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I Am Tired of Bogus Measurements

My expensive shoes have measurements but it doesn’t matter, all I want to know is will they fit. My expensive new suit has measurements but it doesn’t matter, all I want to know is will my expensive new shoes match.

The people being misled by measruements aren’t being led my manufacturers, they are being misled by reviewers. Idiotic rankings of digital gear based on measurements outside the range of human hearing. Cancelling entire brands who put out features customers actually want as they sell to humans, not bats. The worst of these websites will rant about their own superior $$$ equipment but mot even one person will ever use speakers in a klippel matchine, they actually put them in a room! The horror. The cancelling of brands, the talking down to the customers, is bogus.

You need to measure what matters! Are the customers actually happy? Is the warranty honored? Most importantly is their an in home audition period?
I don’t need someone to tell me if I could or should like a product. My room is not a test bench, or a klippel machine. Who cares what the component measures by itself because unless its a clock radio I’ll never use it by itself, I have to interconnect it in a "system" with "high quality" cables, (as in all cables are not the same).

If you want to measure something measure how your personal system of curated components interact with your room. That’s it. The rest of the stuff you could forget because these days if a brand overpromises and under delivers they will be following a formula for losing money, an no company likes that.

kota1
kota1 OP
2,706 posts
 

@willywonka

and many manufacturers are not honest about them.

Which ones, specifically?

There is no standard for this, and power ratings are all over the place.

It is actually much worse, power grids are all over the place. NYC is different than the Catskills power grid, go figure.

Also, speaker sensitivity ratings don’t seem to mean much anymore.

Which speakers and what customer? Are you saying specs, as a general rule, are fake?

I’ve seen claimed ratings by the manufacturer being 8 dB lower when actually measured.

Again its actually much worse, parts are allowed to be with x% of tolerances. If you buy a speaker and 3 parts are "within tolerance" but not the same you have no way of knowing what you got, no matter how the sample measured. Which goes back to auditioning.

Dr David Rich:

Passive components have tolerances. Capacitors and inductors are within 5% or even 10% of the specified value. The speaker’s impedance also varies from sample to sample. Combine all the tolerance changes of each component and the desired frequency response of the speaker has changed by a significant amount. This results in pair matching errors that effect stereo imaging.

kota1 OP
2,706 posts
 

@carlsbad 

But I’ll tell you it is much less expensive to find a way to improve your measurements than to improve your product.

+10, and that is where the "bogus" begins, thank you for saying it so well.

dynamiclinearity
233 posts
 

I have occasionally seen a product(a Technics cartridge!) chosen by a frequency and separation curves and a 1 kHz square wave and my friend who did it was correct. But 99.9 % of the time product selection needs to include careful auditioning. The few times specs can be used directly, at least in my opinion, is when they point to poor performance. I recall a famous 80 watt tube amp that the reviewer liked in spite of the fact he found some instability and it only put out about 2 watts at 290 kHz.

bigtwin's avatar
bigtwin
1,113 posts
 

@thyname  Why does it bother you, and many others, when I ask for claims to be proven?  If a manufacturer claims impedance is lower, or the noise floor is lower, or .........., is it too much to ask for the proof?  I have very little interest in ASR reviews for the most part.   I have searched for exactly two, as I was interested in all and any reviews of these two items.  The PS Audio PP was one and a step down transformer bt Equitech was the other.  In both cases ASR APPEARED to show the units failed to provide the claimed benefits.  I asked PS to comment directly on the ASR report.  I've already posted their response.   Your vitriol towards me is unbecoming and uncalled for.  

kota1 OP
2,706 posts
 

@bigtwin 

Why does it bother you, and many others, when I ask for claims to be proven? 

NP, ask anytime, this is fine.

 

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