a sea of confusing opinions about audio. These are things I have explained in my video tutorials:
I have address this before. Those two recordings could be shown trivially to measure differently. Here, you all are claiming differences that you say are not measurable so best not to mix examples. Even here, we would need evidence of y you doing this reliably. I show how I can tell extremely small impairments in the second video above. This is done through record of double blind test. Countless audiophiles failed that test. Bottom line is this: there is not a single professional society that would accept the results of any non-blind/uncontrolled testing as you say you have done. You claim superiority to the science but lack any evidence to prove it. Only self-appraisals under an alias in a forum. That, doesn't amount to anything. |
Absolutely not....I sat in front of a couple of TAD monitors while a couple of snickering Japanese guys tweaked away behind me...All i did was time stamp what changed at what time....must be rough...being you hanging on to a sinad chart for dear life as your ship sinks. |
Ah, an attempt at blind testing that was left out of your original story. Sad that you didn't know that the test needs to be repeated. TAD by the way has sent me equipment for review, courtesy of their CEO contacting me. Here is my review of their TAD Evolution 2 Speaker: It did "OK."
Conclusions |
@amir_asr +1 For your 6-12-24 11:45 PM post. Audiophiles tend to have an aversion to blind tests - "why should I do that? I listen with my ears, not my eyes". |
jasonbourne71, an ASR minion, chimes in with typical ASR minion snark. deep_333 stated changes were/were not made that he could not see. Being able to see the TAD speakers is irrelevant to evaluating whether changes behind the curtain not visible made any audible difference. The ASR minions always find fault with any test, knowledge, experience, or enjoyment of audio that does not fit the ASR mold. Anybody involved in the audio hobby in recent years very likely is well aware of ASR. Measurements have their place. However, there is no reason for the Audiogon Forum to provide free advertising space so Amir can cut and paste his charts, graphs and promotion of said material ad nauseum. Providing links is more than sufficient for ANY person leaving a post. |
I have followed this thread with much interest. For the record I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion as @audition__audio . Amir has conducted himself with honesty, clarity, and class in the face of repeated ad hominem attacks. This thread captures the essence of the Objective vs. Subjective audio debate better than anything I've seen. Only in a forum such as this, where most of the participants are anonymous, can you really get to the core of the debate. The most vociferous posters act like their religious beliefs are being questioned. When they can't argue the facts they resort to insults and name calling. Everything I have seen from ASR has consistently shown that Amir is offering information that he can back up with data, facts, and measurements. To quote one of my favorite actors, "You can't handle the truth!" I'm curious to know if people who have contempt for Amir's scientific approach to audio disregard the science and trust their own personal judgement on how to treat an illness or disease they may have. Do they think that double blind drug testing is a farce? Do they take "natural" remedies that they feel good about and forsake the pharmaceutical industry? Do they think all science is bogus or do their beliefs just apply to the audio industry? Lastly, it's interesting that several posters refer to themselves as engineers but disregard any scientific approach to audio. I have met several engineers over the years who held contempt for scientific empriical evidence even though their own training was based on that discipline. The most famous example of this is Steve Jobs. He died of a curable disease because he thought that he knew more than the medical science establishment. Fortunately our audio hobby is not life or death but I hope that the anti-science folks don't carry that bias into more important parts of their lives. |
I am pretty sure nobody in this thread "disregard any scientific approach to audio" and all agree that measurements are only a part of evaluation of audio equipment. It is being pointed out that science falls short in full explanation of human perception of sound. You must have missed it. Pancreas cancer is "curable disease", just like common cold right? Really? |
And it that quick moment of ASR advertising, captain feral copied and pasted a measurement on some TAD floorstander, it appears... Funny thing is...i was sitting in a building that belonged to a rival of pioneer/tad ( Pioneer, Yamaha, Technics, Den/Marantz..etc they are all considered to be fierce rivals over there). The monitors just happened to an older tad pro kit that this guy may have never heard of.... It was interesting...their "sound master" (poor translation indeed) picked 2 tracks of the 7 or 8 recorded tracks i had. He wouldn’t tell me why he picked those specific tracks (guy played all kinds of instruments). They were gracious enough though to let me use my own tracks that i’d recorded on my own instrument. They looped it and i just took notes with time stamps for a couple of hours. The guys had a whole work bench behind a curtain with all kinds of circuits (legacy, new sht whatever). Later on, they were explaining to me what correlated to changes made on their end (with their timestamps) against the notes i took down at different timestamps (with no visual)...plenty enough repeats in there.. Technics, Yamaha, etc would keep guys on their top end payroll (high job security n all) for decades if it was all baloney according to the clown and his minions with a AP kit....right? mmhmm...yep. And yes, he wants a video (as if i owe him something)...i would want his hiney planted in my house...so i can telecast this clown to the world, show the difference in "listening skills"/ ability to pass blind tests (whoop di doo), etc between 1 hobbyist musician, 2 other pro musicians and 1 guy with genetically challenged ears who took a listening test on harman’s website for an hour (a self proclaimed sound master). He can hear an instrument in his 1 hour of harman website training better than 3 guys who may have collectively spent more than a 100 years in effort on their respective instruments apparently! We’ll find out. It will be a few hours of 3 of guys laughing away passing blind tests as the minion leader sinks into an abyss. That would be time well spent, but, guess what? If you post such a video on ASR showcasing what a fool he is, he’ll take it down quickly and ban the guy who posted it.
|
That is typical of ASR strawman ill logic, and often presented with a self-righteous passive-agressive sneer. In this instance:
He is so-oooo concerned for our health and well-being! Isn’t that lovely? It’s a whole new level of virtue signalling. ASR itself is toxic and it attracts toxicity. I ignore ’em.
|
You don't owe me anything. That request was meant to help you prove your case. Otherwise, we can dismiss it as another grandiose claim to hear someone flushing their toilet in the next country. And claim so while violating basics of how to do a controlled test. |
That summarizes it pretty well. Seems like a very small handful here feel threatened enough to fight for whatever reason. Maybe ASR dissed something they either sell or own in a review? Or maybe something more affordable that competes with something they sell got a good review? Or maybe it’s merely their beliefs being challenged? Who knows. But it always helps to follow the money when money is involved.
|
