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Originally Posted by tvrboy /img/forum/go_quote.gif
OK............. I am a long-time listener, first-time caller to this thread. I am totally new to hi-fi (knew nothing about it until May of this year) but here is my impression, for what it's worth:
I have never in my life seen a business where there is so much subjectivity and so little rationality.
So many people on this forum seem to run from rationality. They claim "I don't listen to music in ABX format" or "I hear a difference with my golden ears." Their claims basically amount to "science means nothing to me." Yes, the same science that gives us semiconductors, spacecraft, organ transplants, clones, etc, that science means NOTHING when it comes to audio reproduction. A single designer with the mythical golden ear can make a device that thousands of engineers with their supercomputers can't possibly produce. Get real!
Doesn't anyone into high-end audio have a background in engineering, mathematics, or anything where you would have taken a high-school science class? The scientific method works. ABX testing works. That is why we have cars to drive and computers to type on and the internet to argue over. These things are all the result of the scientific method being applied many times, over and over again.
A few carefully designed studies could settle the disputes once and for all about fancy cables, amps sounding the same, etc. Why these studies have never been done (except for a few brave magazine editors and small-scale basement tests) I don't know. I am not an electrical engineering expert and I don't claim to know the "truth" about any component in audio, so I am not arguing a specific pro/con position here. What I am arguing is that these things can and should be tested!
If we can put a man on the moon (in 1969!) and build things atom-by-atom we can certainly answer these basic questions about sound reproduction. The truth is out there, so why don't audiophiles want to find it? Small men always say that the answer can never be known, but real men go out into the world and find it.
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All it takes is one man to give a perspective that changes everything. Just because thousands of engineers haven't thought of it, doesn't mean some man out there cannot. Electronics is more difficult than you make it out to be. Why else would the electronics industry still be innovating? Shouldn't things be done yet? Even then, some areas are going
backwards because of consumer drive towards cheapness.
A supercomputer is also no substitute for a brain. They're for mundane, repetitive, and complex calculations that would otherwise require ridiculous amounts of time (by hand or by normal computer). It's why humans, for the most part, still do the crucial routing on PCBs and ICs. A computer still can't account for things a human can. How economical is it to have a supercomputer do this kind of stuff? And would it be that good anyway? No.
Some more inclined DIYers
are educated, by themselves or by school. Some aren't the nimrod, golden ear-types sticking giant teflon caps everywhere. There's no substitute for experimenting with some of this stuff yourself. I know, some people aren't that enthusiastic about DIY audio, but
you get to discover whether something makes a change or not. And I don't mean sticking Bybee Quantum whatevers everywhere in your circuit. Or using huge BlackGates everywhere. Since when is that science, sticking crap everywhere?
There are proposals on why amps or DACs would sound different in some of the AES papers. On DIYHifi, some members have postulated about this for quite some time. I just wish I had some more equipment so I could measure some things...
~Thomas
