Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?
It’s easy to make snide remarks like “yes- I do the opposite of what he says.” And in some respects I agree, but if you do that, this is just going to be taken down. So I’m asking a serious question. Has ASR actually changed your opinion on anything? For me, I would say 2 things. I am a conservatory-trained musician and I do trust my ears. But ASR has reminded me to double check my opinions on a piece of gear to make sure I’m not imagining improvements. Not to get into double blind testing, but just to keep in mind that the brain can be fooled and make doubly sure that I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing. The second is power conditioning. I went from an expensive box back to my wiremold and I really don’t think I can hear a difference. I think that now that I understand the engineering behind AC use in an audio component, I am not convinced that power conditioning affects the component output. I think.
So please resist the urge to pile on. I think this could be a worthwhile discussion if that’s possible anymore. I hope it is.
"You have never explained why you recommend a product whose quality control is crap." If a product fails during testing, it absolutely does NOT get a recommendation. But if it works and performs well, it gets a recommendation. It is beyond the scope of my evaluation to do reliability surveys. No reviewer does this. The forum however, does a fantastic job of bringing out such issues especially since manufacturers are there to respond as well (or at least read what is being post). |
"No, you are the one doing the measuring and interpreting the data. Other followers chime in on occasion with their own "measurements" that would receive an F in high school science. " I am indeed doing the measurements. But this nordost speaker cable didn’t just fall in my lap from sky. A member was told by a salesman he better buy these cables or else his system would not sound good. He tried them and it made no difference so he was curious if measurements would show any difference. Well, measurements did show a difference: said Nordost cable picked up far more noise than a generic speaker cable! This was obvious to anyone with engineering knowledge so was trivial for me to create a measurement for it. So next time someone says this cable "removes a veil" due to "reduction of noise," you know that is completely false. You paid more to get a noisy cable! That is the interpretation that you can’t argue with. Post that testing, people gained general knowledge about the issues here and they will spread the word. This is why ASR is a team effort. Members enable testing of a ton of gear. Measurements provide very reliable facts. And knowledge gets discussed and disseminated. As to testing others doing not being any good, claims like yours are easy. Clearly you don’t have any facts to back that or we would already be reading them in your post. Remember, hundreds of gear gets measured every year on ASR. With very, very rare exceptions, no manufacturer has disputed them! As you imagine, no one has higher interest in measurements being correct than manufacturer. Yet we don’t see any counters even though 2/3 of the gear I test doesn’t get a recommendation due to poor performance. As a corollary to above, no audio reviewer’s work gets scrutinized remotely like mine. I publish a new review almost every day, subjecting my testing and opinion to verification/rejection by industry and membership at large. ASR would have thrived if the work we were doing was bad as you claim. |
"I was happy to see that Amir visited many rooms at Pacific Audiofest and declared them to sound good… no measurements needed!" Indeed. I can walk around and enjoy sound like everyone else. OK, I am more critical but still, good sound is good sound. What I bring back though is more than what sounded good and what didn't. I also bring back data like this:
We have arrived in a world where the speaker cable costs more than the amplifier it is connected to! The world of audio marketing is broken to the core with little checks and balances. So I bring that to the table with the help of your fellow audiophiles. Maybe that cable does improve audio. So I test them as they arrive. I don't dismiss them out of hand as many do (and rightly so). It is that data that is damning, not what I think. Ditto for what I say I heard at a show. It is a casual observation subject to proper verification in formal testing. |
Ironically, I think ASR changed my mind about the importance of measurements as an arbiter of good sound. It seems that we've reached a point where distortion products are so vanishingly small that even bad measurements don't mean much. But my jury is still out on DAC filters. There's a black art. Correlation is not causation and it's very true with measurements, too. |
Setting price aside, you actually seem much less critical to me than the typical audiophile. You do seem very sensitive and critical to price, though.
Audio marketing "broken to the core"? I guess you need to exert that kind dramatic flair to support your narrative. |
