Trust your ears

[PeterG]

4 hours ago, Confused said:

I am not sure I would agree with this.  From discussions I have had with many people with an interest in audio, I find most people are a little like myself, interested in the objective side, and the subjective side also.  Plus, most people are not interested in a bar fight, not even in bars.  Usually you have many people simply getting on well and having a good time, but it only takes two to start a bar fight.

Exactly!  I am not so sure the real split in membership is objectivist/subjectivist.  My sense is that for some members the goal of AS is sharing ideas on how to get better sound, and for other members the real goal is proselytizing.  Just about everybody in the first group recognizes that this is going to very by individuals' systems, rooms, ears.  A subset of the second group takes absolutist positions (e.g expensive cables will never help) and simultaneously forgets their manners (e.g. you are a moron if you disagree)--this is when things become unpleasant

[March Audio]

I 

9 hours ago, PeterG said:

Exactly!  I am not so sure the real split in membership is objectivist/subjectivist.  My sense is that for some members the goal of AS is sharing ideas on how to get better sound, and for other members the real goal is proselytizing.  Just about everybody in the first group recognizes that this is going to very by individuals' systems, rooms, ears.  A subset of the second group takes absolutist positions (e.g expensive cables will never help) and simultaneously forgets their manners (e.g. you are a moron if you disagree)--this is when things become unpleasant

I agree for the most part, but it is on both sides of the debate (e.g expensive cables will never help - I hear it therefore it is).

 

However, as has been noted by others, we are seeing continuous disruptions in this specifically objective area from a small number of individuals who don't seem to understand what that means, or who are simply trolling.  This thread will go just fine now they have been removed.

 

So unfortunately I thinks it's simply about moderating those individuals that can't behave.

 

[Allan F]

On 6/22/2021 at 10:30 AM, pkane2001 said:

 

Toole published his first speaker research in 1985-6 (years before joining Harman) that indicated that certain measurements of loudspeakers correlated extremely well with subjective preferences of "advanced" listeners. The subjects were given minimal instructions and were not trained before taking the test, AFAIK. For those early studies, they were chosen from among musicians,  sound-recording engineers, and audiophiles.ing less consistent results. 

 

Before joining Harmon, Floyd Toole was Senior Research Officer of the Acoustics and Signal Processing Group at Canada's National Research Council, where he used the facility's anechoic chamber to measure speakers.

[pkane2001]

21 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

Before joining Harmon, Floyd Toole was Senior Research Officer of the Acoustics and Signal Processing Group at Canada's National Research Council, where he used the facility's anechoic chamber to measure speakers.

Correct. At Harman he built more elaborate test facilities and ran larger scale studies, but the results of his initial research at NRC withstood the test of time.