Is ASR for real, or is it only for those sub $1k or even sub $2K?

@stuartk 

It’s a good wheeze by ASC to pretend that science is on their side, so anyone not in agreement with them automatically becomes anti science.

Everything I have seen of them suggests that they are the antithesis of scientific.

Quantitative data is not any more virtuous than qualitative.   

+1

I was trained and worked as a scientist for a decade. I agree that measuring some stuff and publishing it as if it were science is not science. Science is about pursuing truth... and ASR completely fails at seeking and publishing truth. 

@stuartk 

A defect in ASR’s and some other objectivists’ reasoning is the reliance on the dictum “lower SINAD = Better”.  While I truly believe that what we hear can and should be explicable by objective measures, there comes a time when the accuracy is beyond the threshold where our ears can distinguish errors.  There is a noise level below which our ears no longer hear it. There is such a thing as low enough distortion.  Less than these thresholds ceases to be “better”.  ASR rates on a list from “the best” down the line to the “worst” measuring models.  They also rate amps and DACs as “transparent” if their linearity, noise, distortion, and in the case of amps, current delivery and load insensitivity, fall below above some place on the list, and pose the question ”Why pay more”…if your goal is to faithfully and fully reproduce the recording?  It all comes down to whether you agree that electronics are meant to be transparent in that sense, or if intentional errors are allowed in your system if you like the result.

As a scientist and engineer I think ASR is a welcome addition to the hobby and industry. First, it provides depth in comparison to the surface-grade preferences and coded adjectives that are the stock for subjective discussions and reviews. Second, it is important to have a comprehensive debunking forum that shows nonsense and snake oil through tests and an interrogation of the underlying arguments that justify things like power cords, conditioners, and expensive interconnects. Finally, there are deep discussions of core matters related to audibility and preferences (very much science) as illustrated by the recent discussion of preference curves for headphones arising from a Sean Olive AES paper. Many of the participants are designers, engineers, and scientists themselves so there is an inevitable depth to the discussions and reviews.

I encourage more people to use ASR as a resource to learn more about how systems are engineered, tuned, and the underlying science that backs up those methods!

Computer nerds with delusions of grandeur. Fancy themselves as having doctoratesin physiology. With no knowledge of "you don't know what you don't know."