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.
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. |
@amir_asr Amir…how about incorporating listening tests and publishing those results along with the measurements. As most reviewers do, list your reference system so that your subscribers can see in what context a component was reviewed and how it performed using your ears as a measurement tool. Don’t use a $99 dac to test a $1700 usb cable. That’s as far from a real world use case as you could possibly get. So do that for high end components that either are or pretend to be reference level (i.e. audioquest and nordost cables, chord dacs, marantz sacd player, etc) |
"how about incorporating listening tests" he does "list your reference system" he does "Don’t use a $99 dac to test a $1700 usb cable." why not, if it is transparent? Is a more expensive DAC going to break the cable? Well-designed DACs are insulated from artifacts from USB cables. "So do that for high end components that either are or pretend to be reference level " What is reference level? A lot of the cheap gear he measures has less noise and distortion than the high end brands. Besides, he uses an Audio Precision system to measure, which is truly "reference level", if anything is. Sometimes it seems like High End is an ouroboros, eating only itself. |
