I Am Tired of Bogus Measurements


My expensive shoes have measurements but it doesn’t matter, all I want to know is will they fit. My expensive new suit has measurements but it doesn’t matter, all I want to know is will my expensive new shoes match.

The people being misled by measruements aren’t being led my manufacturers, they are being misled by reviewers. Idiotic rankings of digital gear based on measurements outside the range of human hearing. Cancelling entire brands who put out features customers actually want as they sell to humans, not bats. The worst of these websites will rant about their own superior $$$ equipment but mot even one person will ever use speakers in a klippel matchine, they actually put them in a room! The horror. The cancelling of brands, the talking down to the customers, is bogus.

You need to measure what matters! Are the customers actually happy? Is the warranty honored? Most importantly is their an in home audition period?
I don’t need someone to tell me if I could or should like a product. My room is not a test bench, or a klippel machine. Who cares what the component measures by itself because unless its a clock radio I’ll never use it by itself, I have to interconnect it in a "system" with "high quality" cables, (as in all cables are not the same).

If you want to measure something measure how your personal system of curated components interact with your room. That’s it. The rest of the stuff you could forget because these days if a brand overpromises and under delivers they will be following a formula for losing money, an no company likes that.

kota1

@kota1. Now you have me really confused. Are you now saying that measurements are good as long as they validate your subjective experience?

I would reach that conclusion.

 

Conclusions
Performance here is not awful but clearly could be a lot better as sister group Denon has shown. $5,000 is a ton of money for an AV product so performance needs to be much more optimized than it is.
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Bogus, anyone buying equipment can skip both sets of measurements. One guy likes it, the other guy "meh". You need to audition at home.

The conclusion appears to be based on expecting a $5,000 AVR to have internal DAC performance maybe somewhere in the ballpark of a $100 DAC. That does not seem unreasonable, or are you saying that all DACs sound the same as long as they are half decent? If you play a lot with external digital volume control, it may be important to you to have DAC performance in your $5,000 AVR that is better than a $10 phone dongle but maybe it does not matter if they all sound the same. With that level of engineering detail, what else have they missed?

 

If you need that device @kota1, maybe I should go a little easier on you, then again, making jokes about alcoholism, a serious disease for many, and genetically influenced is in pretty bad taste on your part.

Dr. Sean Olive on why good measurements are so difficult:

What is the most challenging thing about what you do?

"The biggest challenge is designing listening tests that can provide accurate and reliable ratings of sound quality."

Who is doing these measurements and where are they reliably tracking the data? This seems like it might actually be useful.

 

Excellent post @kota1, it completely makes the point I stated above. Here are some key statements in it.

 

In your most recent paper, you proposed a statistical model that predicts listeners’ preference ratings of headphones. How did you first come upon the concept of the model?

We now understand what the target response should be for achieving good sound.

The statistical model for predicting listeners’ preference ratings of headphones based on deviations in its frequency response was really an extension of a similar model I developed in 2004 for predicting listeners’ loudspeaker ratings. The only difference is the headphone ratings are based on a single curve whereas the loudspeaker’s radiation uses several curves to characterize its sound over a sphere.