Audio Science Review = "The better the measurement, the better the sound" philosophy


"Audiophiles are Snobs"  Youtube features an idiot!  He states, with no equivocation,  that $5,000 and $10,000 speakers sound equally good and a $500 and $5,000 integrated amp sound equally good.  He is either deaf or a liar or both! 

There is a site filled with posters like him called Audio Science Review.  If a reasonable person posts, they immediately tear him down, using selected words and/or sentences from the reasonable poster as100% proof that the audiophile is dumb and stupid with his money. They also occasionally state that the high end audio equipment/cable/tweak sellers are criminals who commit fraud on the public.  They often state that if something scientifically measures better, then it sounds better.   They give no credence to unmeasurable sound factors like PRAT and Ambiance.   Some of the posters music choices range from rap to hip hop and anything pop oriented created in the past from 1995.  

Have any of audiogon (or any other reasonable audio forum site) posters encountered this horrible group of miscreants?  

fleschler

I'm a member on ASR but I don't post often, mainly to defend the honor of vinyl.  It does not go over well and I wind up clashing with the regular trolls there who don't want anyone to enjoy vinyl.  So dogmatic in pronouncing digital superior, but it just doesn't sound that way to my ears.  They don't value the human factor there, wanting to boil everything down to measurements.  Music just isn't that simple, it'd be nice if it was, but it ain't.  They pray to the great God of SINAD, differences in which I find inaudible.  I just took a distortion listening test on YT and I wasn't bothered by it until it hit like 8% THD, a huge number.  The noise floor in my quiet listening room is like 35 dB, so there's really only 55-60 dB of dynamic range for me practically.

To be fair I did buy a class D Hypex power amp on their suggestions, review and teardown.  And cheap SMSL DAC too based on Amir's review, though that's about as far as I'm willing to go on the digital end.  But they do piss me off a lot with the mob mentality.  Someone got a 30 day ban recently for calling them angry joyless nerds, audio bullies getting revenge for traumatic childhoods.  Not nice, but pretty accurate in my eyes.

alanhuth

I certainly agree with Amir when it comes to power cords.

Testing power cords that way he does will never show a thing.

Their purpose is to stop AC emissions contaminating surrounding equipment. The better the shielding the better the improvement.

That alone is enough to indicate Amir is a nincompoop of the highest order.

@drewdawg999   100% agreement with you as well as @yoyoyaya   @henry53 That's what I'm complaining about ASR. 

@td_dayton No, the video did not anger me as it wasn't directed at me.   Having an opinion that there is no difference in sound quality between cheap and expensive gear makes no sense to me and is non-sense but Darko can believe whatever he wants to.

@mitch2 I never intimated that I was superior to the other posters on the forum, just that I have a great deal of experience recording at world reknown venues as well as performing there.  Everything I stated was taken out of context.  Every suggestion that there is more than one point of view was nullified.  Calling them miscreants is appropriate. 

Every person hears differently, prefers different music and each system/room requires synergy to extract the best sound. 

ASR has a religion and hates anyone who is not a believer.  Audiogon is sooooo superior despite some rancorous differing opinions.   What's Best in Audio,  Audiocircle and so many other sites permit differing opinions and one can learn from many posters.   Not much to learn from ASR posters.  

@fleschler he doesn't say that in the video. darko has been quite critical of the 'measurements over everything' crowd. in fact, the "audiophiles are snobs (with money to burn" title is in scare quotes because he spends most of that video directly criticizing their closed-mindedness - he calls the dogmatic measurement people inverse snobs. i don't think you actually watched it 😂