I guess it would depend on the goal. If the goal of building an amplifier lies along the same lines as Peter Walker where "the perfect amplifier is a straight wire with gain" then I would think measurements would be more important since we can measure way beyond anything we can hear.
Do the best audio designers put their ears before the numbers.
Human hearing is what passions our love for music. Subjectively speaking, most of our hearing can’t be measured in a way that tells us how something will sound. So if we can’t measure our hearing to correlate with the numbers ( measurements) used by manufacturer’s of audio components, why are they so important? Assuming I’m right? Don’t the best designs always result from designers that approach their designs with their ears first and worry less about how it measures?
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Not since the days of Peter Walker would any designer say they don't even bother to listen to their design, but I doubt there's even a single one today that relies entirely upon their own hearing. Listening is usually only mentioned as a last minute check that some horrible miscalculation hasn't occurred, eg with crossover design etc. Measurement matters, it always did previously, and even more now. Advances in measurement techniques and our understanding of how to best apply them will eventually render listening whilst designing altogether superfluous, if it already hasn't done so. Time is money and the days of designing exclusively by ear have long gone. Products with serious anomalies will be ruthlessly exposed in today's market. No sane designer will risk that. Even Rega, reluctant as ever to publish data, have had to weather a few storms regarding turntable speed issues. Gradually there should be an increasing amount of homogeneity between different designs and products as measurements such as drive unit dispersion increasingly begin to coincide. Hopefully one day similar loudspeakers will be used to make recordings all over world, thereby ensuring a degree of consistency as the BBC attempted with their designs. Until then some inconsistencies will unfortunately remain. Audio design has always been a science and not an interpretive art form. The designer's primary task is to build a product which faithfully reproduces the signal fed to it all the way from the microphone to the finished audio file/pressing. The decision to apply selective EQ/gain is usually up to the listener and not the designer. In fact the only current exception I can think of is Russell Kaufman who also believes loudspeaker damping causes more harm than good. Apparently, although Kaufman still puts his listening impressions first he also relies upon hours and hours of measurement. 'At Russell K, we’ve conducted thousands of hours of research into the effect that different crossover types have on the sound from 6db (gentle roll off) to 24db (very steep roll off). We’ve discovered that it’s the combination of drive units mechanical roll off and the crossover working in harmony that produces the best sound.' http://www.russellk.co.uk/the_concept.php |
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