Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

"You mean to tell me you have never earned a single penny from a commercial or residential contract for your brick and mortar business that was referred by ASR. I find that highly improbable."

We are not "brick and mortar."  Madrona is has an office space and we rarely if ever meet with customers there.  Our typical customer is an ultra high net worth individual who has no idea what or who ASR is.  Or care one bit about this hobby.  I don't recall a single instance of someone from ASR asking us to handle their custom project.  Part of the reason is that Madrona just doesn't do smaller projects.  

There are some customers of Madrona by the way who also read and appreciate ASR.  But they predate my creation of ASR Forum.  There may also be customers we have gotten as a result of my reputation/ASR work but without my personal knowledge.

2-channel audio is just not our thing at Madrona.  It is a cut-throat business and something we don't know how to do so we don't go after it.  Kudos to other companies who know how to make a living out of it.  We sell one lighting system and the cost can be as much as $100,000!  We know how to do that.  We don't know how how to sell a Wilson speaker for the same amount.

I suggest you cut back on these accusations.  It is totally improper to keep making things up that has to do with my reputation based on what is "improbable" to you.  Not everyone does things in this industry because they want to make money.  Learn that and move on.

If you don’t care about money which I again don’t believe or one millisecond, and it’s not a motivator then why do you care if a video from YouTube is on your website. It only gives you more users and traffic. Puzzling.

I don't care about the traffic or more users at the cost of setting a precedence that you can use our audience for commercial purposes.  You seem to not understand the concept of having core principles that you stick to.   I suggest you move on.

@prof nice setup! I had Benchmark DAC 3 HGC it was nice but I liked the Bricasti M3 better.
Guess you’ll be upgrading the CJ tubed monos to the Topping amp at some point. That would be a logical progression. Topping is high end, as transparent as it gets, and probably mops the floor with CJs when it comes to measurements…

I’m just kidding…chillax….

@audphile1

I’ve tried SS amps in my system over the years, most recently the Bryston 4B3, and I have always ultimately preferred my CJs.

I enjoy the slightly cleaner sound of my Benchmark SS preamp sometimes vs the CJ tube preamp...but then again often prefer the CJ preamp. (I actually did a blind test between them, just out of curiosity).

My view is that ultimately the level of distortion we are talking about in, say, my CJ tube amps vs a Topping or Benchmark amp, are quite low. There’s no "incredible revelation of detail" from some of the best measuring solid state amplification even compared to my old tube amps. With the tube amps it’s more of a slightly different presentation of details, vs one being "way more revealing" than another.

Of course being an audiophile means obsessing over the tiniest sonic differences. That’s what makes us kooks vs the general public :-)

So I use the tube amps because even if the audible difference is very subtle in the big picture, it’s a subtlety that is subjectively significant for me.

But I certainly think it’s a great thing for people like Amir to get measurements out there so an audiophile who wishes to can use that information. An audiophile who is seeking accuracy isn’t going to choose my tube amps over a Topping, and knowing measurements can help ensure he knows what he’s getting.

Amir, can you share what constitutes a "properly run listening test" from your perspective? What characteristics are you listening for, specifically?

It wildly varies depending on class of product.  On say, a power tweak, I listen for any difference regardless of what it is.  If I can distinguish it from not using the tweak, then that is major news by itself.

For testing of distortion, it is best to hear it exaggerated first, and then dial it back.  So if you have a low power/high distortion amplifier, first crank it way up and hear the distortion clearly.  Then back down the volume control and see at what point that same artifact is no longer there.

For things like speakers, single speaker testing doesn't make sense.  Ultimately we don't know how a recoding is supposed to sound like.  Research relies on paring at least 4 speakers together and compare them.  That way, the bad speaker will stand out as an exception to the rest.  Such tests are outside of the means of most audiophiles but a few have tried as I linked to yesterday.

In all cases, deep knowledge of what you are testing, including measurements, is a great help to focus your listening tests.  This is very important in hearing lossy compression artifacts for example.

Back to speaker (and headphone listening), selection of content is paramount.  You want broad spectrum content that is mostly invariant.  That is, it doesn't keep changing.  That way you can do comparisons without the content itself changing on you.  This is incredibly helpful when I am developing EQ filters to correct response errors.  I want to be able to turn the filter on and off and hear the effect.   But if the content changes from dumbs to vocals and then the piano, I can't do this.  

Something very useful in testing lower powered amplifiers and speakers/headphones is to have a mix of bass and high frequencies.  This way, when the bass notes come and demand power, you can listen to not only how they get distorted by the impact on the rest of the spectrum (e.g. brightness as a result of too much harmonic distortion).

Another key is to stick to the same set of tracks and only use them no matter how tired you get listening to them!  You learn what parts of them are revealing, saving you time and effort.  Throwing a new random piece of music at every new piece of audio you are testing as some reviewers do, is just wrong.

Hopefully this at least partially answers your question.  :)