The Audio Science Review (ASR) approach to reviewing wines.

Another ASR hating thread. One need not say that listening does not matter in order to see the value in measurements.

Are there ASR folks who think that only measurements matter? Sure. But that does not mean that the measurements done cannot be helpful at all. (I mean, I’m not a fanatic about my weight on a scale, but it helps to know when I’ve gained 10 pounds.)

I honestly don’t understand why ASR is like Voldemort to some folks here.

Analogies of audio to other hobbies are generally suspect (especially the car ones), but yes I can sort of get on board with this one. The folks at ASR have a very different hobby than what is generally practiced here - though we’re superficially under the same title "pursuit high-quality home audio". Unfortunately that’s about all the discussion that can be had about the 2 camps before it goes way off rails.

I remember reading an ASR "review" that was chock full of the useless SINAD analysis, and then for the "subjective listening" portion something like this was written: "we had comany arrive at this time, so no listening tests were performed". That's their hobby, in a nutshell lol.

It would be really cool if somebody who wanted to criticize ASR could do it without strawmen.

1. Amir DOES listen to every loudspeaker and comment on the sound.   He also reports whether a speaker that doesn’t measure well can be ameliorated or not with EQ
2. You have left out something rather important: everything you said about testing on objective measures would actually make sense IF those objective measures have been carefully studied and correlated to find out that these characteristics correspond very well to what most people rate very highly in terms of the taste of wine.  Then of course measuring wine would make plenty of sense.

And this is the case with loudspeakers.  It’s like so many audiophiles imagined that measurements are just plucked out of the air for no reason at all.  The whole point of measurements is that they have been correlated to how things sound.  That’s the point of measurements!   And scientific study has shown that certain measurements correlate to what most people will rate as higher quality.  No it doesn’t mean you have to write the sound quality as high.  But then it’s the case with every single review ever written, subjective or otherwise, that you might not like the speaker yourself.

But it’s completely rational for somebody to use measurements that have been correlated to good sound as a way to winnow out the loudspeakers that they are going to spend time pursuing.

Among a myriad of other complaints, I simply don’t have any confidence that ASR as a publication knows good sound.

Now that alcohol has been classed as a group 1 carcinogen, measuring it may be much safer than subjectively evaluating it.