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not really fair to Stereophile, Andy

Although I am in infrequent reader of TAS (and not a subsciber), I have been for a number of years a subscriber to Stereophile. IMHO, the quality of the writing in TAS has become rather variable lately -- there is some really sophisticated listening going on and there is some that is really elementary (or at least the writing about it is). However, both TAS and Stereophile seem to be committed to close listening to the equipment and a determined effort by the reviewers to describe what they hear.

However, where Stereophile appears to depart from TAS is not only in doing objective measurements (which TAS eschews) but in trying to correlate those measurements with the reviewers' perceptions. The objective measurements, and the commentary thereon, are almost always done by John Atkinson, and those measurements are done after the "subjective" reviewer has submitted his copy to JA. What you will see rather consistently in that commentary is an effort by JA to discuss the correlation (or, in some cases, the lack of correlation) bewteen the "subective" reviewer's description and the measurements. Less frequently, you will see, in the body of the review some statement by the reviewer, especially when he likes something, that he hopes the measurements support his taste.

So, it seems to me pretty clear that JA has a long-standing effort to harmonize objective measurements with subjective perception (i.e. "if it measures this way, then it will sound that way")and that he has his reviewers thinking about that issue.

Personally, I think that's an effort worth doing. OTOH, for reasons expressed elsewhere in this thread, I don't think setting up a bunch of DBTs of audio equipment is worth doing. The question, that DBTs answer: "Does A sound different, on a repeatable basis, from B?" is not really one that interests me.

As I have said before, I'm quite confident that the majority of people could not tell the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola or between wine A and wine B in a DBT. That doesn't mean that Coke is the same as Pepsi or Wine A is the same as Wine B. In fact, I would guess that most people could not reliably distinguish the difference between Artur Rubenstein playing a Beethoven piano concerto and Evgeny Kissin, even if they were played an identified sample of both before the "test."

At most, on a personal level, if I can't tell the aural difference between component A and component B, there's probably no reason for me to spend more money on A unless I have some other basis for preferring it. But that is a piece of information relevant only to me and of no interest to anyone else. If you multiply "me" by 5 or 10 and you make the test double-blind, that still doesn't add to my perception of the utility of the result.

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