What are we objectivists missing?

I'm the one who posted Game Changing Tweak first in August of 2020 and in this forum titled Part 2. I consult with people whose knowledge in the audio field is towering. The audiophile who suggested I get an isolation transformer began his electronic career at age 16 and is now 78 years old. He solved a speaker problem for his friend, Dave Wilson, of Wilson Audio. He was also a friend of Walter Jung, author of Audio Ic Op-Amp Applications. He takes apart audio cartridges to modify them wearing magnifying goggles. Of course he can measure signal, but the final arbiter is his ears. 

As is often suggested on these type of threads, measurements don't tell the whole story. This should be obvious, as if they did, every designer would base their designs on the best possible measurements, yet many don't.

That's not to say that they ignore distortion, etc., but rather that the best measurements don't necessarily equate to the most compelling listening experiences.

There are many examples, but Nelson Pass has shared more than a few interesting, related anecdotes and opinions. Here's a quote from an interview:

I like measurements, and I use them all the time, but they don’t get the last word. Generally, there isn’t much conflict between what we measure and what we like to hear. I’ve spent decades working to correlate good sound with measurements, and we have a reasonable picture of what works, and you see that in our products. These represent our own listening tastes, and appeal to a large enough portion of customers to keep us in business.

With low-order harmonics, there is agreement that low-order distortion is much less offensive than high-order harmonics and IM (Inter modulated) sidebands, and this drove the development of the Threshold 800A back in 1975, where the nature of the distortion was considered as important as the size of the “single number.”

By 1991 when I started Pass Labs, I began to focus more on the specific character of second and third harmonics, and slowly settled into a character where negative-phase second harmonic dominates at low levels, segueing into symmetric third harmonic at higher power. The second fosters an illusion of expanded space and localization, and the third seems to improve dynamics. The distortion of these amplifiers is still quite low, but they are not sterile.

Another incident related to this was when an audio technician with 50 years of experience told me that the hiss being produced by a pre-amp didn't register on his oscilloscope. 

This wasn't meant to be a troll post.  I am completely serious.

whipsaw:

Very familiar with Nelson Pass and his take on this (I have a Pass Labs amplifier  in my system and have read a bunch of his stuff).  Even though he uses extensive listening tests, he can still measure the relative amounts of harmonics relative to different designs.  So this is an example where you have a distinct difference in the perceived character of the sound but at the same time there is also a corresponding difference in the measurements.

So measurements alone may not predict which you may prefer, but there still exist a measured difference.  I'm just curious as to what you all think we might not be measuring that would account for perceived massive differences in components which on the surface appear to measure identically.

My take is that if you can hear a difference, there must be some difference.

In my case, yes, but in your case I have no idea, you could be fooling yourself. 😂

If a device or cable or whatever measures exactly the same it should sound exactly the same.

The problem I have with this argument is that it believes our existing, common measurements are all that could tell us anything about sound. I do not believe this to be true, at all. Most of the measurements audiophiles are familiar with were developed 30 years ago or more. Yes, we can measure them with more precision, but their definitions haven’t changed.

These measurements were made before high speed data collection was available and data retention and processing was a lot more expensive than it is today but unfortunately we have not really taken much of this into account in developing new measurements.

Let me give you a super simple example. Vibration control. AFAIK no one has a standardized measurement of the effects of sound on electronics but measurements and tests could be trivial.

Another kind of testing might be to measure the output at the speaker terminals with different speaker cable and compare the spectral and phase characteristics of the signal. Instead we have people spouting nonsense about theories of wave propagation through insulators that have absolutely no measurements behind them. Hell you should record it and put it in a youtube.

Before anyone asks me, I am not your lackey. I don’t get paid to do this kind of work, that’s for the magazines and gear makers to do. I’m just saying that overall the state of testing has stagnated 30 years ago and it’s a real shame.