Audio Science Review = "The better the measurement, the better the sound" philosophy

@milpai  Every night I get to listen to music for 2 hours prior to bedtime.  Yesterday, I listened with friends for 4 hours.   My main audio system is so addictive and I have 42,500 LPs/CD/78s that I look forward to listening whenever I have a chance.  I am retired from my profession and only work about 20 hours weekly as an investor/manager.  I also take care of my family until it's music listening time late at night.  

I had some time to see my forum posts today so I added rejoiners.  My other forums over the past 20+ years only received no or up to four replies.   I obviously hit a nerve and this forum is probably the most popular of September.   I am concerned that ASR may have a physically violent "militia" although it is more likely that they just have much free time and personal angst they have to relieve themselves by posting on ASR, so often and often negatively.  

@amir_asr cool of you to show up. i have a question - would you say that "if

[insert audiophile claim] can't be measured by my tests, it doesn't exist" is a fair description of your view? why or why not? 

@fleschler

ASR "militia" cannot differentiate the difference between biographical summary of one’s music expertise versus self-aggrandizement I am no more important than any other audiophile; however, music experience as an amateur recording engineer in major orchestral halls of well over 250 recordings and for the Erich Zeisl (brother in law of Schoenberg) centenary collection of 11 CDs for Vienna, UCLA and USC establish some credentials that my opinion in how vocal, chamber and orchestral music can (not should) sound is evident. I do not have a "golden ear." I just have a lifetime of experience performing and recording/mastering music.

This is a common retort.  That you have been either producing music for many years or an audiophile for the same and hence your impressions are correct.  Fact is that none of this trains you to a) be a critical listener and b) make your listening tests reliable.  This is not only position of audio research but also my personal professional experience.  In my last corporate job, we performed controlled listening tests of hundreds of audiophiles and sadly, they way underperformed our trained testers in hearing compression artifacts.

Research work would be so much easier if we could just recruit people like you and render an opinion about sound fidelity with no controls. But it is not. The only way we know you speak the "truth" about fidelity is to block all other stimulus than the sound arriving at your ear.  And further, repeat observations many times to rule out chance. Nothing replaces this.  Every shortcut to that is prone to serious faults.

This is an uncomfortable truth for many of us. After all, we call ourselves audiophiles with the intent of saying we know what good sound is like. But it is the nature of how we behave as humans.

You can argue with this and create your own domain of audio not based on realities of decades of research. That is fine. But please don't throw rocks at me at ASR or the membership for using proper science and research as compass of what is right.

Adding on to above, post, I have zero skills in recording, mixing and mastering music. In those domains, your experience blows me out of water.  So there is no attempt to put that experience down in the slightest. It is just that it doesn't apply to the topic at hand (reproducing of recorded music as opposed to creating it).

@td_dayton

@amir_asr cool of you to show up. i have a question - would you say that "if

[insert audiophile claim] can't be measured by my tests, it doesn't exist" is a fair description of your view? why or why not? 

Let me first tell you that there is far more to conclusions we draw than measurements. Myself and many members of the forum are engineers and understand how your audio devices operate.  We then combine this with careful measurements.  And then look at what audio research (published) tells us.  If all three arrows point the same way across testing multiple categories of products, then we have very high confidence in our conclusions as to efficacy of such claims.

As an example of above, we know how power supplies work in audio products. So when someone says this power cable "filters" noise that then does the same in your audio output, we can analyze this on all fronts. We know that there are multiple filters working far more effectively in your audio gear than anything a power cable (or conditioner) can do.  We then combine that knowledge by showing that said power cable provided no filtering. And even the company itself showed no such evidence. We then go further and produce highly distorted AC waveform and show that the audio gear did its job and nothing changed in its output.  After testing a number of such products with the same outcome, we then have a very high confidence answer with strong data to back it.

Please note that this is VERY different than what other objectivists do. I put in tons and tons of effort in testing these audiophile claims. I have tested more interconnects and power conditioners than I can keep track of. And when a new one is offered to me, I test it again in the thought that it may be the one that shows a difference. This should show you the openness I bring to this field. There is nothing "cult-like" about what we do.

Note that there situations where measurements provide part of the answer but not all. Speaker and headphone measurements are very powerful in their predictive power but not sufficient. We don't for example fully know the effect of radiation patter for a speaker in different rooms and for different people. Measurements do however rule out the poor designs and do so with authority. Maybe some of those are still good but there are so many good choices with good engineering so why take a chance?

I recently recommended an IEM. A bunch of people purchased it. About 70% love it and can't imagine how great this $50 IEM is. 10% to 15% say it sounds good but better with EQ. 10 to 15% say it is not for them.  This shows how powerful imperfect or incomplete measurements can still be.