Beware the audio guru

cleeds,

If you keep reading the forums, I’m confident you’ll recognize those who speak in absolute terms. I’m not going to single anyone out beyond what I did in the original post.

Hmm...

1. I’ve been active on this forum for years now, and don’t recognize or recall anyone making the type of absolutist claims you’ve depicted.

2. What I HAVE seen, almost routinely - and especially applied to my arguments - is misrepresentations and strawmen. Every time I say "I’d like to see some better evidence for that" or "here are reasons for some skepticism about that claim..." it’s translated into "you are dogmatically dismissing the claim as impossible while having no experience with the claim in question."

So I’m going to have to remain skeptical on these grounds, until I see more evidence that anyone is making the statements you are attributing to them. I don’t deny it; I just have reasons to not simply accept your OP as accurate.

Of course, I certainly agree that anyone who DOES make absolute claims isn’t being very reasonable and should be regarded with caution.

prof, I don’t mean to start a fight, but isn’t that what religious skeptics or doubters frequently say, “I just want to see some evidence.”? Your self proclaimed position as a sincere skeptic looking for the truth is not exactly bolstered by your recent statement that after all was said and done with your battle with vibration isolation you were not able to hear the fruits 🍌 🍉 🍎 of your labor. As I’m find of saying, a real skeptic would perhaps be more aggressive, you know, roll up his sleeves and dive in, kind of what MG was suggesting all along. A lot of these subjects, isolation, RFI shielding, directionality, Tuning I suspect, I don’t know that much at all about Tuning, usually turn out to be more complex than they do at first blush. I don’t suppose you tried to visit Tuneland to seek answers to your burning 🔥 questions.

Geoff, you don’t seem to have a clue how critical thinking and consistency works.

The way you think I should operate when being skeptical is the opposite of being skeptical! No wonder you push teleportation tweaks!

I have a very heavy, expensive, delicate turntable. The isolation shelf is a major contraption. I was not able to listen to the turntable before I had my rack re-built to accommodate the turntable (which included adding the layering/isolation components).

Therefore I had no before and after to compare.

And now that I have the shelf and turntable set up, how in the world am I to do any practical back and forth testing? Listen...take disassemble the turntable taking it off the shelf, take the shelf off, put the turntable back on and listen again? Then if I want to switch back to compare...do all that again and again? That would of course be absurdly impractical, not to mention the last thing I want would be my delicate turntable risking mayhem every time I had to disassemble the system and put it back to do any such back and forth.

And what am I going to do if I wanted to blind test it; yell out to my helper "ok, I heard it with the isolation stand - now disassemble the turntable and take it off the stand!"

As I’ve said: sometimes - often even - blind testing for some differences may be impractical to impossible in a domestic setting. So in no way do I say everyone needs to be doing this, including myself.

BUT...as I wrote before...I therefore scale my claims to the level of evidence I have. I don’t have any tests or evidence that my isolation base altered the sound of my vinyl playback vs no base. So I simply don’t make the claim either way.

That you can not recognize the reasonableness of this speaks volumes.

(A lot of this changes for manufacturers, though, who could in many more practical cases produce iterations of an item - with and without tweak X - and compare them in a listener-bias- controlled fashion).

Objectivity is a state of mind in a purely subjective reality. Everything in this place runs through a subjectivity fundamental filter.

Objectivity is merely and agreed upon individually derived mindset. Objectivity only exists in your mind. It’s a convention. A concept. A projection. Nothing more.

Anyone who thinks objectivity is a real thing, really needs to get back to psych 101 class and get mentally slapped about and around for quite a while, until they let go of that fundamental logic error. :)

Everyone agrees on orange.

In reality there are 7 billion interpretations of orange, and not one of them is the same.

Ear/brain combinations are far worse in this respect, regarding the level of individuation of differences.

It's like i always said, never believe what you hear you'll hear, only believe what you hear, hear?