An interesting reconciliation game here would be to have a design contest for the simplest DIY circuit that lit up a green LED when you plugged in a Burr Brown OPA-627, and a red LED when you plugged in an Analog Device AD-8610. People would of course divide on whether such a circuit is even possible in theory, how accurately anyone could separate into bins a few dozen such chips by listening, and so forth. I'm of the opinion that if you staked enough money on this, there'd be a few dozen different working "discriminator" circuits submitted as entries. I'd love to see how they worked. Someone could then turn this around into a better amp design.
This reminds me of the advent of computer shuffling in duplicate bridge tournaments: Rather than shuffling one deck by hand, writing out the deal, and making copies of the deal for the remaining tables, tournaments started printing out the deal by computer, and making copies for all the tables. Very sensitive bridge players noticed differences in the play of the hands. The computer experts rolled their eyes at this; the computer algorithms for shuffling were drop dead simple and had to work. What was really going on? I proved a theorem with Persi Diaconis on how hand shuffling worked, leading to the recommendation that people should shuffle seven times to achieve a reasonable approximation of randomness. People weren't shuffling enough; the bridge players who noticed something were right.
Here, I have complete faith in the conflict discussed in this thread. I have faith that the subjectivists who notice something are right, and I have faith that the objectivists can come up with better measures that capture what the subjectivists are hearing. Knowing just enough about differential equations to be a danger to myself and others, I read the PSpice links in horror. The objective measurements for audio amps are like sticking a thermometer somewhere in the ocean. Nothing wrong with the theory, but it only goes so far.
|