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

@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.  

@bigtwin 

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

NP, ask anytime, this is fine.

 

There's a power conditioner I thought about buying but didn't because the measurements determined it was too wide for my rack. I bought another one that fit based on the measured width. Measurements...

@kota1  third party measurements are there to validate manufacturer claims. But lots of people refuse to understand this basic fact. Then you have the issue is when people think their hearing is 100% unbiased and can’t be fooled. Those two combined cause issues since they are opposite of each other. 
 

 

@kota1 - thanks for your reply. I think the argument perhaps needs to be separated out into two strands. If your essential argument is that - measurements don't reveal how a component sounds and that the reveal even less how a component will sound in a given system - then by and large, I agree with you. At component level (with some exceptions as set out below ( and for clarity, I mean for example, a CD player and not the individual components in the player) unless measurements reveal gross defects then they say little enough about sound quality and certainly do not describe sound quality in substantive way. The same applies cumulatively at system level.

The exceptions to the above are that certain measurements of amplifiers do correlate pretty well with subjective sound quality. For example, SET amps tend to measure pretty similarly in regard to their levels of harmonic distortion and that is subjectively audible. Secondly, there is a reasonable correlation between loudspeaker measurements and aspects of subjective sound quality. But for completeness, I am not arguing that those correlations are in any way comprehensive.

Going back to the basic argument, I still feel that it's a leap of logic from there to concluding that measurements are not useful. The progress of science depends on the formulation of hypotheses and repeatably testing and validating. The more engineers and designers measure, the better they can understand the relationship between their design choices and the subjective performance of their designs.