I don't want to beat a dead horse but I'm bugged.
I just can't clear my head of this. I don't want to start a measurements vs listening war and I'd appreciate it if you guys don't, but I bought a Rogue Sphinx V3 as some of you may remember and have been enjoying it quite a bit. So, I head over to AVS and read Amir's review and he just rips it apart. But that's OK, measurements are measurements, that is not what bugs me. I learned in the early 70s that distortion numbers, etc, may not be that important to me. Then I read that he didn't even bother listening to the darn thing. That is what really bugs me. If something measures so poorly, wouldn't you want to correlate the measurements with what you hear? Do people still buy gear on measurements alone? I learned that can be a big mistake. I just don't get it, never have. Can anybody provide some insight to why some people are stuck on audio measurements? Help me package that so I can at least understand what they are thinking without dismissing them completely as a bunch of mislead sheep.
@realworldaudio Thank you for stating what should be obvious. Of course some believe we've already discovered all there is to be discovered. Why not just shut down any research into audio reproduction and human sensory perception, we already have all the measurement protocols and tools needed to prove absolutes, and differences in individual human sensory perceptivity is of no concern.
Watch out for the audio authoritarians, they'll be sure no Toto can open the curtain.
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Are you any better @sns , insisting on magic because you won't accept your own infallible and easily influenced hearing? I replied to @realworldaudio's post, objectively, with no idea or care for his qualifications. Some of the things he said are wrong. Some of the things he says seem relevant, and some are likely outside the scope or even capability of any viable test regimen but does not make them irrelevant, just impractical. |
Who would consider this a good frequency response? It’s the Harman curve. Research showed this to be the frequency response for headphones the majority of people like best. It’s curves like this (there are several variants) that headphone designs nowadays target. Maybe we should do something similar for Amps plus speakers. Tone control is mostly stripped off of hight end amps, let alone the good old 'loudness' switch. A multiband equalizer is a very nice piece of equipment ... strangely enough seldom used in high end hifi. I wonder why?
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I've listened to a lot of amps on a lot of different systems, and I would say that specs are probably less correlated with sound in the case of an amp than they are with virtually any other component on the system. If someone put a gun to my head and said I had to pick a spec for an amp and make a purchase on that spec alone, I'd want to know its weight. That doesn't tell you a lot about it sound, but it tells you more than just about anything else you could name. I just bought an amp here on Audiogon, and I couldn't tell you its power rating without googling it. |
