Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?

@amir_asr Then what do you say to @soundfield who pointed out your old post where you did not level match?

Sorry, no.  JA's measurements assume you flush mount the speaker in an infinite wall.  No stand alone speaker is used that way. As such, his measurements overexaggerate the bass energy.  JA states the same: "The usual excess of upper-bass energy due to the nearfield measurement technique, which assumes that the radiators are mounted on a true infinite baffle, ie, one that extends indefinitely in both horizontal and vertical planes, is absent."

Once again, JA makes it clear its a nearfield measurement without correction, it's up to the viewer to read his speaker measurements section. And you to read your own website where long time speaker designers explain.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-make-quasi-anechoic-speaker-measurements-spinoramas-with-rew-and-vituixcad.21860/#post-726171

There is no way for you to predict where a speaker is located in a room as to provide any diffraction loss compensation. 

That's because you don't know what baffle diffraction loss is, it's based purely on the size/shape of the baffle, relative to wavelengths, not "location in room".

And again, ultimately, correction/EQ  below transition must be made based IN ROOM, not anechoic. The nearfield and/or anechoic is of limited use other than to compare speaker vs speaker in terms of extension. EQ will be needed regardless of how measurement is presented.

JA's measurements are fine and often done in situ, unlike yours, Genelec, Neumann, PSB, Revel, etc.

He's not bringing an NFS to his reviewers home. His quasi-anechoic on/off axis >300hz or so and nearfield below, along with in room (mostly) are suffice. Claiming that he needs an NFS is petty. Voecks also did just fine for your Salon 2s without.

NFS is a great tool, but certainly not mandatory for knowledgeable designers.

After several tests, the designer then made a conscious decision to let it be, since it sounded much better in its original untamed state after extensive listening tests. This is what many of us mean by "listen first and then measure". Putting more emphasis on listening and what sounds best as a means to an end, rather than making graph lines flat.

Oh I perfectly know what you mean. Before starting Audio Science Review, I co-founded a forum specifically focused on high-end audio.  Folks there spend more on audio tweaks than most of you spend on your entire system there!  That is where @daveyf and I met.  So there is nothing you need to tell me about audiophile behaviors this way.  I know it.

Here is the problem: there is no proof point that the assertion of said designer is true.  You say he did "extensive listening tests." I guarantee that you have no idea what that testing was let alone that it was extensive.  What music was used?  What power level?  What speakers?  How many listeners?  What is the qualifications of the designer when it comes to hearing impairments? 

Story is told and believed.  Maybe it is true.  Maybe it is not.  After all, if he saw a significant measurement error, logic says the odds of it sounding good is low.  After all, why else would you tell that story?  If the odds are low, then we better have a documented, controlled test that shows that.  Not just something told.

BTW, the worse person you want to trust in these things is the person with a vested interest.  I don't mean this in a derogatory way.  Designer just want to defend their designs and be right.  So we best not put our eggs in that basket and ask for proof.

I post this story from Dr. Sean Olive before but seems I have to repeat it. When he arrived from National Research Council to Harman (Revel, JBL, etc.), he was surprised at the strong resistance of both engineering and marketing people at the company:

To my surprise, this mandate met rather strong opposition from some of the more entrenched marketing, sales and engineering staff who felt that, as trained audio professionals, they were immune from the influence of sighted biases.

[...]

The mean loudspeaker ratings and 95% confidence intervals are plotted in Figure 1 for both sighted and blind tests. The sighted tests produced a significant increase in preference ratings for the larger, more expensive loudspeakers G and D. (note: G and D were identical loudspeakers except with different cross-overs, voiced ostensibly for differences in German and Northern European tastes, respectively. The negligible perceptual differences between loudspeakers G and D found in this test resulted in the creation of a single loudspeaker SKU for all of Europe, and the demise of an engineer who specialized in the lost art of German speaker voicing).

You see the problem with improper listening tests and engineer opinions of such products?  

These people shun science so much that they never test their hypothesis of what sounds good.  Not once they put themselves in a proper listening test.  Because if they did, they would sober up and quick!  Such was the case with me...

When I was at the height of my listening acuity at Microsoft and could tell that you flushed your toilet two states away :), my signal processing manager asked me if I would evaluate their latest encoder with their latest tuning.  I told him it would be faster if he gave me those tuning parameters and I would optimize them with listening and give him the numbers.

I did that after a couple of weeks of testing.  The numbers were floating point (had fractions) and I found it necessary to go way deep, optimizing them to half a dozen decimal places.  I gave him the numbers and he expressed surprise telling me they don't use the fractions in the algorithm!  That made me angry as I could hear the difference even when changing 0.001.  I told him the difference was quite audible and I could not believe he couldn't hear them.

This was all in email and next thing I know he sent me a link to two sets of encoded music files and asked me which sounded better.  I quickly detected one was clearly better and matched my observations above. I told him in no uncertain terms that one set was better.  Here is the problem: he told me the files were identical!  

I could not believe it.  So I listened again and the audible difference was there clear as a day.  So I perform a binary test only to find that the files were identical. Sigh.  I resigned my unofficial position as the encoder tuner.  :)

This is why I plead with you all to test your listening experiences in proper test.  Your designer could have easily done that.  He could have built two versions of that amp, matched their levels and performed AB tests on a number of audiophiles blind.  Then, if the outcome was that the less well measuring amp was superior, I would join him to defend it! 

@amir_asr   You have said that you have been insulted here by myself and others, yet you have the temerity to post what you just did about the experience level of all audiophiles. You put all of the group into one basket, that of being clumsy and ignorant consumers..and therefore easy marks. Not ok in my books.

Believe or not, there are folk here who have extensive experience and are not just shopping with their eyes and attracted to the highest price anything.

Once again, JA makes it clear its a nearfield measurement without correction, it's up to the viewer to read his speaker measurements section.

He doesn't make it clear.  Most people will have no idea what I quoted means.  They see a graph and run home thinking the designer screwed up.

NFS is a great tool, but certainly not mandatory for knowledgeable designers.

Go and ask Ascend.  Since purchasing NFS, post my measurements of their speaker with the same showing serious issues, their design has been hugely transformed.  They can get full 3-D radiation of a speaker in 3 hours and iterate on the design on daily basis.  In contrast, garage show operations like yours will make a crude gated measurement or two and call it the day.  

Yes, if you spend the time and energy as you linked to in ASR link, you can get proper measurements.  But that is not what JA is doing.  And certainly not what you are doing on daily basis.

So yes, what else is new.  Garage shop operation sells speakers for $15,000 but works hard to say a) you don't need to see any measurements of said speakers and b) incorrect measurements claimed to be correct.