I don't want to beat a dead horse but I'm bugged.

May have to rename the site Audiokarens.

It's a measurement. It has no emotion. Amir didn't call your favorite piece of audio equipment ugly, the measurement did.

I ordered a pair of the Fiio 5 IEMs that he reviewed with very low distortion. So far I am impressed. I have also owned tube amps. I liked them too. I am not emotionally attached to any of it.

The acoustic engineer who did my listening room took a ton of measurements. It sounds fantastic. Well worth the money.

His measurements seem competent. Not scientific lab quality but competent. It's unemotional. It just is. I am sure many of you have been in a room where the person said "this sounds great" and you were thinking "this sounds awful". Do you need another person's opinion that is not your own? Why does Amir's opinion matter so much?

Let it go.

I personally find some of the measurements fascinating on speakers and headphones/IEMs. It is interesting to see the measurements and try to relate that to what I hear. They got me into equalizing headphones and IEMs too. What a difference!

It's a human thing: when it's written in stone, it becomes objective and sacred. It needs no further validation... (who cares about listening.) Judgements can be made, and people will fall in line. Who cares about the art, beauty, music, humanity.... let's turn our fascination of art to a fascination with number-crunching.

Sadly, people often neglect the fact that the EASIEST THING ON THE PLANET FOR _ANY_ even HALF-WAY COMPETENT ENGINEER is to design and build  a product that produces stellar measurement on the LIMITED SET OF MEASUREMENTS USED TO TEST AUDIO GEAR.

Great measurements will only establish 1 thing:

The product was designed to be a mainstream poster-child, most likely without any respect on how it sounds. If it measures absolutely perfectly: RED LIGHT, RUN AWAY!

Every amplifier and loudspeaker designer (worth his salt) will agree with the words above...

These measurements tell us these two things, and absolutely nothing more:

1. The equipment is functioning according to design parameters.

2. The equipment has been SPECIAL TUNED TO EXCEL AT THESE MEASUREMENTS. Excelling at certain measurements is EASY with certain tricks (eg loops of feedback). Yet, using such tricks skews other performance parameters, that ARE NOT MEASURED as pat of the standard measurement sets, yet still COUNT. We are routinely testing maybe 1-5% of all the parameters that are needed for accurate sound reproduction, and eve those measurements are MASSIVELY FLAWED. For example, we test how an amplifier drives a resistor, which has very little to nothing to do with how it drives a loudspeaker!

If an amplifier measures perfectly it means that the product is a PERFECT PRECISION HEATER. However, tells next to NOTHING about its sonic virtues.

Well reasoned arguments are countered by the ultimate troll.
Who'da thought?

We've been telling him to "let it go" for ages under all his past incarnations and he has the audacity to take our advice and use it as his own.

All the best,
Nonoise

Yet, using such tricks skews other performance parameters, that ARE NOT MEASURED as pat of the standard measurement sets, yet still COUNT. We are routinely testing maybe 1-5% of all the parameters that are needed for accurate sound reproduction, and eve those measurements are MASSIVELY FLAWED

@realworldaudio , I feel most of what you wrote is made up. I don't think you will be able to clearly articulate what is missing from the measurements and certainly not 95% of the things that are missing. Perhaps this is the issue. This sounds more like outrage mob mentality that reasonsed criticism. I am welcome to be proven wrong.

@realworldaudio , I feel most of what you wrote is made up. I don’t think you will be able to clearly articulate what is missing from the measurements and certainly not 95% of the things that are missing. Perhaps this is the issue. This sounds more like outrage mob mentality that reasonsed criticism. I am welcome to be proven wrong.

What is missing from the meassurements is the way the gear will interact with the other piece of gear in a specific room for specific ears...Listening is mandatory here...And what is missing are the unknown or/and   the non selected possible measures too...No one selected ALL POSSIBLE measures...Which one set matter is not absolute certainty in all case...

 The "Selected"  by Amir  isolated measures from a single piece of gear means not much for the final listening test...Save for the designer itself going on with his engineering designing standards confronting them to Amir own results.....

By the way you cannot be proven wrong because you COULD not be even wrong ever in this case : if from Amir measures you deduced " an hypothetical sound quality level" which will never be proven to exist IN ITSELF without linking this piece of gear to some other interacting system parts in some controlled or uncontrolled room and to some specific ears in a LISTENING EXPERIMENTS ...

Room are also like headphones, ultimately they can be fit for one pair of specific ears ...Studio acoustic is not Hall acoustic and neither of them is small room acoustic...Why? geometry, size, topology, acoustic content and in the case of a small room ONE listener with specific hearing history and taste not many recording engineers or a crowd...