This is for Georgehifi especially but others can chime in.

And try the veal.

Maybe you should call it cleaner. It is certainly more accurate because if the preamp does change the signal, by definition that is degradation.

The problem (as has been discussed a lot elsewhere) is that a passive control is highly susceptible to cable issues while an active system is far less so. In addition, the control often acts to reduce the efficacy of the output coupling capacitor of the source (if it has one). This can result in reduction of bass impact as you turn the control down.

An active system can be completely immune to the effects of the interconnect cable, allowing the result to be more neutral.

That depends a lot on the construction of the line stage of course. Being aware of this fact, we designed our balanced line stages to be quite impervious to the interconnect cable(s) they drive; for this reason we often advise the customer that an expensive cable is not always needed.

Audition is important!

Ralph we know about that trick, what you said is that having multiple speakers in the room completely invalidates the results, when they don't.

Actually it does. The problem is that all the cabinets act as bass traps, whether their respective woofers are shorted or not.

This is correct Ralph, and does work to a degree, and only if the bass unit is not cap coupled.

Actually it works whether there is a cap or not. But only to a degree, as you say.

But I was waiting for the light to come on from Audiotroy to tell us he does this, which never happened.
So his knowledge of this and having multiple speakers in the room to demo to the detriment of the sound is limited.

I can't be sure of the latter, but to the former it was pretty obvious that this was not 'old news' despite his remonstrations.

what is fact vs opinion?  Everything in life is pretty much an opinion when it comes to subjective products.

Its not that simple, fortunately. The only reason there is a subjective aspect is simply because the audio industry in general does not recognize many of the physiological aspects of human hearing and so has not devised a test.

That is likely not going to change anytime soon since many of the aspects of my previous statement cause debates all over the web that aren't going to go away anytime soon. But it is a false statement to assume that all things are that subjective- if we understand how the ear works, its a simple matter to apply engineering to solve the issue at hand. That means there is math and stuff...

This is precisely why we've avoided using feedback in our amps and seen reduced market share as a result. Its not because we don't want to sell amps- we do- its just that we want them to sound like real music when installed, and that's not going to happen if the speaker requires the amp to use a lot of feedback.

Such a speaker will only ever sound like a nice stereo. We don't want our amps doing that- we want them to sound real.

It all comes out of engineering and don't think for a second that its all somehow opinion!

In our reference room we have one set of speakers on each wall so we have two active speakers on display,

It does not matter where the unused speakers are in the room, they are affecting the sound! If the speaker connections are shorted, they will have less effect.

Just try it instead of arguing about it.

Just like if I demoed an OTL amp vs another type of amp using decent but not great cables would be demo be all of a sudden not be valid and therefore by a hoax?

[sic] 

Maybe, but this analogy does not hold up. Amps don't absorb energy from each other by being in the room.

How can anyone make a serious judgement about the sound when there are more than one pair of speakers in the room?

+1

Its easy to show that unused speakers in a room are absorbing energy from the speaker being played.

The **partial** solution is to short out the speaker terminals of the unused speakers, so their drivers can't move. This really helps.

If this is not done, then the audition thus becomes a hoax. If it is done, it simply becomes a poor audition- the speakers really should not be in the room with the active speakers.