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Missing a point?

If your used to hearing / thinking about measurements and DBT’s as used to sell product, then you are missing the point.
If you have a car, it is valid to describe it by saying it has 350Hp, has independent suspension and so on and so on, none of which tell you exactly “how” the car is to drive but still conveys some useful information related to driving..
Same for amplifier spec’s.

The center stone for the subjectivist is listening to what ever it is and deciding based on that experience.
Thus, it is easy to imagine two subjectivist car fans discussing there car’s performance based on subjective impressions “Yeah, well my car goes so fast it’s mind-boggling” to wit “Well my car is so fast that I’ve had people pass out” and so on, a discussion which is like how good ones stereo image or realism is, entirely subjective arm waving.
All subjective impressions aside, a sufficient number of electronically timed trips down a measured distance and road track reveals more about the objective performance.

As a designer, I don’t say there is anything wrong with listening, not at all, I wouldn’t design speakers if I didn’t love listening to what I’m doing.
Think about designing speaker’s for other people to use, where do you start, do you listen only or measure and listen?
The problem with listening alone is multifold, what you hear depends on too many things, how the recording was done, if there are colorations which counteract or compliment ones later in the chain, the speakers interaction with the room and to what degree it interacts with the amplifier.
One real issue here is at some level of development, one stalls out, you find some recordings sound better with what ever you just did, but also some sound worse, which one was the right direction?
Another issue is that you instinctively look for “most real” but your ears can be fooled because of that bias. Several examples, a tweeter with a ragged hf response will sound brighter than one with the same average level but smooth. It might well make strings sound great depending, but this is still coloration and invariable will make some other sounds, sound bad.
Your ear will instinctively pick the more distorted of two subwoofers (with equal response) when auditioned alone with a drum for a signal. A subwoofer IS SUPPOSED to only produce the lowest components of it so when the upper parts are added via harmonic distortion, it sounds more real to your ears..
Added to the rest of the system, that extra energy conflicts with the actual midbass low mid signals and sounds muddy, the better sub actually has the lower distortion.
Anyway, there are many ways your ears and preconceptions alone can lead you down a dead end path or provide no real clues.

On the flip side is being able to do anechoic measurements, here what you measure is only the speaker (plus an amplifier at low power). Seeing “only the speaker” is critical too as that is the part you have some direct control over and reveals what the system actually does.
Here, in one domain or another one can usually see which of two mods makes the speaker a little closer to “ideal”.
By ideal, I mean coming closer to making an acoustic signal in pressure that when examined with a microphone is identical in shape to the input signal.
With loudspeaker seeing what direction is usually easy as they are nearly always very very far from “ideal” in one way or another.
My ears have told me each time I got closer towards the ideal, there has been an audible change in the sound. It is not what I expected the first few times but listening to one, its as if the sound gets “simpler”, less complicated but more dynamic and strangely, one is progressively less able to tell how far away the speaker is. In stereo (with a good recording) each step made an improved panorama between the speakers and (to ones ears) to some distance past on each side.

With amplifiers I am not as sure, I did not had this kind of test equipment back when I built amplifiers. I do know that I have heard differences between some Pro-sound amplifiers and hifi amplifiers in blind tests and simple A vs B switching (knowing which was which).
If those differences are “enough to hear” with music, they ARE enough to measure with the right signal and equipment. I have had a few ideas about what to look at and what signals to try but have not had time to play or a “work” reason to look into it yet.

If I could impart any real message here it would be that you get the best results using ALL the tools you can gather including engineering theory, measurements, your ears and brain.
Best,

Tom Danley

RCA's?

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