I don't want to beat a dead horse but I'm bugged.


I just can't clear my head of this. I don't want to start a measurements vs listening war and I'd appreciate it if you guys don't, but I bought a Rogue Sphinx V3 as some of you may remember and have been enjoying it quite a bit. So, I head over to AVS and read Amir's review and he just rips it apart. But that's OK, measurements are measurements, that is not what bugs me. I learned in the early 70s that distortion numbers, etc, may not be that important to me. Then I read that he didn't even bother listening to the darn thing. That is what really bugs me. If something measures so poorly, wouldn't you want to correlate the measurements with what you hear? Do people still buy gear on measurements alone? I learned that can be a big mistake. I just don't get it, never have. Can anybody provide some insight to why some people are stuck on audio measurements? Help me package that so I can at least understand what they are thinking without dismissing them completely as a bunch of mislead sheep. 

russ69

Some engineers don't listen or want to. Many are in it only in it for the specs, not the music. The special designers with golden ears are a rare breed any more.  

OP,

 

Yes, good observation. I have managed technical people all my life. As one example, programmers… they love to program… so if you are not careful… as soon as they hear what is wanted… they happily roll up their sleeves and start programming, only to later find out they really didn’t fully understand what the requirements were. This is one aspect… doing what he likes to do. Well, many engineers love to measure things and make pretty charts. Amir loves this view into the world of electronics. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t reflect how equipment sounds.

 

Second, I have worked with hundreds of electrical engineers, they tend to think (I’m sorry) they know it all and that the real world conforms to their technical understanding of it. So, they simply refuse to believe the charts do not tell all. Engineers tend to be really stubborn in this.

 

So, add the two together and you get Amir’s site. It sounds logical, the charts are pretty. He is having a great time showing how full of bunk the audio world is. 

 

This is one of the reason that good audio designers are fairly rare.

Acoustic sound experience is subjectively registered FIRST and studied with objective measured implementation only after that...

Musical interpretation CANNOT be tought to an artificial Intelligence why?

Because it take a body rooted in the earth soil to make music meaningful experience...

Without a living heart sound cannot be an emotion... An emotion dont live in time but GENERATE his own time into the body metabolism by the way...

In acoustic and psycho-acoustic we not only try to replicate human hearing up to a point, but we study what make human hearing IRREPRODUCIBLE in the phenomenon called musical interpretation and perception...

Measuring gear and thinking that it is valuable to pick a piece of gear without listening to it is pathetical move...Ignorance to the third power...

😁😊

Physics is born with music and Pythagorean school in Greek time...There is no objective descritption and explanation of tonal playing perception even now...

And the geometer Fields medallist Alain Connes just connected music, primes numbers distributions and the deepest mysteries of quantum physics together...

And someone think that we can reduce sound experience to few measured tools? and what about music experience which even transcend sound itself ? why?

Because say Alain Connes "music"  reflect the non commutative geometry behind TIME experience itself...What is this source of diversities and variations behind time? it is a moving consciousness out of time...Emotion generate his OWN time out of time...

The musical tone scale is non commutative...

Musical time and tempo cannot be measured by a clock BY DEFINITION...

It is the reason by Valery Gergiev say that no one succeeded to imitate Furtwangler tempi...They emerge from music they are not put over the notes externally by a mechanical clock.....These tempi cannot be measured they only can be feeled in a body resonance effect... Call it ectasy or emotions...

Then Amir disciples are deluded crowd to the extreme... They are separed from reality by three qualitative gap: sound experience....music experience.... spiritual experience...When we listen we reunite these three gaps in one body/emotion

Anybody can hear but we must learn to listen....

 

I guess for some folks, having a super-precise instrument/piece of gear is of more importance than how it sounds.

As long as each side respects the other, seems equally valid to me, though I'm into sounds myself, not measurements. 

Bingo! I would take it a step further. I don’t think we will ever be able to “fully align our perceptions with measured performance”. And, you know what? I like it that way. Notice how there is always one very important word missing from these discussions, particularly on the part of the objectivists: MUSIC.

How does one quantify the reason that one drummer can lay down a fantastic groove; while another sounds accurate, but like a machine? Or, the sense that he and the bass player are in total musical sync, as opposed to in their own musical universes? Or, the subtle, but crucial feeling of tension, like a coiled spring, that an orchestra’s string section brings to the performance of a musical passage when they make a beautiful and seamless crescendo from ppp to fff ? What measurements exist that explain the perception of these very real things? And, aren’t these things what ultimately make the listening experience enjoyable? As in music, those are the things of the ART of audio electronic design; some designers have it and way too many don’t.

Great post  indeed that reflect also my experience...

Thanks