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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
td_dayton
320 posts
 

@nonoise superb read, appreciate you posting that 

decooney
1,980 posts
 

Interesting. From the SOULNOTE site, a little more on their philosophy.  Some of them apparently came from the original Marantz crew, quote -

"Soulnote believes dynamic performance keeping accuracy of the original waveform on the time axis as the most important for music playback, which is, however, still unmeasurable by any of the conventional methods. At Soulnote, only listening dominates the determination and improvement of circuit, selection of parts and mechanical construction. This approach is a kind of antithesis against the supremacy of static performance."

 

nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,842 posts
 

Hey guys,

I'm just happy I came across that article demonstrating the fallacy of believing static measurements is all there is to know, and needed. Kind of reminds me of when Apple came out with those "moving" still images taken on an iPhone. When you took a photo, it was actually a very short video and when viewed, gave life to that photo that it never really could capture as a still image.

All the best,
Nonoise

amir_asr
777 posts
 

I'm just happy I came across that article demonstrating the fallacy of believing static measurements is all there is to know, and needed. 

Three things:

1. The stimulus is not static. A sine wave is time varying.  A multitone is time varying and complex.  Jitter signal (J-test) is also complex and time varying.  Only DC signals are static which we don't use for audio testing.

2. For the most part, audio gear is state and memory less. The system performance doesn't change or rely on what came 1 second before current time.  In that regard, "static" testing of this sort is quite appropriate.

When testing systems that do have memory such as lossy audio compression (e.g. MP3), we cannot use this type of testing because they do have memory and adapt to signal to being encoded.  There, we rely on controlled/blind listening tests.

3. I also using music files for such things as null tests of power cables and such.  This is more done to do away with objections like yours more than being a need.

amir_asr
777 posts
 

@fleschler

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

 

No, I just got here.  😁

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