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

Kokakolia:

"iiWi Reviews on YouTube is one of the few places where those Chinese amps are reviewed subjectively. The reviewer got me very interested in the Sabaj A10A which seems to be working well with his KEF LS50 Meta. His reference amp is a Hegel H190 (which is a perfect match for the KEF). iiWi Reviews was very happy with the Sabaj A10A, stating that the amp disappeared and he was just enjoying the music."

A number of Chinese brands are of very high quality. Opera Consonance for example gets excellent reviews in German Hi Fi magazines. AM makes brilliant amplifiers and they are not cheap but they are heavily over engineered and weigh a lot. The sound quality is excellent and is among the best of all tube amps you can buy.

Where people get annoyed with ASR is when some say "I will not listen to this because it measures badly". Similarly when they claim that "All Dacs sound the same", I know this is a nonsense. I have been to dealers where different Dacs were used on the same system and the dealer said nothing about cost so the argument that if it is more expensive you think it sounds better is absolute rubbish.  There is often a big difference in the quality of sound. I dislike the sound of Dacs using ESS chips as I find many of them have a mid range glare which is not conducive to female voices. When I mentioned this I was informed I like distortion and I was thrown off the site and I am not the first or the last. I was told that I am not willing to be educated and learn.

It is also the arrogance in the site that is nauseating. "Stick around here and we will teach you". That together with the worship of Amir as if he is some sort of spiritual guru is enough to put off anyone.

I do wonder how ASR would deal with testing some Accuphase products-especially their CD players and DACs.Accuphase components do have a "house sound" .You get a sound that has a lot of timbre and harmonics and general tonal richness.And yet any Accuphase product I have seen measured also has textbook perfect measurements.Their CD/DACs really stand out from the crowd for having this character.Somebody described it as digital with soul.Esoteric is another high end Japanese company that is well regarded for its CD players and DACs and which also measure perfectly but  they sound very different to Accuphase and have no character at all.So how would ASR account for these sonic differences?My guess is they would just avoid addressing it.

A system put toghether from ASR favourites would be very very good. I got one. 

@gosta what you consider "very very good" is only your opinion and valid only when someone else's sonic tastes align with yours. I have their darling DAC the Topping D90SE I purchased out of curiosity, and it is merely competent to my ears in my system. Nothing like the $ unicorn they claim it to be, midfi at best.

You might get decent sound using their recommended products I suppose but seeing they pay no attention to things that can't be measured like image depth and musical involvement and rhythm and timing It would probably only be a fluke.

And like Kairosman says those products are probably more likely to sound half decent rather than very good.I have a fiend who bought one of those DACs and is of the same opinion.A 15 year old Musical Fidelity DAC and a 27 year old Sony CD player sound much better.