Do you trust your ears more than measurements?

@knotscott i agree. I always trust my ears. They have to bring joy to your ears. 

I’ve found that with reliable sources and using both, that my ears typically help confirm what the metrics indicate. So the stars have been aligning pretty well for me in that regard of late…..the best of both worlds.

@calvinj for sake of mild curiosity - do you employ DSP in your setup, and if you do, are DSP settings being adjusted by ear?

@benanders because of my listening space. I can’t. A lot of us audiophiles are limited in where we can place things and the room itself.  

Ah, okay @calvinj . Thing is, DSP doesn’t really require physical space - certain modules fit the footprint of a playing cards deck, with the software run entirely from within the module or upstream in part from a standard computer. Think “desktop-to-larger old school-style DAC” footprint for any typical DSP module. You could fit at least half a dozen units in the empty spaces on the shelf in your system photo.

To the contrary of your limited space concern, the less listening space you have (and/or the more conflicting the boundaries there are), the better DSP might work for that setup, especially a bass-heavy rig like yours. Similar measurements to what AVR’s have used for calibration over two decades is an over-simplified but conceivable likeness.

On arguing in favor of tuning a system (1) by ear-only vs. (2) an integrative approach of listening and measuring/trying signal processing to better inform you of possibilities:

If you just don’t want to test your system with measurements and attempted corrections in the digital domain, that’s your prerogative and it’s totally fine. But it’s also choosing a stance of “ignorance is bliss.” IOW, you don’t actually know which to trust because no informed position on tuning a system (1) by ear-only vs. (2) by ear with measurements as a guide, can be held by someone who has not tried both. You cannot have an informed opinion about two things if you’ve only tried one of them. Make sense?

Regarding measurements for selecting kit to purchase (vs. tuning a system already had), @erik_squires  summarized potential advantages vs. pitfalls concisely and objectively.