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RE: Please Tony....

The problem here that the designer had (and this is the typical situation for subtle artifacts) is that two designs both measured similarly and sounded similarly to the designers. So far, so good. This makes sense. However, other people heard differences.

Here is where the rubber meets the road: die hard objectivists vs. die hard subjectivists.

In this case, all the "scientific" evidence showed that the two devices were sonically equal. The fact that some audiophools imagined differences was their problem. NOT...

In this case, because of one designer who was not a hard core objectivist, new tests were found that showed differences that could be objectively measured. It was still the case that only some listeners could hear differences, of course. With the better measurements in hand it was then possible to pursue improvements to the design, eventually leading to a new design that measured better and sounded better to those people who heard the earlier difference. Of course, this designer was not a hard core subjectivist, either, otherwise he wouldn't have developed new measurements.

It is possible for hard core subjectivsts to be designers and operate entirely by ear. However, there are few people with the talent and intuition to succeed at this. For the rest of us, a combination of measurement and listening are more effective. Without a lot of talent and dumb luck it can be useful to turn on a flashlight if one is looking for one's car keys in the middle of a dark night. (Lesson I learned at age 13 tweaking the feedback loop of a Dynaco 35 watt amplifier that didn't sound right until out of tolerance parts in the feedback loop had been adjusted.)




Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

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