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RE: Audio critics should publish their hearing tests

FR is one aspect - and yes a younger person may be put off by a treble issue he can hear that a 60 year old reviewer can't. Experience doesn't make up for a lot of this and I'll give you (yes an Audio Note SET example).

I was an audiophile from about 14 and went to shops weekly to hear everything there was in the greater Vancouver area (which basically covered every major hi-fi brand). I heard Audio Note and SET and it blew everything prior away. Then 10 year later lo and behold so so so many veteran reviewers 20 years older than me and been reviewing for decades who have WAY WAY more experience also bought in - so with total inexperience in comparison to some of these reviewers with 4 decades of products came to the same conclusion I can too after 4 (FOUR) minutes of listening to it versus the leading B&W speaker of the time.

Don't buy into this experience nonsense. There is no audio reviewer degree or rigorous testing. It is not a requirement that you have an engineering degree to drive your car - you in fact very well may be a vastly better DRIVER than the engineer who can tell you about every aspect of the vehicle and that is true with audio - the requirement is this - you listen - how does the listening make you feel?

You don't need some self proclaimed expert telling you what to like. You find reviewers who share your opinion and your likes and then when they say check out brand X because hey it's really good and is a bargain - that's the thing to go listen to because you know the ears giving the advice.

And regardless everyone hears stuff virtually the same which is why everyone on the board will be able to recognize Sade from Madonna and with more experience when they off pitch and then instruments and so on. There was a distortion test on the net people were do to determine how low in level you could detect distortion which is fine enough. I did quite well but no one bothered to ask if the distortion was bothersome. It really wasn't even at levels it was more easy to detect. So there is a "does it matter" element to such thing.

Use the musicians as you analogy - two people can listen to Tupac at the same volume in the same room - one will hate it the other will love it. The hearing of it is the same but the music just doesn't appeal to one's sensibilities based on that person's entire upbringing.

And that's the same with stereos - speaker have certain general attributes and detriments based on their design and your ear gravitates to certain things. I gravitate to tone, weight, cohesion, body, and midrange and dynamics (midi, Micro, macro) over a speaker that is weak in all of these things but has flatter frequency response.


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  • RE: Audio critics should publish their hearing tests - RGA 06:58:00 03/22/17 (0)

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