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RE: Sorry you've missed the topic

>I can only take these remarks by JA as metaphorical: "All measurements
>tell lies..."

Indeed.

>You see, measurements are not the kind of things that can lie. Lying
>requires and intellectual being who intends to say something false or
>misleading. Measurements may not tell you what you want to know, or you
>may misinterpret them, but they do not lie.

The measurements do not lie as such. But the person performing a
measurement has to have an idea of what the outcome will be, before he
performs it, just as with a slide rule, which I instanced in my 2011
Richard Heyser lecture (scroll down at the page linked below).

The example of this that sticks in my mind was back in late 1989, when
Stereophile had first purchased a MLSSA system for speaker measurement.
My assistant that that time had written a review, complete with
measurements made with MLSSA. As soon as I saw the graphs, I realized
that they were "lying," thus invalidating that section of the review.

There had been a system set-up error that resulted in the MLSSA input
board measuring crosstalk from its output section rather than the signal
output by the speaker. The person performing the measurement had not
comprehended from the measurement that he had done something wrong,
that he had not measured what he thought he was measured. In other words,
he had not detected that his measurement was lying to him.

He had to repeat the measurements before the speaker review could be
published.

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile



Edits: 06/25/15 06/25/15

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