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In Reply to: RE: Wouldn’t it be great to measure overall system improvement? posted by skinzy on July 21, 2014 at 09:34:32
In the final analysis, the one thing which matters more than anything else is whether or not our ears are stimulated by what they are hearing.
The music comes first of course (I can think of plenty of recordings which make my system sound amazing where the music is dull). I'll take great music with mediocre sound quality over great sound quality with mediocre music any day.
There is no better measure than trusting your ears. Measuring equipment isn't receiving the information in exactly the same way any individual's ears are. We don't know enough about how our ears receive sound to make a measuring equipment receive it in the same way (not least because we all hear things differently), and we don't know enough about technology to design measuring equipment to do it even if we did all hear things the same.
So, trust your ears for the best results.
If you put listening to you system before listening to the music, you will never be happy with your system.
If you are an engineer, please ignore this post - chances are you have been programmed to (erroneously) trust specifications over what your ears enjoy.
Engineers: forgive the dig, but I sold audio gear for 20+ years, and I had to drag engineers kicking and screaming into the demo room. Most of them thought it was a place not to be trusted.
Any customer had the choice of trusting any of three things:
1. Specifications (so many reasons why these are an inaccurate guide)
2. The audio sales guy
3. The demo room (ideally their front room).
Follow Ups:
since no component is perfect, it is a matter of optimizing the compromises for your set of priorities - which are likely different than mine. What sonic clues or characteristics are most important to replicating that "live" experience? The wide dynamic swing of horns? The neutrality and wide bandwidth of direct radiators? The coherency of full range electrostats? Guess which is at the top of my list. :)
Another factor that is important - to me at least - is achieving a lack of distractions. The OP mentioned power cords. What I've found is that all manner of power conditioning products can reduce the false brightness caused by EMI/RFI garbage found in and radiated into modern homes. Not because the grid is inherently noisy, but there are all sorts of switching devices we plug into our AC that happily pollute our circuits along with the presence of a range of radio/WiFi/cellular network signals.
And given you can't listen to a graph or spec sheet (but both might indicate something you might like) you ears are the final judge.
I have found that "most" (say, 80%) gear that measures well, also sounds good when playing music. But you also get the pieces of gear that either measure well and sound bad, or measure poorly and sound great. And I think much of that rolls into "what floats your boat"
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