Amir and Blind Testing

and I will assume for the sake of this conversation that Amir is well intended and professes what he believes to be true. I will assume that his forum is his pet project meant to “debunk” years of supremacist audiophile unobtanium. The happy few will continue to revel in the performance of their true to life systems while ASR fans will take great pleasure in sharing the critical opinion of their oscilloscope guru, Matrix references and all.

Here's an interesting quote from Kevin Scott, Living Voice speaker designer.

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."

Enough of the us versus them.

@mapman +1

people who refuse to use their senses and rely on tech measurements, exclusively

This is focusing on tools, and ignoring another variable - preferences.

An analogy. Two people like red cars - same preferences.

One will investigate the properties (measurements) of the paint and say it is a red that is OK. The other will use their eyes and say that it is a red that is OK.

Now - let’s change things a bit. The first person now likes silver cars, and the second still likes red cars.

Different preferences, *and* different methods of arriving at their preferred solution.

I would say with some certainty that the second person who likes red could also use properties (measurements).

Examples - the recent Carver amp. Nelson Pass’s kit (? camp) amp. Some other things that Amir places in the red corner of his rankings - useful information!

When making purchases in this hobby/sport, at some stage we have to bite the bullet and trust our senses. There are products and technologies that exist that effectively re-create the music we love with more finesse, more sense of realism and triggers a response for recognition of music/ instruments with less effort, engendering more enjoyment.

I do understand that different doesn’t equate to better, however, variety here might be the distinguishing factor that makes a different device stand out or be of interest.
I would hope after a point of exposure to higher quality equipment and setup, and opportunity to hear live music played in a variety of venues, we the end users can recognise truly better gear when we hear it?

“I weight my senses as the final arbiter.”
I do subscribe to this thinking, and yet I see no weakness in trusting the skills of veterans in this craft if they are willing to point out and describe differences while listening. I believe it’s the recognition, the statistical matching of the authentic and the re-created that transports our consciousness into more or less accepting the artificial as pleasant and beautiful.

If we can’t at all trust ourselves, how are we supposed to engage in swapping out and reorganising our system to allow for the variety the sound the system can itself make to the presentation??
We change music for variety, I think we change our system for it as well.