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Re: Question

It's hard to say. Judging from the nature of the quality of the state of the art of loudspeaker design, it's clear that much is not known. It is very rare that I have heard a loudspeaker from anyone which could fool even a casual listener with normal hearing that he was listening to live music and not a recording. This is after more than 100 years by countless people of collective effort.

As for the state of the art of amplifier design, it should be obvious to anyone with even the meanest of logical capacity that a purely electrical device eventually reaches a level of performance where it not only passes the point of diminishing returns but the point of no returns whatsover.

The fact that these men and their competitors continue to market new products indicates that a) they have not come close to that point yet because they don't understand where it is or how to get there or b) they are compelled to continue marketing products merely for the sake of having something new to sell. In the case of Mr. Vandersteen, I think it's a), in the case of Mr. Pass, I'd say it's b).

When someone (not Mr. Pass or Mr. Vandersteen) says he cannot correlate what he measures with his subjective reaction to it and rather than bother to investigate why and do something about it by finding measurements which will correlate but instead goes back to his laboratory and resumes his "research" by trial and error, that is not science or engineering in my book, that's tinkering. And I think that is what most of those who work in this field today are doing. That is why I have so little respect for it.

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