Honesty of the Reviewers

I grew up riding my bicycle to Radio Shack where I read everything I could get my hands on. Like Isaac Asimov whose father owned a bookstore but he still couldn’t afford the books so he carefully read each one and put it back looking new, I read all the magazines and tech specs. The guys in the store even put up with me trying out all the different speakers and stuff. 
At some point as I moved up from paper route money to McDonalds ($1.35/hr!) I was able to afford a subscription to Stereo Review. I read each issue cover to cover, memorized all the words of wisdom of that greatest of greats Julian Hirsch. 
 

Years later after college when finally I had some real money and went shopping it was like pulling teeth to get me to realize there really is more to wire than gauge. Frequency response is not paramount. Signal to noise unless obnoxiously bad isn’t even relevant. Watts aren’t equal and hardly even matter. And I could go on. 
Learning all this, or more to the point unlearning all this, was a long slow painful process. 
It wasn’t until much later that I came to learn another guy J Gordon Holt had been writing on audio around the same time. Only unlike Hirsch and his measurements Holt had it right: the final arbiter of fidelity is the listener. 
Hirsch harmed a whole generation of audiophiles, hopelessly misleading them into a fruitless reliance on numbers. His legacy haunts us to this day. 

there really is more to wire than gauge

Speaker cable is a bit different from a lot of the interconnect cables we handle, in several respects. Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn’t required. The low impedance of the circuit, meanwhile, makes capacitance, which can be an issue in high-impedance line or microphone-level connections practically irrelevant. The biggest issue in speaker cables, from the point of view of sound quality, is simply conductivity; the lower the resistance of the cable, the lower the contribution of the speaker cable’s resistance to the damping factor, and the flatter the frequency response will be. While one can spend thousands of dollars on exotic speaker cable, in the end analysis, it’s the sheer conductivity of the cable, and (barring a really odd design, which may introduce various undesirable effects) little else that matters. The answer to keeping conductivity high is simple: the larger the wire, the lower the resistance, and the higher the conductivity. -- Blue Jeans Cable

That’s all there is to know about wire. No magic, no sentient being.

 

Frequency response is not paramount

If not paramount, I can’t think of any other thing that is more important. The entire freq spectrum of the music must be reproduced.

 

Signal to noise unless obnoxiously bad isn’t even relevant

Would you buy an amp with 15% THD? Regardless of what you hear, it’s an indication of the skill of the amp designer.

 

Watts aren’t equal and hardly even matter

The watt is the unit of measurement of electrical power.  Period.  Manufacturers have been known to lie about watts.

 

the final arbiter of fidelity is the listener.

The listener is the final arbiter of the decision to buy or not. Fidelity can be measured. Fidelity being identified as the degree to which the signal is faithful to the original signal. Once into your speaker and out into your room, well, that’s unknowable except to the listener.

 

Cheers

@millercarbon +1 "the final arbiter of fidelity is the listener"

@rok2id "Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn’t required” -there is a loop inductance of the speaker cable as well, which sometimes resonates with speaker’s crossover circuit, and gives amp hard time, to be stable! Kimber kable uses minimizing loop inductance direction in their speaker cable designs, using those in my setup improved SQ significantly. -most amplifiers have feedback loop, which can be affected by very high frequencies from RFI/EMI sources. I use low loop inductance Kimber Kable cable to lower such impact in my system. -some of 4/8 Ohms speakers with higher order filter crossovers have much lower impedance than rated, sometimes 1Ohm, thus higher output current amp does sound better with them.

@rok2id

the final arbiter of fidelity is the listener.

The listener is the final arbiter of the decision to buy or not.

Fidelity can be measured.

Fidelity being identified as the degree to which the signal is faithful to the original signal.

 

Beautifully spelt out.

I hope Miller appreciates that things have changed somewhat since his last tenure here.

 

If any of you Audiophiles really desired honesty in reviews / reviewers, you would not have destroyed Julian Hirsch and Stereo Review.

All it takes to be a reviewer these days is to ask, what is the MSRP? The higher the MSRP, the mo’ better it must be. Also, knowing a few nonsensical words to describe things helps.

My favorite, "it’s a nice well rounded amplifier, but it’s not built for anger." (what hifi)

 

I’m not familiar with either Julian Hirsch or Gordon J Holt but their stories seem to match with what happened in UK reviewing.

It basically went from information to entertainment.

You only need to look at YouTube to see which is more popular.

I’m definitely old school in this regard and Hirsch sounds like the one I’d put my confidence in.

 

@grislybutter

I wholeheartedly agree with you in regard to reviews. They are merely entertainment, and often not even that.

 

The funny thing about these youtubers is how much they talk about themselves.

 

Since the days of Milton Erickson his work in hypnosis has been increasingly used as a sales technique.

I guess some of these reviewers believe they actually have a personality. There were quite a few DJs I recall who had similar issues.

 

[Ericksonian hypnosis is based on 3 principles –

To help someone, you have to empathise with the person and establish a connection (we now call this ‘rapport building’). Otherwise, the person would not trust you have the intention or the ability to help them.

To access the unconscious mind, you have to distract the conscious. He achieved this using a variety of techniques.

Indirect suggestions have a greater likelihood of being accepted by the unconscious and helping the person make natural, sustainable changes.]