Home Critic's Corner

Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry.

Re: bad comparison

Well, I know that this is going to fall on deaf ears (pun intended) but here goes ---

Scientific methodology demands that experiments are repeatable by independent researchers at different times.

Wherever human perceptions are involved, to remove the risk of perceptions being affected by (for example) the brand or price of the thing under test, a double-blind test is conducted. Tests have proved that a single-blind test is not good enough (the experimenter provides clues to the tester).

The above is well known and is used successfully in many diverse fields.

In high-end audio, there is a serious lack of scientific rigour and this makes some people very angry. Others (subjectivists) couldn't care a hoot for this and are happy discussing the virtues of thousand dollar cables.

Things would be fine if there were no appeals to science or engineering to justify why one component is better than another or justifies its high price. If subjectivists simply said that this was an art and not a science, they would be on much stronger ground, i.e., there would be nothing to argue about. This is the situation that actually exists today except that subjectivists will readily ignore materials science and elementary knowledge of electrical engineering while at the same time invoking molecular level and radio-frequency level effects in an effort at "explaining" why they think a particular cable is magical.



This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Schiit Audio  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups


You can not post to an archived thread.