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

A couple of posters who argued the ASR view did so respectfully and presented interesting and thoughtful views, for example @prof and axo, others not so much. What annoyed me and I suspect some others is Amir’s attitude. Fine, he has a viewpoint, however he hectors and attempts to shout down others of opposing views.

A few of us have been thrown off his site. You saw it here where his attitude was that he has come to teach us the right path. He has a highly inflated opinion of himself and brooks no opposition to his dogmatism. He belittles others, for example his comments about Goldenear in his exchange with Darko. He does not need to do this as it just makes him look like a prat. He mostly does the same when his testing methodology is called into question. He has clearly made mistakes in the past but usually refuses to acknowledge these.

In the meantime let’s follow the advice of Herve Deletraz, " Listen first, then measure."

ive devised a blind listening test of my own. i flip through a bin of records blindfolded and choose one at random. then i put it on, crack a beer, and enjoy the music. you guys should try this - VERY revealing, and unimpeachable on the scientific level.

@prof

You saying you blind tested a shunyata power cable vs. a cheap $15 is a strawman also, you can’t prove it to anyone here that you actually did that.

when all is said and done, if i need to know how something sounds, i'm simply going to go listen to it and make my own judgements

There is NO question that a device that measures better will sound more accurate(maybe not better depending on taste). The problem is we don't know how to measure audio products completely. We can do some measurements but the ones we do do not define a product. At minimum we need to do many measurements(and flatness and % distortion is far from sufficient) and also learn how to combine them for a final result. We can't do that now. The best we can do is identify measurements that are good clues and combine them with experienced listening however that's defined for each individual.

It is possible that some bad measurements can tell us that a product can't be accurate but we are miles from measurements totally defining accuracy. For what it's worth I am a measurements(and subjective person) and there are some measurements that I believe are good clues but they aren't the classical distortion and response ones. I recall my late friend Murray Zeligman who knew more about measurements than most  tell me the first thing he looked at for a speaker was the impedance curve because it was a big source of predicting speaker performance.