Quote:
Originally Posted by b0dhi /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I'm often the first person that complains when things become too subjective, but the Audio Critic is not unbiased nor is it knowledgable enough to be making the broad denials it has a habit of doing. It's simply the other side of the coin - just as biased, but in the opposite way, as placebo victims. It continually makes the fallacy of believing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, too often jumps to conclusions which aren't justified, makes very poor arguments which are sometimes self-contradictory, and in general suffers from a lack of imagination. I and others have pointed out this overt bias in past threads which unfortunately seem to have disappeared since the Great Crash.
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Well, you can also give examples of what you said. This would help the discussion along:
1) Fallacy of believing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence (how is the conclusion that there's no
audible difference in certain hardware a fallacy)
2) Too often jumps to conclusions which aren't justified (I think you may be confused by their bias rather than their conclusions - some of their conclusions were justified in previous articles, so they just state the finding in future articles without the data)
3) Suffers from a lack of imagination (what sort of imagination is needed for an equipment test)
What I think is that the subjectivists have brought this sort of condemnation upon themselves. When I say subjectivists, I mean hardcore "silver is twice as fast as copper" kind of people; I'd say almost everyone on Head-fi has a tint of subjectivist character in them. The problem is that subjectivists make A LOT of claims, as read on Head-fi and in every audio forum. Some of these claims are outright "wow the difference is night and day" - say between two cables. The question is how do we, as readers and prospective buyers, justify these claims at all when some of these changes in hardware have been verified to have no audible differences. Personally, I don't think anyone can make a conclusion unless they were able to properly A/B the equipment, and even in that case, there's still a lot of bias going on. Just the simple fact that people (audiophiles in particular) hear differences between the
same two setups goes to show a lot.
If anything, the subjectivists are the more biased group. They aren't willing to test their overwhelming number of claims. They think they have abilities others don't. They're more closed minded and are afraid of being proved wrong.
As I said, it's easy to eliminate the objectivists altogether - have a DBT where there's an audible difference between two identically measured hardware (say cables), where the participant differentiates 13-14 out of 16 correct. Isn't that supposed to be easy when subjectivists are always saying there's sooo much of an AUDIBLE difference? Yes, the subjectivists claim audible differences but can't prove it. Therefore, they are wrong. Isn't this the most sensible conclusion? There's no bias or anything to be considered. Someone please knock some sense in me if I'm being naive.
