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

@prof 

Sorry, not calling you out on this, but you said "ASR evaluates equipment based on objective criteria that has been found to predict certain aspects of sound quality".

I was hoping that you could point to a link/post/discussion on ASR covering how the reader would correlate measurement anomalies directly with SQ issues?  This is 1 of the 2 big holes I find in reading ASR reviews, so hopefully it's covered somewhere on the site, in depth.

For example, in a Stereophile-style review, the listener might say something like "trumpet was a little spitty in its high register".  In the measurements section, that might be correlated with a slight rise in the on- or off-axis response.  In ASR, the measurements go first, so you get the same data.  In the listening section, though, you might see that Amir tried EQ'ing out the slight rise and liked or didn't care for the result.  No indication of how the listener would perceive the original issue.

The other big hole is imaging, which is ignored in the monaural listening test.  This has 2 parts - the first, alluded to above - due to the loss of the stereo image with only 1 speaker in play.  

There's also the speaker design - box vs planars vs horns vs OB, etc.  Each of these have significantly different radiating patterns.  Their optimum measurement results should also be radically different.

How is any of this information being conveyed to the reader?

Give me measurements or give me chaos!🤲

@hilde45 

I had a long and bitter debate with Ethan Winer about this. My position is that there may be things heard which cannot be measured because the brain and perception are way WAY beyond our understanding at this point in our scientific understanding. His reply to that was, essentially, "No, it’s just placebo effect and subjective bias." (In other words, y’all are just in denial.)

I recall there was a really enjoyable exchange between Jay Luong of Audio Bacon and Ethan Winer in the comments on one of his reviews; probably the power cable one. 

Summary off the top of my head is: Ethan said what you stated above, Jay imagined all of it, no proof etc. and also Jay had no scientific background. Jay responded he was an electrical engineer, Ethan said he must not be a very good one if he believed there were differences in power cables, Jay said he received a Bill Gates scholarship, so yeah he probably was a pretty good electrical engineer. Ethan did not have much to say after that. Quite comical. 

@jrareform 

The measurements aren't the problem with ASR.  the problem is the mob of people that pounce anyone that says "hey this is better even though it measures poorer"

Exactly. 

ASRs whole approach of anything that measures bad sounds bad, and the inability to describe how things sound or what people prefer sometimes - is a nonstarter for me. It all comes back to what people hear and what they enjoy most, and no metric tells us this very well.

Agreed. The point is not that "we should adopt the ASR Method." but rather we should avoid a false dilemma fallacy. Which both sides commit.

Measurements have their place. The measurements aren’t the problem with ASR. the problem is the mob of people that pounce anyone that says "hey this is better even though it measures poorer"....The sad thing is, the "happy panther" scale always rewards the highest measuring equipment because of the horde of stat hunters that are ready to say it’s better without hearing any of it.

My point is that people just being "against ASR and FOR listening" are throwing out some valuable data. I already made this point at length so I’m going to stop after this.

I'll add one more point -- people who focus on "how gear sounds rather than measures" frequently do not mention the rather complex effects of (a) other gear, (b) the recording, (c) the ROOM, and (d) their methods for listening. There is a very bad pseudo-science air in these conversations where it is supposed that the writer is conveying something that others would experience, but without any of the critical variables to help others know whether the claim would be something they can experience. How often do we hear "these speakers sound bright" and then we ask for a photo and find out they are listening with a bank of windows or a tile floor? It's this kind of thing that drives people to measurements even though those can be misleading or besides the point, too, but in a different way.