Do you trust your ears more than measurements?

Audio is subjective. 

I spend money to please my ears. I measure to figure out WTF is happening, not to tell me what "good" sounds like.

So, if you ask me, what are the best amplifiers ever made, clearly the CJ Premiere 12s. How do they measure? Kind of like garbage!! :D

OTOH, I rely heavily on frequency and distortion measurements to guide m in building new speakers as well as setting the up, repeatably and predictably in a room.

Even then however, lots of studies show that we like different overall amounts of bass. Who should win? My mic or your ears? Tell me this: who worked hard for the home, amp and speakers? You did, so your personal and emotional tastes should win.

Also, the measurements most audiophiles read about were decided upon 50 years ago, so I cannot believe that they these simple half dozen or so measurements we read for an amp or speaker are inclusive of all that can happen in an ear brain mechanism for everyone, or that the mastering engineer in 1982 was listening to my system at the time, so .... be true to your own decadence I think.

No sense measuring without listening. So it’s not an either or. You can listen without measuring but when time comes to figure out what’s wrong or could be made better you can only guess and the devil is always in the details. No doubt measurements can only help if used correctly so there is a learning curve to tackle there before one can hope for positive results.

I’ve recently measured all my rooms using Room EQ Wizard freeware and that provides the information needed to make proper adjustments that make a night and day difference in each case. If you haven’t measured your room, you are working with a huge handicap. I suspect many would be off the hifi merry go round a lot faster once they come to the realization that it’s largely room acoustics they hear so it’s important to know what those are in order to be able to cut to the chase. Throwing more money at the problem alone is not a very effective way to fix what’s broken in most cases.

Dan Foley from Audio Precision wrote an interesting short article in 2016. A few clips from the article:

• "As he explains, instrumentation noise floor is an overlooked contributor for the reason we are not able to measure a particular audible “distortion,” especially with low sound pressure level (SPL) signals."
• "the reason given as to why a particular audible “distortion” cannot be measured is that the measurement equipment doesn’t have sufficient signal processing capabilities, such as measurement bandwidth or Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) resolution."

article: "Test and Measurement: “I Can Hear It. Why Can’t I Measure It?”"