"I Trust My Ears"

I mean, objective measurements can certainly help you get to where you're trying to go, but isn't the ultimate judge how it sounds to you? I trust my ears in the same way I trust my taste buds when evaluating a good steak. The butcher can go on and on about how this cut or marbling should taste better, but it's ultimately up to what I find enjoyable to eat.

Measurements can be a useful screening tool if nothing else. For example, speakers that roll off 6 dB at 50 Hz, or amps rated 200W into 8 ohm, 250W into 4 ohm, and "not recommended" below that, I know right away they’re not for me.

But they could make other folks happy and that’s great.

@gdaddy1  I am 84 years old and by definition must have deficient high frequency hearing but I still can't listen to most B&W speakers for long because of their over emphasis on high frequencies. Is that my ears or my brain?

@mazian you don't have deficient hearing in the problem areas which is mostly the lower treble region between 2 and 6kHz unless you can't hear to 6kHz.

But yes B&W newer iterations have always sounded stringent, overly bitey to me and the data doesn't lie about that

So preferring bright speakers because of high frequency hearing loss isn't a bulletproof phenomenon. I know many people who don't like B&W, Martin Logan and many speaker brands that have overly zealous presentation in the upper registers

@devinplombier someone gets it. Instead of blindly doing whack-a-mole with your speaker preferences. You demo something that intrigues you, look and pray it has a competent and full spin data, not some measly on axis FR. Then try to demo other speakers within that form of presentation so you can narrow it down.

That's how I ended up with my setup.

Also shunning measurements when the room is basically the biggest denominator is weird to me. Cos if you have a dedicated space and just use vibes to set it up. It will sound good but you'd be bottlenecking yourself not optimising the setup with help of some RTA