"The Audio Critic" B.S. or what?

TAC doesn't have a Web site, but any search engine will turn up plenty of reviews posted by manufacturers (obviously only the positive ones, of which there are fewer than for other mags). Note: reviews from the 70s and early 80s pre-date TAC's embrace of objectivism, so won't reflect its current thinking. Subscriptions ($24/4 issues) can be ordered from PO Box 978, Quakertown, PA 18951. The publication schedule has been spotty (to say the least), but there's a new publisher with the promise of more regular issues. You should read it even if you don't agree with it, for the same reason that liberals should read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal--it broadens the mind.

Eldragon: Subscriptions ($24/4 issues) can be ordered from PO Box 978, Quakertown, PA 18951.

John_l: Vehement and dogmatic Aczel certainly is, and the "Lies" article was Peter at his worst. He was trying to cover a lot of ground in very little space, and wound up with a summary, rather than an argument. But judging a magazine by your agreement with it seems to me to be a good way to avoid learning anything new. As for your own "experiments and experiences," their exact meaning depends on how they were conducted, a subject on which Aczel has had a lot to say in the past. You might try checking out a few more issues, or ordering some back numbers.

The Audio Critic, in its current incarnation, is the foremost proponent of the notion that high-end audio is subject to the laws of psychoacoustics, a branch of psychology that studies auditory perception. The most basic principle here is that sighted listening is an unreliable means of judging a sound because your brain is taking in and processing other information as well. Hence, only blind listening tests can truly determine whether two cables sound different, for example. Needless to say, this view (and it's more than just a view--there's a damned lot of peer-reviewed journal articles to back it up) doesn't sit well with the manufacturers of certain products, or the magazines which rely on those manufacturers for advertising revenue. By the way, Aczel and his crowd are audiophiles, too. It's just that they pursue "the absolute sound" by concentrating on the things that really matter, particularly speakers and speaker-room interaction.

Waldhorner: You've set up a distinction between measurement and what you call "ears-only testing" that I think is misleading. TAC does do measurements (as does Stereophile), but it also does "ears-only testing." What it doesn't do (and what S-pile does) is "eyes-and-ears testing." It's the eyes that get you into trouble, if you're trying to make judgments based solely on sound. Otherwise, your comments are right-on.

Trelja: For one thing, there are lots of reasons besides the sound to choose one component over another. For another, many audiophiles attempt to judge the sound of a component in a way that allows factors other than the sound to intrude on their perceptions. (They will tell you they can ignore those other factors, but the truth is our brains are not wired that way.) The point I was making was that if they want to listen that way, that's their business, and nobody should tell them, "Oh, but you should listen double-blind" or whatever. But if they want to pontificate to others about what things sound like and which things sound different from other things, then they need to do their listening in a way that takes into account what psychologists have learned over decades about the foibles of human hearing. Otherwise, their observations are completely meaningless to anybody else. And to get back to the original point, that is the difference between The Audio Critic and, say, The Absolute Sound.

There seems to be some confusion here between "deciding what you like" and stating that one thing sounds better (or different) than another. If all you're about is "deciding what you like," you can go about that any way you wish--sighted, blind, standing on your head. But if somebody tells you that a particular cable has a certain sound, you need to know how he came to that conclusion in order to decide how much credence to give him. As for Charlie's point about blind testing, scientists long ago figured out that even the most unbiased helper gives subconscious cues that can throw off a test. That's why they always use double-blind listening tests.