The science of opinion ...

to the op,

these subjects and subject areas have been covered a hundred times over.

what you are, is just the next one to come along and try to raise them like a sword of justice ...one built out of your own limited understandings of the entire envelope of what is involved... in the area under discussion. 

You don't know the subject, and your data and your knowledge is severely lopsided.

Re the OP:

He's not doing these sorts of threads because he cares about audio or high end audio or the people who desire quality audio in their lives.

Hes trying to crash it, he's trying to tear it down, he's trying to force it to follow HIS dogma. Every post he makes screams this point, either openly, or subtly.

See it for what it is.

Re the op and the subject matter chosen my him:

The ass hat tries to subtly game the forum, again.

and he will do it again, in the next post or when he tries to start another thread.

see it for what it is.

I'd expect that his next tactic would be to try and be polite in everyone's eyes..act as the harmed one... and try to label me as being anti-science for my direct mention of the subtle manipulations and obvious intent within them.

Ethan would be like kryptonite to you geoff, he knows almost everything about a subject to which you know almost nothing :-) .... serious side: he can be dogmatic and jumps to conclusions without considering all variables, and will fight you, but he does listen. Speaking purely of acoustics at this point.

Ethan is true pseudo expert. A pencil twiddler of the worst and blind kind. Reminds me of someone here....

His product is crap, his knowledge base is crap. He has threatened to sue people before (individuals, forums, magazines, editorial staff, and experts among them) and been kicked off forums for such behavior. He’s been kicked off more than one forum, for sure.

I and others have gone ’round and ’round with him before, and we have encountered his limited depth to such a large degree that his pattern is well known and well understood. To a point well past nausea. Reminds me of something.....it does....

Are these the marks and talents of a person whom you respect?

Ethan is good with spinning numbers on a calculator or whatnot, but even a dog or horse can be trained to do that.

But knowledgeable about acoustics? yes, maybe... at the generic base level. The rubber stamp simplistic textbook ’by the numbers’ level. Sure. Sort of.

Can he fix REAL problems outside of a simplistic textbook formula?

No.

This means there is little to no mind of capacity or intellect - behind the facade.

Normally, as in the vast number of situations... I would leave this sort of thing alone. But Ethan has surely managed to drum up his own enemies by attacking that which he does not understand, with relentless fervor. And damaging the other given business and people, in the process. Kicking him to the curb is a moment of sanity and reason.

Then we get into the concepts behind the origins of science, which is philosophy, and that can garner some very nasty barbs from the overtly dogmatic.....

How big is the horse calculator? It has to be able to withstand lots of force.

The big super robust calcs were getting damaged regardless, so we decided to start training hummingbirds to use teeny tiny calculators.

I was there for all of that.

The thing about it, is..that..if one actually follows the cutting edge of psychoacoustic research and cutting edge work in acoustics, re scientific articles at places like physorg..

...what one discovers, through doing the hard work of article and research reading and reference sifting...

That the bowls (originally by Franck Tchang) actually DO WORK. AS ADVERTISED.

But, it took years and years to emerge as part of the new knowledge base. It is still filtering and dripping in.

10 years from now, this will all filter down into the average bit of knowledge, for norms in psychoacoustics ,and the fields involved in acoustics. It will be in all the textbooks, to some given degree.

And the people who can't innovate and can only attack things as they are not in the textbooks (dogmatic mindset), those negative proofing mindsets...they’ll be busy attacking the next thing which they don’t understand, things that are emergent and not yet in the textbooks.

And be tossing around the those intellectual flyweight nickel level charlatan and snake oil screams like they were intellectual level manhole covers.

Since, in high end audio, the expectation is the the manufacturers do have the intellectual capacity to bring the new and cutting edge -into the world of audio... it is a given that the dogmatic mindset negative proofing types, they will attack relentlessly. Ad infinitum, as the history of it shows so abundantly.

@teo_audio Do we have any examples of reformed "dogmatic mindset negative proofing types" and their redemption stories? Likely not to help, given the ’type,’ but may make for interesting reading....

Erik was smart enough from the get go, IMO, but I’ve noticed recently that he has decided to go more public with his thoughts and ideas on how intellectualism, discovery work, and exploration works - re some of the threads he has started.

I sensed he had it in him to do so..and he does...

Thus I find it is more of a internal psychological perception and perceptual base issue than anything else.

eg, in congruent fashion of illustration of the base required re shifting one’s self... never sign off a letter with ’take care’, but sign off with ’take risks’.

These sort of perceptual base shifts can’t happen over night and take years years (even decades) to execute. Slow boil, slow burn. It is the nature of the mind. Most that make it to this nebulous ’there’ point, have had things in their lives that seeded that coming condition of mind. Eg, stress and extremes can be very useful, in some critical or fundamental ways, when in the right life at the right time.

p.s. phys.org is a news aggregator of science oriented press releases. It is not where one does scientific research.

That is not a quality deflection, IMO.

One finds the press release and one investigates.

That is how it works, if one has to deal with multiple fields. Not physorg specifically, but with science news aggregators. No one can read all the journals, there are too many of them and the fields intertwine too much to find it all in one area.

I hold this to be obvious, so your comment is strangely placed -to the logical and capable mind...

Physorg is a place where cross field feeding can be easily found, so it is a gold mine for translatable and transferable ideas and understandings that can illuminate in multiple connected fields.

Like Heinlein said, ’specialization is for insects’.

eg, speaker design crosses pretty well seven different branches of established engineering/physics. anyone can put a extant cheap radio speaker in a cardboard box ...

Or get into the complex build and physics of lets say...nanotechnology...or molecular bonding, and multiple branches of physics and science, a near unspeakable level of complexity..... all to build a cone, which will be dealing with complex forces in a complex motor in a complex environment.

Thus seven different branches of physics have to be mastered as a flowing intertwined set, to make the best that can be in the realm of loudspeakers. It requires, in olden terms, a ’renaissance man’, and in modern terms, an ’absolute unit’.

The question is, does the opinion and experience of the average of the bell curve in humans, does it possess the ability to tell the difference?

Yes, by simply listening and buying what they like.

But if one does the hard work, the involved work, and is called a charlatan (regardless of the perceived quality of the speaker [or amp, or cable, etc]) well...what then?

How to respond to an ignorance that does not possess the capacity to clear itself? There is no effective humane answer found for that one, as of yet -and likely never will be.

Unfortunately elizabeth,
I feel that many on this forum are too scared to read scientific articles. They are not the safe space they are looking for.

Objection your honor! Obvious projection!
 
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I know plenty of people who have nothing to do with science and have towering capacities for logical deduction and reasoning.

Quality minds are not exclusive to engineering or scientific endeavor.

This Ethan person undoubtedly has a very powerful personality.

He does not have a very powerful personality.

What he has is akin to intractable psychosis, which he forces on everyone else. The man has serious issues.

I’ve dealt with him before, back on another forum, and the best thing that can be done with him is to get rid of him, for the good of all.

Otherwise it’s just problem, after problem, after problem, ad nauseam.