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

I'm not an ASR disciple, I've invested in some cables and don't believe measurements tell the whole story, but measurements at a minimum seem to add useful context. I don't buy into Amir's philosophy by any means, but his posts here have been civil, at least the ones I've read. Certainly more civil than many of the responses he gets. Amir, Gene and the other "objectivists" add useful information, but not the last word as their more pedantic followers assert.  

The ones I don't respect are the reviewers who say that measurements don't matter and blind tests are invalid. One suspects that the most important characteristic of a product for them is that they received a free copy to review.

Lastly, I don't know about the wine analogy-I'm in the middle of bourbon country and that process is filled with chemistry and measurements. The difference is that if you have a set of cheap, poorly made speakers, the third song you hear through them will sound as bad as the first. On the other hand, as you get past the third glass of Kentucky Gentleman, it will taste more and more like Pappy. Burn in, I suppose.

I no longer have the listening acuity that I once had, so my days of having firm opinions about one thing sounding “better” than another are behind me…like a wine snob with COVID whose sense of smell has gone away.  But as a person retired from a 50+ year HiFi career, I have opinions, some based on what I used to be sure I heard. I know that some audio designers believe as Amir does that audio component accuracy can be reduced to transfer function and SINAD.  What else is there, after all (they wonder)?  But I used to hear “depth” and “spaciousness” in some things, and not others, where both easily met criteria for flat, extended bandwidth and THD and noise.  I even had a preamp that sounded positively marvelous…unless you engaged the rumble filter, which collapsed the soundstage.  The engineer who created that preamp may not have noticed, or even listened to it to find out. If .1%THD in an amp or preamp is “inaudible”, why is .0001 better?  The ASR “less is better” approach doesn’t impress me.  He does base his recommendations on an array of measures and does recommend many items that aren’t “the best”, but there is a Calvinistic aversion to luxury build quality and pricing (if not matched with top class measurements) that is appealing to the less affluent, perhaps younger, reader.  I used to belong to the Boston Audio Society, and these debates between objectivists and subjectivists were just as entertaining then.

"To the best of my knowledge, ASR is unbiased (it does not accept advertising)."
I am not so sure this is correct. It would not surprise me if Topping gave ASR a kickback of some description. The fact that Amir wets his pants about every Topping product seems to point to this.
What annoys me about ASR is the fact that many, (not all), of the members are rude, objectionable know it alls. No contrary opinion is tolerated. The "chief cat herder", not Amir, is probably one of the most objectionable  and ignorant of all.

@Hilde45

"I honestly don’t understand why ASR is like Voldemort to some folks here"
Because as soon as you say well designed Dacs can and do sound different, (and they do), you get abused and banned from the site.

@hilde45

"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."

What you said immediately clicked the bulb in me. IMO, the error of ASR resonates a lot with the error of your analogy. About gaining 10 lbs.

You could be gaining 10 lbs in water weight, Or 10 lbs in muscle. Or 10 lbs in fat, or any combination of these things. You can look quite different depending on how you gained your weight.

You could weigh 210 lbs and be visibly/noticeably thinner than when you were 200. How is this possible? Well you could’ve gained extra muscle mass, lost fat in the process, and because muscle weights A LOT more than fat, you will look slimmer even though you are heavier.

Kudos to you for making a perfect analogy to weight gain on a scale vs what ASR does.