The Audio Science Review (ASR) approach to reviewing wines.

Stereophile does measurements. You can look at it and also see what J.Atkinson says about the sound.

You can look at the asr guy’s measurements (graphs only) as well. But, scroll over anything else he squeals about because he has two lumps of turd in place of ears.

“Among a myriad of other complaints, I simply don’t have any confidence that ASR as a publication knows good sound.”

ASR evaluates equipment based on objective criteria 

that has been found to predict certain aspects of sound quality.

The speakers forces are rated based on the type of measurements that have been shown Through rigourous scientific testing studies To be correlated

With the type of sound most listeners - That includes audiophiles and reviewers! -

Will rate most highly.

This may not be perfect, But I’m guessing they are on much stronger ground

Than you might be. 

What Do you claim to be “Good sound “ And why should someone agree with you?

@prof 

+1

There are any number or audio equipment reviewers that could be ignored just as easily as ASR. Then again any audio equipment manufacturer claims and advertisement could also be ignored as well as dealers hype. You provide a good analogy. I think it's always a good practice to never take any review/claim as " the truth set in stone". Do your own research and try to listen to a component before making an opinion.

+1 @mulveling 

Double yawn. Weak analogies add no value. 

Now that alcohol has been classed as a group 1 carcinogen, measuring it may be much safer than subjectively evaluating it.

Among a myriad of other complaints, I simply don’t have any confidence that ASR as a publication knows good sound.

It would be really cool if somebody who wanted to criticize ASR could do it without strawmen.

1. Amir DOES listen to every loudspeaker and comment on the sound.   He also reports whether a speaker that doesn’t measure well can be ameliorated or not with EQ
2. You have left out something rather important: everything you said about testing on objective measures would actually make sense IF those objective measures have been carefully studied and correlated to find out that these characteristics correspond very well to what most people rate very highly in terms of the taste of wine.  Then of course measuring wine would make plenty of sense.

And this is the case with loudspeakers.  It’s like so many audiophiles imagined that measurements are just plucked out of the air for no reason at all.  The whole point of measurements is that they have been correlated to how things sound.  That’s the point of measurements!   And scientific study has shown that certain measurements correlate to what most people will rate as higher quality.  No it doesn’t mean you have to write the sound quality as high.  But then it’s the case with every single review ever written, subjective or otherwise, that you might not like the speaker yourself.

But it’s completely rational for somebody to use measurements that have been correlated to good sound as a way to winnow out the loudspeakers that they are going to spend time pursuing.

Analogies of audio to other hobbies are generally suspect (especially the car ones), but yes I can sort of get on board with this one. The folks at ASR have a very different hobby than what is generally practiced here - though we’re superficially under the same title "pursuit high-quality home audio". Unfortunately that’s about all the discussion that can be had about the 2 camps before it goes way off rails.

I remember reading an ASR "review" that was chock full of the useless SINAD analysis, and then for the "subjective listening" portion something like this was written: "we had comany arrive at this time, so no listening tests were performed". That's their hobby, in a nutshell lol.

Another ASR hating thread. One need not say that listening does not matter in order to see the value in measurements.

Are there ASR folks who think that only measurements matter? Sure. But that does not mean that the measurements done cannot be helpful at all. (I mean, I’m not a fanatic about my weight on a scale, but it helps to know when I’ve gained 10 pounds.)

I honestly don’t understand why ASR is like Voldemort to some folks here.

Exactly.

dead on.

As good an analogy as any, I guess.

I wrote off ASR long ago.....