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General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

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RE: I mostly agree with what you wrote: FWIW, and...

Posted by josh358 on January 23, 2015 at 12:38:23:
That's precisely why I didn't respond to the request for specifics. It's just too complicated and there are too many of 'em! And often you just don't know beyond broad generalizations about output impedance and the like. So I got lazy and skipped the question. :-)

My take on the "objectivist" philosophy is something like this: If you take two amplifiers AND run them within their power envelope AND put a little jigger on them so you can adjust LRC, you won't be able to hear the difference between them in a blind AB test that would confuse Einstein because it was designed to compare differences of a single variable, not complex and ever-changing audio signals.

And, of course, I could be just as snarky about subjectivists, but I'd better save that post for Hydrogen Audio. :-)

I'm actually a great believer in the utility of blind testing and AB testing and, as an engineer, trying to figure out how measurements correlate with what we hear. But on a practical level, most AB testing has limitations and is better at proving that you *can* hear something, and even the most comprehensive measurements won't tell you everything, or be easy to interpret. In many cases, it's taken decades before I understood how a given measurement influences sonics, or someone did some basic research that explained something I've puzzled over. In many cases, I'm still mystified.

And beyond that, what sometimes gets overlooked is that AB tests typically *do* show that components sound different. Tests on converters, sampling rates, amplifiers and op amps have all confirmed audible differences.

At the same time I'm aware that we all suffer from confirmation bias, and that when we evaluate audio we're trying to soot from a heaving boat because our "references" are actually recordings that differ from one another and we're listening to a long chain of equipment, so that one component can be making up for shortcomings in another.

Another way to look at it -- when I was a kid, I learned about hifi from Julian Hirsh. And then at some point I noticed that my system, chosen as it was on the basis of specifications, didn't sound as good as some systems that didn't measure as well, and discovered Stereophile and later TAS and became an ardent subjectivist.

And then, like all good things, subjective audio started to attract some snake oil salesmen and cargo cult reviewers (hi, Enid) whose perceptions had more to do with a colorful imagination than anything else. And a sort of tail-chasing retro/tweak culture arose around that. Besides which it started getting really embarrassing when people started freezing CD's and invoking quantum mechanics.

So now I try to steer clear of the extremes.