@billsame +1
The Audio Science Review (ASR) approach to reviewing wines.
Imagine doing a wine review as follows - samples of wines are assessed by a reviewer who measures multiple variables including light transmission, specific gravity, residual sugar, salinity, boiling point etc. These tests are repeated while playing test tones through the samples at different frequencies.
The results are compiled and the winner selected based on those measurements and the reviewer concludes that the other wines can't possibly be as good based on their measured results.
At no point does the reviewer assess the bouquet of the wine nor taste it. He relies on the science of measured results and not the decidedly unscientific subjective experience of smell and taste.
That is the ASR approach to audio - drinking Kool Aid, not wine.
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Love the wine analogy! I have often said that good HiFi is like good wine – you pay more for what you don’t get. Nasty sounding distortions and nasty tastes. The biggest differences are that wine comparison thrives on blind tasting, there is a defined point-scoring system, but there is also no objective standard (comparison with live performance). Both ‘hobbies’ have had technological breakthroughs like SS. Stainless steel for wine, solid state for sound. I would argue wine also has a digital transformation, in the Stelvin cap which converted porous ‘analog’ cork stoppers into binary on-off bottle tops. Science and technology underpin each! Australia started with cuttings transported on the First Fleet and established its first wine college in 1897. Where I live in Canberra there are over 140 vineyards and 40 wineries. Many are run by scientists including Nobel prize winning physicist Brian Smidt, who now heads our leading university. Many others are chemists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) which invented WiFi using its expertise in fast Fourier transforms from radio astronomy. The Canberra District does not even get a mention amongst the 60 designated wine growing regions Australian wine - Wikipedia and we locals hope to keep the secret. Australia’s top drop is around $1,000 a bottle and we get peeved when others, flaunting their affluence, mix it with coke. When it won a prestigious French competition, it was disqualified because it was so good, it just had to be French (in the minds of the judges). In my opinion, the least good Aussie wines come in half way up the French scale. While audiophiles debate the effects of room shape, wine sensations are dramatically changed by the shape of the glassware! Try it! |
@richardbrand that's a cute story. Are you making that up? 🤔 |
No, not entirely! I am not smart enough to make stories up ... There was a brilliant DVD documentary about how the Australian wine industry got its foot into the European market. The DVD is unfortunately titled "Chateau Chunder" see Chateau Chunder: A Wine Revolution - The Education Shop. I leant my copy but never got it back. The story in the DVD is that a couple of Australian winemakers and a marketer organised wine tasting dinners for French wine critics. The top drop was underrated until it was tasted in a blind comparison, when it won. It is Penfold's Grange. I quote from the link I gave earlier "The great 1955 vintage was submitted to competitions beginning in 1962 and over the years has won more than 50 gold medals. The vintage of 1971 won first prize in Syrah/Shiraz at the Wine Olympics in Paris. The 1990 vintage was named 'Red Wine of the Year' by the Wine Spectator magazine in 1995, which later rated the 1998 vintage 99 points out of a possible 100". I accidentally conflated with another wine from earlier days: "At the 1873 Vienna Exhibition the French judges, tasting blind, praised some wines from Victoria, but withdrew in protest when the provenance of the wine was revealed, on the grounds that wines of that quality must clearly be French."[15] |
There are thousands of people like you, Amir & Gene & Erin included, that cannot hear a difference with cables. Doesn’t mean there isn’t. Different metals of cables, purity, capacitance, inductance, quality of connectors, length, geometry, type of shielding, thickness. All of this come together to form a cable. To say cables have no difference is saying all of these aspects don’t matter. Which if you give it 2 minutes to think about, is quite ludicrous. Especially for a "no-nonsense scientist" such as yourself and Amir. Erin has stated he cannot hear a difference between amplifiers, does not mean there’s no difference. Leave the idea of cables aside for a minute. I’ve encountered hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of people that have said they cannot hear a difference between DAC, AMP, and pre-amp. These people, like you, truly believe there’s no difference with certain components. The facts remain. If you cannot measure a cable, what can you really measure? |
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