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In Reply to: RE: The problem is that the measurements don't always reflect posted by Ralph on August 19, 2015 at 08:52:41
The problem of just listening is you can fool yourself way too easily. Listening is vulnerable to circular reasoning. A great old English reviewer, Percy Wilson, was fond of a story called the Zanzibar Fallacy to describe this.
Follow Ups:
The problem of relying on measurements is you can fool yourself way too easily
Alan
And you can't fool yourself with Listening?!
...usually occurs in A/b testing or short term listening and is why many audiophiles are unhappy with new "upgrades".
Longer term listening in your system is the only way to tell if you prefer one component over another.
Prefer is a different word than fidelity. And while I agree with long term listening it has its dangers also. Over time you may get used to the sound.
Edits: 08/19/15
...since nothing reproduces music in the home with even close to 100% accuracy and fidelity, it's all about the trade-offs you prefer and can live with.
nt
You've left yourself open to any trade offs you like. There are obviously some speakers where the trade offs are bad colorations. I suspect you don't disagree with that.
By the way Floyd Toole has done work where he correlated measurements with subjective responses from listeners and he claims well over 95% correspondence. And the measurements he describes as good are ones that look good on graphs. They are the ones an engineer would like.
...so if you take a few speakers Floyd has measured, correlated and pronounced accurate, which one is the most accurate?
They all sound different.
like room placement are considered *unimportant*. I had a "deer in the headlights" interaction with his protege, Sean Olive here . Why would anyone think that optimizing speaker placement is important, right? :)
They regularly skewer the Martin-Logan speaker tested and while that is not one of my favorites, it does require different placement from a monopole box.
It would be interesting if they attempted to put the big Nolas, Scaenas, Wilsons on the "shuffler".
I haven't heard most of them but while I'm sure they sound different I suspect it isn't as different as you suspect. I find it amazing how those that don't get their hands very dirty often doubt those that do. It's one of the reasons the real designers of gear that many of the Audio Asylum no longer contribute which has been a monster loss to the conversations here.
> I find it amazing how those that don't get their hands very dirty often doubt those that do.>
Whatever that means...
Like Peter said and I agreed, measurements are for designers, listening is for audiophiles.
If some want to use measurements to decide what to listen to, more power to them.
And yes, a lot of talented people from the industry, including the audio press, have left because of the know-it-all jerks who post here.
I thought the discussion was about reviewers not measuring , nothing about consumers/audioP ....
...this is Peter's post up above.
I find the reverse to be true.
-until then we will continue to be having a lot of subjectivist/objectivist debate, we won't be able to tell how it sounds from the specs, and equipment will still measure poorly and sound just fine.
We do need more and better measurements. But that's no reason to not use the ones we have that do tell us something. Too many audiophiles seem to want to ignore all measurements either because they don't understand them or they don't like what they tell us.
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