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

@devinplombier 

that's a cute story. Are you making that up?

No, not entirely!  I am not smart enough to make stories up ...

There was a brilliant DVD documentary about how the Australian wine industry got its foot into the European market.  The DVD is unfortunately titled "Chateau Chunder" see Chateau Chunder: A Wine Revolution - The Education Shop.  I leant my copy but never got it back. The story in the DVD is that a couple of Australian winemakers and a marketer organised wine tasting dinners for French wine critics.  The top drop was underrated until it was tasted in a blind comparison, when it won.

It is Penfold's Grange. I quote from the link I gave earlier "The great 1955 vintage was submitted to competitions beginning in 1962 and over the years has won more than 50 gold medals. The vintage of 1971 won first prize in Syrah/Shiraz at the Wine Olympics in Paris. The 1990 vintage was named 'Red Wine of the Year' by the Wine Spectator magazine in 1995, which later rated the 1998 vintage 99 points out of a possible 100".

I accidentally conflated with another wine from earlier days:  "At the 1873 Vienna Exhibition the French judges, tasting blind, praised some wines from Victoria, but withdrew in protest when the provenance of the wine was revealed, on the grounds that wines of that quality must clearly be French."^[15] 

@oberoniaomnia

There are thousands of people like you, Amir & Gene & Erin included, that cannot hear a difference with cables. Doesn’t mean there isn’t. Different metals of cables, purity, capacitance, inductance, quality of connectors, length, geometry, type of shielding, thickness. All of this come together to form a cable. To say cables have no difference is saying all of these aspects don’t matter. Which if you give it 2 minutes to think about, is quite ludicrous. Especially for a "no-nonsense scientist" such as yourself and Amir.

Erin has stated he cannot hear a difference between amplifiers, does not mean there’s no difference.

Leave the idea of cables aside for a minute. I’ve encountered hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of people that have said they cannot hear a difference between DAC, AMP, and pre-amp. These people, like you, truly believe there’s no difference with certain components.

The facts remain. If you cannot measure a cable, what can you really measure?

@oberoniaomnia I respect your opinion.  As a marine biologist do you think that Amir testing commercially available audio gear is in the same category of scientific work as an NSF funded project to understand how physical, chemical and biological processes mediate carbon transfer in and out of the sea surface, or a Sea Grant funded study of how plankton might affect oxygen levels in eutrophic coastal waters?  I suggest that if Amir were to submit a proposal to a competitive science or engineering funding organization claiming what he does on ASR somehow qualifies as “science” he would not get past the first round.

I read Amir’s reviews and look at his charts comparing different components and find it interesting.  But it is not “science”.  I never said that TAS reviews are remotely scientific, or even unbiased.  Stereophile often combines subjective reviews based on listening with independent machine measurements - is that “kinda scientific”?  No, it’s not, it’s just a combination of subjective and objective measurements.  I find the name “Audio Science Review” pretentious, inaccurate and mistakenly bestowing the reviews with the mystique of expanding the boundaries of our understanding when in fact Amir is just functioning as a dude with some measurement devices and a lot of time on his hands.  His professional work for Microsoft and others advancing digitally reproduced sound may more rightly qualify as “science”, I don’t know enough about it. His work at ASR, not so much.

if you tried different cables and they did nothing for you, be happy, you are saving a lot of money.  As for me, I’m going to turn off my phone, open a bottle from the bottom shelf of my wine rack with the sticky note on it that says “ask” and enjoy drinking it while listening to my digital front end without reminding myself that it measured well in Amir’s tests or that the new power cable on my power conditioner is making everything sound better.

kn

The real question is why do the doubters care?  

Amir is not a scientist! Wouldnt make a bit of difference if he was.

ASR takes an extreme view and attracts the disgruntled along the way.

Erin has stated he cannot hear a difference between amplifiers, does not mean there’s no difference.

@samureyex 

Only an imbecile would state that they cannot hear a difference between amplifiers, and Erin is not an imbecile. It is therefore doubtful that Erin actually said that, unless of course you can provide a link. Thanks