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RE: Have you listened?

If it were coming from someone else I would have discounted things and left it as a "maybe". Since It is Ric, and I have tried some of his tweaks and mods I know he has a keen ear, careful listening evaluation process, and much less of a tendency for self deception.

Being an engineer I know that the science is often left outside the door in favor of engineering principles that are sufficient approximations of reality and have the great advantage of actually allowing calculation of a design. However, they are not complete models for the actual physics involved. Which brings me to the point that dismissing something as "subjective" is simply not a useful standpoint. The useful one is to actually try out the scheme in question and hear for yourself. Then if something is there you can try to measure it, since you are the pro. For the audiophile the fact of a consistent improvement from listener to listener is the only factor that matters before trying it out for one's self.

I keep finding EE pros who prefer playing amateur psychologist, ascribing biases and delusions to listeners making observations, to testing things audiophiles pick up on. Sensible Sound dropped off my reading list since the reviewers kept dismissing their own observations as products of bias or beer, rather than believing that amps or CD players might sound different within similar technical performances. That doesn't make someone rational, it makes them blind to the limits of the models they use and the narrow scope of measurements they know to perform.

To give you a recent example I came across, a friend sent me his email correspondence with a vintage tube equipment restorer (apparently a retired EE) who had just converted the output transformers of an industrial amp to operate with 10 ohm Tannoy horn speakers and said the amp measured like a dog and pointed to Robert Deutch's review of a 211 tube SET on a pair of 8 ohm Avant Garde Uno with 104 db sensitivity and said that the THD measurements are terrible, which above 1 W they are, but you don't listen that far up the amp's power, so Atkinson's obvious aversion to the amp's benchtop performance was quite irrelevant to its performance in the field on appropriate speakers.
http://www.stereophile.com/content/air-tight-atm-211-tube-monoblock-power-amplifier-measurements

Note that observations precede scientific models and engineering simplifications and approximations follow quite a time later. So when a credible observer finds out something then help us get something useful out of it, not throw "subjective" at it.

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