November 2014 Stereophile Disappointment

[crouse]

It didn't take long for Stereophile to disappoint me. The November issue is only the third one in my two-year renewal, and already I'm finding fault with the opinions of the staff writers.

Take Art Dudley's "Listening" column on page 43. Please. AD wastes 2-1/2 pages setting up and demolishing straw men in an attempt to discredit blind testing. In the process he completely ignores the question of how to compensate for expectation bias in sighted subjective testing. He also fails to draw the essential distinction between art (the music he uses to evaluate equipment) and technology (the equipment itself, which should be designed to function as a perfect copy machine rather than a musical instrument). His remarks include several paragraphs of gratuitous name-calling aimed at those who are skeptical of sighted subjective evaluation of audio equipment. I was neither convinced nor impressed by this screed, though it did leave me wondering why Stereophile allocates page space for AD's opinions.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
The great thing about that quote is it can apply to both sides of the objective vs. subjective argument!

 

[Pio1980]

My limited listening experience indicated that quick-switch comparative listening may be better with gross differences than the finer differences that longer term listening might reveal. I.E., amp 'a' for a few days, then amp 'b'. As much as I may want to like one piece better than another for visually intriguing/ appealing reasons rather than comparative SQ, that pretty much never works out unless SQ carries the day with the more attractive piece.

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk