Objectivists/Subjectivists

[Hugo9000]

26 minutes ago, sandyk said:

You forgot the Pizza !

 I would suggest a good cable demonstration or even an MQA demonstration to really get things moving.

And as illustration of the divide, the objectivists will bring their measuring gear/test instruments, while the subjectivists will bring their rally signs and banners?  lol

 

 

(Lame joke regarding the two meanings of demonstration.)

[Hugo9000]

13 minutes ago, wgscott said:

 

There seems to be a large Venn Diagram intersection between "subjectivist" audiophiles and psychopaths. In addition to numerous stalkers, I've had people threaten me, my family, and threaten to complain to my employer, because I had the temerity to disagree with their palpably absurd comments.

At the risk of appearing to be one of your stalkers (lol I'm harmless, really!), I'm a little disappointed to see that you've dissociated yourself from T. Herman Zweibel, whose writings used to be such a delight before he left orbit.  

[Hugo9000]

I hope you'll be back.  Best regards!

[Hugo9000]

The opinion piece by the former XLO guy is actually okay in my own opinion.  He doesn't name names of guilty parties/companies, but he is right about there being many speaker and cable "designers" who have no expertise and just slap things together, as opposed to someone trying to make something like an amplifier while having no knowledge or experience.  For every KEF or JBL, there are a hundred Zu or fake-Harbeth-looking things with a few off-the-shelf parts thrown in it, or oddball fugly things with 8 tweeters and cheesy names and bs reasons listed as the "science" behind it, or whatever.

 

Same with cables, look at all the monstrosities out there that are designed as tone controls because of lack of knowledge of electrical properties or that have been "engineered" to have abnormally high capacitance to interact in a certain way with a system, rather than being engineered to have the least impact on the widest range of gear.  Cables are an "easy" purchase if you know that whatever is underneath the sheathing is something engineered by Mogami/Belden/similar and it is suitable for the intended application.  Mystery cables, where we are just supposed to trust them that the design is even electrically adequate (no details on the build geometry let alone any measurements of the basic LCR characteristics on many "boutique" cables with astronomical prices, for example), are something altogether different. 

 

 

Quote

The first thing to know about any system is that, of all of the components going into it, the two least likely to have been designed by an expert are the speakers and the cables:  Anyone at all, with any level of knowledge at all, can take any driver at all or any combination of drivers; put them into any box, or no box at all, with any crossover or no crossover at all; wire it together and hook it up to an amplifier and a signal source, and it will produce sound, and he will be able to declare himself a speaker designer.

https://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/building-a-new-system/

 

His points seem like common sense to me.  But perhaps that will prove to be his own marketing angle for his new company:  appear reasonable and make minimal subjective claims to take over a niche that seems to be occupied mostly by Blue Jeans cable (their prices seem inflated to me for what you get, but at least they make no bs arguments about their products.  I'll admit I never looked at how much the connectors they use cost, so perhaps the prices are reasonable after all?).