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And your point is...

what?? If I were that "objectivist," I would consider getting another doctor. To diagnose clinical depression on the basis of a few opening sentences borders on malpractice, in my opinion. There are a number of other illnesses, some very serious, that could lead to these symptoms, and I'll leave it to some of our medically-knowledgeable posters to list some if they want to bother. In fact, a blood test could very easily rule out some major contenders.

When are people going to give up on this subjective-objective debate. As it is typically posed, it is silly. There is no question that laboratory measuring devices are far more sensitive and accurate than our hearing, but it is also the case that laboratory measurements cannot ultimately be of decisive help in picking audio equipment, especially high-quality equipment. For now, the ear-brain combination is vastly superior in judging the extremely complex, fine nuances that are involved in the quality reproduction of sound. We don't know what to measure, haven't learned what measurement are important and how to weight different parameters, and most important, different people perceive and judge (like) sound in different ways. Your great speaker may be my terrible one, though we are listening to exactly the same speaker. How will measurements ever account for that, unless each person is also calibrated. Just as a chemical analysis of a dish prepared by two different chefs is unlikely to reveal which one is the great chef and the other is the meerly good one, a laboratory analysis of the sound for a speaker is likely not to tell to you which speaker you will love and which you will only like a lot. It can probably tell you which one ones you won't like if you take the trouble to compare lots of measurements to the sounds of lots of speakers.

Measurements have their place and remain supreme in certain arenas. In the complex arena of the human senses and perception, measurements right now can only go so far. For evaluating audio equipment, measurements fall far short of giving enough information for critical audiophiles. [As an aside, though, I recently found some published distortion curves and detailed frequency response curves for a number of speakers. For the fun of it I decided to rank the speakers just on the basis of smoothness and flatness of the frequency response curves and level of the distortion without seeing the names of the speakers. I then compared these ranking with my previous listening ratings for the ones I had heard and was amazed to find a very good correlation. It wasn't one-to one by any means, but speakers with flat, smooth frequency responses and low distortion definitely tended to be ones that I liked a lot. They all would be considered high-quality speakers, and low raters by hearing that were in the $10-20K range also rated low according to the measurements. Still, I would never buy a speaker based on how it measures or even based on how someone else says it sounds. The measurements are still on the primitive side, and my tastes are my tastes.

Joe


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