Popular Post tmtomh Posted December 31, 2019 Popular Post Share Posted December 31, 2019 5 hours ago, ARQuint said: I think that progress is being made on the civility front, a reflection of how Chris wants this community to function. For me, that's substantive. I agree that progress is being made on the civility front. However, I also agree with those who say that you continue to misrepresent the conversation in this thread. Yes, there have been many antagonistic comments, some justified IMHO and some gratuitous and unnecessary. And there also have been many, many important, substantive comments that have brought information to light that would not have come out otherwise - and that despite your and others' steadfast refusal to admit it, clearly influenced the mainstream audiophile press and clearly played a role in some of the moderate walking-back of the earlier uncritical euphoria over MQA. But most importantly, there's a third part of the conversation in this thread, and your repeated ignoring of it speaks volumes: the many, many posts by Lee Scoggins and several others that endlessly repeated MQA marketing lingo and technical talking points. These were not opinions to be disagreed with. Rather, they were demonstrably false claims, often contradicted by MQA reps' own statements. When someone keeps saying over and over and over that MQA is not lossy - and then finally "admits" it's lossy by saying. "it doesn't matter that it's lossy," that's not a disagreeable opinion - that's unaccountable, bad-faith behavior, and it doesn't deserve a civil response. And it's disingenuous in the extreme for you to keep banging the civility drum without calling out - or heck, just mentioning once - the shifty, bad-faith approach taken by Lee and some others in support of MQA. Unless or until you acknowledge that, you're not likely to find much of a welcoming reception here. You can of course continue to chalk that up the horrid incivility of members here, but to do that you have to ignore the many of us who are pro-civility and anti-MQA, and I would hope you'd not want to adopt such a simplistic and lazy posture here. troubleahead, esldude, Kyhl and 13 others 9 2 5 Link to comment
Popular Post tmtomh Posted January 1, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted January 1, 2020 18 hours ago, ARQuint said: Steven Stone's post includes a 1200 word response from Bob Stuart. Instead of just spewing for five sentences, why don't you critique Stuart's points in a reasoned fashion? Could you? That's what civility looks like. It's been done, repeatedly, in this thread, by multiple members of this forum. And you pointedly have not seen fit to engage any of those substantive critiques, instead staying in the Civility Police lane. So you are complicit in the dynamic you're so intent on criticizing. MikeyFresh, esldude, troubleahead and 6 others 5 4 Link to comment
Popular Post tmtomh Posted January 1, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted January 1, 2020 22 hours ago, christopher3393 said: It is interesting that the pro MQA posters who behaved poorly are frequently named and criticized, while those against MQA who behaved poorly are seldom if ever named and the criticisms are vague and brief ---one could say "minimized". Wouldn't it be an interesting experiment to name some of our own shortcomings in this thread, to own them? Who are these few bad apples and how bad were they really? Certainly not nearly as bad as the Shills of Audiophiledom! Thank God there is no hypocrisy among our good membership or one might think there is a social media ethics problem of some sort here. And what on earth is Mr. Connaker on about in claiming there is a problem with so-called "civilty" on the forum, enough so that changes are proposed because of a few very vocal members. Surely not on the paragonal MQA thread! After all, the OP has made clear numerous times that he does not see the "problem" as a problem. And one or two have made clear that they have no issue with banned members returning in disguise, like Anonymous, becaused they were chased off by snitches and civility police. TOS be damned, it is the right thing to do for a higher cause! "AT EVERY DOORWAY before you enter, you should look around, you should take a good look around— for you never know where your enemies might be seated within." --- Havamal Happy New Year, gentlemen. I hear what you're saying, but Brinkman was called out, by name, repeatedly, and eventually was banned from this forum for the behavior you note. So too have I and others called out folks by name (by quoting and responding to their posts), criticizing their overuse of "shill" accusations and their over-reliance on attributing sinister motives to those they disagree with. I appreciate your presence on this forum, and unlike @ARQuint you are not a one-note participant, but IMHO the reason we see an imbalance in criticism and commentary in this thread is simply because among those who care about MQA here, there simply are more who are concerned about it than who are fans of it. Teresa and christopher3393 2 Link to comment
Popular Post tmtomh Posted January 17, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted January 17, 2020 @ARQuint I think you need to take seriously the point that @Archimago makes, which has been made by many others previously as well, and which has been ignored, as far as I recall, by every other mainstream audiophile press representative who's posted in this thread (excluding Kal from that since he's not been a partisan in this particular argument): AS is not a formally edited publication - it is a forum. @The Computer Audiophile does publish articles of course, but they are simply one type of content here and clearly marked as such. This place, like any forum, allows members not only to comment on content, but also to create it themselves by starting threads. That makes this place qualitatively different than a magazine. One can talk all one wants about how being an editor at TAS or Stereophile is not as powerful as people think and about how the stable of writers and reviewers has lots of autonomy - that is no doubt true, but it still is a much more tightly controlled outlet than a forum like this. And so to point out how AS has advertisers, and how AS has subjectivist views and reviews, does not actually make the case that AS is very similar to TAS. Note that this dissimilarity is true regardless of one's value judgment about the quality or usefulness of TAS and AS. A site that is primarily a forum allows for a much "flatter" hierarchy of authority of voices, primarily because it more easily allows for: Responses to articles to come in the form of other articles, giving the responder a peer relationship and equal prominence on the site as the original author; and Discussion threads to carry on a conversation for days, weeks, months, or even years, giving multiple voices far more prominence and staying power than the Comment section under an article. (Even here the comment sections of articles are far shorter and die out much more quickly than the companion threads Chris sets up for discussion of those articles in the forum proper.) Now, you have been quite active - obsessive even - in pointing out the sometimes negative impact this forum structure has on the civility level and the signal-to-noise ratio of the discussion. Fair enough - but my point (and the point many others are making) is that to be as fair-minded as you claim you are, and as fair-minded as you are constantly urging or chiding others to be, you need to acknowledge the clear benefits of this format over the more tightly controlled TAS format (whose web site does not even have a forum section as far as I can tell). Virtually any content substantively critical of MQA that has appeared in TAS and/or Stereophile showed up there in large part because of the groundswell of criticism of MQA at places like this. I try to be open-minded in general, but on this point I am convinced. Now, one might argue that it took time for TAS and/or Stereophile to publish any real, technically based (or business model based) criticism of MQA because these publications filter and vet issues and cannot and should not rush to judgment like the forum here does. That argument would hold water if the mainstream audiophile press had not rushed to heap praise and adulation on MQA without bothering to check if any of Bob Stuart's technical claims where, you know, true. Put more simply, if burying the hatchet means agreeing to disagree, we can't do that until we have clarity from you about what we actually agree or disagree about. And as far as MQA, I confess I have absolutely no idea where you stand on it - and as far as I can tell, that's because you haven't ever clearly said where you stand on it, nor has your publication (if it has an editorial stance on it). firedog, Shadders, skikirkwood and 10 others 8 5 Link to comment
Popular Post tmtomh Posted April 29, 2022 Popular Post Share Posted April 29, 2022 On 4/25/2022 at 11:03 PM, The Computer Audiophile said: My choice was to let a tiny number of objectivists continue to piss in the community pool, or give them their own pool. Turned out they didn’t piss in their own pool. If you don’t like the banner ads that pay for this site to exist, you can always pay $4.99 per month to remove them. Exactly. Take away the audience they loved to belittle and berate, and they weren’t happy. They loved to save people from themselves, be the big brother nobody needed, and school those of us who seem to exist solely to have our money easily separated from our wallets. I called their bluff. They said, who us? No way. We just want the truth out there etc… I gave them the space to write the truth and even said they could link to that space in a subjective thread. That wasn’t good enough because they couldn’t get in peoples’ faces and “prove” them wrong. I'm one of the folks who stopped participating when Chris consigned objective discussion to a single subforum. I didn't ask for my account to be deleted, and for context I should note that I was a strong and frequent voice in favor of deleting trollish and needlessly combative comments and repeatedly urged the banning of a couple of members who clearly could not or would not behave. I look in on the site perhaps once every 2-3 months, though I don't log in (except now). I check the site mainly to see if @JoshM has posted another one of his excellent "the best-sounding version of" series. When I do that, I also take a quick look at the forum homepage too, and sometimes click through to the Objective-Fi forum, and occasionally to the MQA Is Vaporware thread if it shows up on the forum front page as a recently updated thread. For what it's worth, here are my observations and opinions on the status of scientific inquiry, objectivist discussion, the objectivist-subjectivist debate, and so on. 1. It doesn't matter to me one bit why @The Computer Audiophile made the change in the forum structure and rules that he did. As I've said repeatedly in the context of debates where folks try to attribute specific motives to MQA/Bob Stuart, I don't think hypothesizing and arguing about someone's motives is useful or the main point. What matters are the actions themselves and their effects. In that regard, it is clear to me, as it was at the time, that Chris' action ghettoized objectivist discussion. I don't use that term for sensationalism. It's the most apt description: a formal, forcible, restriction of a group into one sub-area of the larger community. Yes of course, self-described objectivists are still free to post anywhere in the forums, but they cannot post as objectivists in any area except objective-fi. In other words, if someone makes a subjective listening claim outside the objective-fi forum, I am free to comment on their claim, but I am not permitted to make an objectivist comment on their claim. So as a practical matter I am barred from participating in that discussion because forum rules do not permit me to write what I really think or believe in that thread. And I think every reasonable person can understand that no one enjoys participating in a discussion if they cannot say what they think. To be clear, I do NOT a restriction on my free speech rights, because a private forum is not obligated to enable or respect free speech rights in the first place, so I have no complaint there. But it is nevertheless a ghettoization of views and therefore of certain members here, and it is indeed a restriction on what can be said anywhere in the forum (including the Q&A subforum!) except in the objective-fi ghetto. 2. It is Chris' right and prerogative to run things this way, and again I have no complaint in that regard. But I find his explanation and justification for why he did this partial, self-serving and - looking at his rehash now compared to when it first happened - increasingly self-satisfied and unreflective. Not surprising that the narrative would harden over time, but it has done so nevertheless. As part of this, I was struck by the petty way Chris chose to treat another audio site whose culture and purpose are objectivist and science-based: the way he mocked its name, and if memory serves the way this forum set up some kind of auto-barrier to correctly displaying the name of that site or perhaps to linking to content there (apologies - I can't recall the details and I don't look in here often, so I am happy to be corrected if I am misstating the details of this particular bit or if something has changed in that regard). 3. Another important - though IMHO totally predictable - change is that the Objective-Fi subforum itself very quickly became more or less the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Most of the threads there appear to be dominated by Chris and some self-described subjectivist members engaging in speculation about whether or not there are scientific bases for subjective listening impressions. But the point of those threads isn't to actually answer or even seriously investigate the objective truth of those impressions. Rather, the point is merely to pose the question and keep it perpetually open and unanswered. This is a key feature of subjectivist audiophile culture (and, to be fair, of many hobbies): the artificial maintenance of mystery and open questions by ignoring some portion of human knowledge, so that space can be left open for interesting and enjoyable explorations, new purchases, expenditures, and so on. The thread Chris started on fiber transmission of digital data is a good example. He raises a question to which the answer is already known, with the implicit use of "science" as a cudgel - "if you haven't done a test, then how can you really know it won't make a difference?" This is such a basic red herring and rhetorical fallacy that it is difficult for me to believe that Chris honestly is not aware of the fallacy; it is difficult for me to believe that he is not casually and intentionally indulging in the fallacy simply to be able to have a conversation he finds interesting and to cloak it in the dressings of "science" and "objectivity." The ridiculous demands being made of @plissken as he tries to engage in a reasonable discussion about what would constitute empirical evidence illustrates that "science" is simply being invoked as a rhetorical tactic to keep actual scientific information out of the discussion, even in the objective-fi forum. 4. I have considered asking for my account to be deleted. It didn't sit right with me at the time, as I don't like the idea of "taking my marbles and going home," and I wanted to have an open mind and give things a chance to see if they might perhaps develop differently than I thought they would. They have not. Now, Chris might very well say they have gone the way they have because so many of us objectivists stopped participating. But it takes only a cursory look at the consistent participation of @pkane2001 and plissken to see that this is not the case. In this vein, if Chris actually thinks that we stopped participating because we no longer "had anyone to yell at" or no longer had an "audience" of subjectivists, he is ignoring the fact that the objective-fi forum is filled with just such an "audience" of self-described subjectivists, and still very few objectivists from before are participating. Moreover, I am a member and frequent participant at the other forum I referred to above, and there's plenty of fascinating, educational discussion there. Putting aside for a moment the fact that a good number of subjectivists actually do post there and do not get chased away, that other forum is evidence that objectivists have enjoyable, vigorous, informative, extended discussions without needing a bunch of people to "yell at" and without needing a subjectivist "audience." So Chris' claims in that regard are (not to put too fine a point on it) empirically untrue. Or to put it another way, his claim is true of this forum but not of audio forums in general, which therefore suggests that his characterization of the issue is inaccurate. 5. Finally, following on point #4, Chris said repeatedly at the time he made the forum-structure change, "you can be part of the problem or part of the solution." But what he never addressed then, and what he seems even less interested in or cognizant of now, is that most of the people he directed that claim towards chose the third option of just stepping away, because to take your time, energy and effort to be "part of the solution," you have to feel that your time, energy, and effort will be valued, respected, and put towards a "solution" that you actually view as a solution (in other words, as a desirable, feasible, or enjoyable state of affairs). And I can tell you that I have no desire to be part of a "solution" in which by participating here I lend credence to demonstrably false claims that this is a balanced community with a fair and open opportunity for multiple viewpoints to be shared; that Chris is in any way, shape or form interested in a scientific or evidence-based approach to audio; and that others who share my views but no longer are members here left simply because they were babies, trolls, or attention-seekers not interested in real discussion but only in fighting with others. I'm just one person, and my views and preferences matter only insofar as anyone else here cares about them - and it very well might be that virtually no one here does care. That's fine. But so long as as such self-serving narratives are being spun; so long as the objective-fi forum functions as the inverse of what it is claimed to be; so long as I remain a member and the rules permit me to post a comment like this (which perhaps they don't!) - then I have the prerogative not to let such things pass without comment, and for this one time I have decided to exercise that prerogative. I fear I've already spent too much time composing this, to too little end. But I console myself that the time spent writing this is a tiny fraction of the time I spend enjoying other online venues for discussion audio - and that that time online is, in turn, a tiny fraction of the many hours a day I am lucky enough to be able to enjoy listening to my favorite music. To anyone who's made it to the end of this comment, thanks for reading. Be well. pkane2001, Iving, opus101 and 1 other 4 Link to comment
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