Electronic measurements measure electronic parameters. How it sounds to a human is not an electronic parameter. We know now the trend to strive for boxes that measure exceedingly well, but they don't all sound exceedingly good.
If you have a frequency response curve and you know where various instruments fall within the frequency response range, you can get a pretty good idea of how the equipment sounds. If you have distortion numbers and you have the type of distortion present, you van get a good idea of how the equipment sounds. You just need to have the proper measurements of the proper parameters, rather than look for a single number that signifies THE MEASUREMENTS.
I am surprised this thread is still alive. Usually HF censors this stuff immediately. What is happening @jude ? Ive noticed lately that you do not delete posts mentioning sbaf. Is the North Korea strategy not working? You want to be like South Korea? Hey Jude! Remember when measurements were outlawed here, then you had to make a “science” subforum for measurements and related discussions. Then remember when you changed your mind and started posting measurements yourself on the front page of HF. Will HeadFi be the new Audiogon? Or will it continue its decline? Is it management or is it the people that have changed? Id blame others.
No, paid shills do not threaten the audiophile industry. In fact, if anything, they help it. Why? Because they get more people to buy product. If it weren't for consumers, there wouldn't be any products. Shills expand the market for products and give companies a chance to make new ones. The key is to get an increasingly educated consumer for products and then the products will get better.
The audio market is no different than any other market including the news. You always need to know the point of view the source is coming from and what incentives they have for telling you what they are. Then, you need to fact check everything and listen to alternative points of view. Then, you need to experience the products yourself and come to your own conclusion on what is truth.
Every industry has paid shills, at least the audio shills are giving exposure to our hobby.
From my experience, the best advise I can offer is:
demo gear before you buy.
I've found that Zero Fidelity on YouTube is trust worthy and points out the qualities in gear that matter the most, good or bad.
Funnily enough, I don't think that it takes money to make these guys shills. All it takes is an expensive product, and all of a sudden it's the best thing they've heard. These days, just about everything is good and everything is "the best".
At the end of the day, you must be a real one to recognize another real one. If you are reading through someones work, you might be able to see the level of professionalism and knowledge that they posses. However, if you cannot look past the bs and the nice words, you won't get far.
I was always able to tell apart quality journalists and talented and capable writers. It's not easy, but being skeptical helps.
The audio market is no different than any other market including the news. You always need to know the point of view the source is coming from and what incentives they have for telling you what they are. Then, you need to fact check everything and listen to alternative points of view. Then, you need to experience the products yourself and come to your own conclusion on what is truth.
Very well said. There have been incentives for shills since the dawn of time. It's imperative that a consumer educate themselves and be able to disseminate misinformation from reality. If they listen to overzealous advertising, choose to purchase that product and are satisfied, it's probably not necessary for a white knight to step in and say "hey, 60% of people prefer this product over yours and you were deceived." The consumer is satisfied with their purchase and that was the point of the transaction. Also given the vast amount of products on the market it's pretty much impossible to have perfect information anyway.
In a perfect world every seller would have integrity, every consumer would have perfect information, and the human mind wouldn't succumb to biases and shortcuts. In a less than perfect world you get what information you can and then judge with your own ears rather than someone else's
I used to read Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. The fact that they would test gear and report back was fascinating. I mean Stereophile as a print publication is almost older than me, being the first issue was September 1962. And what’s more fascinating is they would have a paid advertisement of the products you just read about the exact page after the article ended.
Imagine the coincidence (It wasn’t 100% of the time, but a regular thing) every time an article would end, a advertisement for the product they were writing about was posted, sometimes the next page or a two later! So of course there was monetary incentive as the people who paid for the ad were also supplying the equipment. So?
Does it make sense? Still the industry has wide range of styles of writing. Some maybe 100% fake script, maybe some 50% fake script, maybe some with only facts as they are subjectively are perceived? Does it matter? Or better yet, will it ever change? There are very few things that people agree upon in audio. It truly is 100% subjective. So in reality it doesn’t matter what the reviewer writes. It’s their own opinion if they were telling the truth or their own opinion if they lied. It’s the same!
The fact is recorded music is done with no standardized method. This means that every studio in the world does a replay of what they have recorded on different speaker systems. So if a cello sounds one way in a studio in California, studio B in Colorado has a different tone. So what?
Well, that means there is no way to truly reproduce an actual live event.....as the event is lost. It was never captured even from the start. If the recording was a multitrack, it’s simply the artistic content of the producer as what it sounds like. Actually I’m OK with that. Why? Because somehow I have found replay systems that make it all musical anyway. I enjoy 80-90% of the sound quality of my library, and I never EQ. In truth I don’t even have to change headphones or IEMs to modify the playback, to make it acceptable, as the music sounds pretty much correct.
The reading of Stereophile? Well, those were dreams of youth, a silly naïveté of what I thought the world was. Still if lies or truth it really doesn’t matter. It gave me ideas and drama. Oh....what if I purchased the gear? What if I sprang for those speakers?
Well I did make small humble purchases. Actually I was always questioning if the sound was good or not. I probably would have been questioning if the sound was good or not if I didn’t read Stereophile?
Headphones? Headphone reviews......everything is still the same. I buy stuff or am given stuff and I try to figure out if it’s good or not. Still anything I write about it is my subjective take on it. It never has any more value than that.
I used to read Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. The fact that they would test gear and report back was fascinating. I mean Stereophile as a print publication is older than me, being the first issue was September 1962. And what’s more fascinating is they would have a paid advertisement of the products you just read about the exact page after the article ended.
Imagine the coincidence (It wasn’t 100% of the time, but a regular thing) every time an article would end, a advertisement for the product they were writing about was posted, sometimes the next page or a two later! So of course there was monetary incentive as the people who paid for the add were also supplying the equipment. So?
Does it make sense? Still the industry has wide range of styles of writing. Some maybe 100% fake script, maybe some 50% fake script, maybe some with only facts as they are subjectively are perceived? Does it matter? Or better yet, will it ever change? There is very few things that people agree upon in audio. It truly is 100% subjective. So in reality it doesn’t matter what the reviews write. It’s their own opinion if they were telling the truth or their own opinion if they lied. It’s the same!
The fact is recorded music is done with no standardized method. This means that every studio in the world does a replay of what they have recorded on different speaker systems. So if a cello sounds one way in a studio in California, studio B in Colorado has a different tone. So what?
Well, that means there is no way to truly reproduce an actual live event.....as the event is lost. It was never captured even from the start. If the recoding was a multitrack, it’s simply the artistic content of the producer as what it sounds like. Actually I’m OK with that. Why? Because somehow I have found replay systems that make it all musical anyway. I enjoy 80-90% of the sound quality of my library, and I never EQ. In truth I don’t even have to change headphones or IEMs to modify the playback, to make it acceptable, as the music sounds pretty much correct.
The reading of Stereophile? Well, those were dreams of youth, a silly naïveté of what I thought the world was. Still if lies or truth it really doesn’t matter. It gave me ideas and drama. Oh....what if I purchased the gear? What if I sprang for those speakers?
Well I did make small humble purchases. Actually I was always questioning if the sound was good or not. I probably would have been questioning if the sound was good or not if I didn’t read Stereophile?
Headphones? Headphone reviews......everything is still the same. I buy stuff or am given stuff and I try to figure out if it’s good or not. Still anything I write about it is my subjective take on it. It never has any more value than that.
scamazon probably leads the world in monetizing bogus reviews and whole sites based on bogus reviews. It's almost impossible to find a real review of any product at all now.
When I'm looking for product info, as soon as I see a link to scamazon, I close the tab.
I don't think this is a threat to any hobby, since people interested in something invariably find a way to talk to other people with the same interests or at least find accurate info, or just do something else instead. I think it's a threat to the internet though. It was seen as a source of freedom, of real info, but as expected, it has been hijacked by commercial interests, lies, etc.
High Ranking Agents of Chaos are wandering independent entites who can identify a situation where they see their services needed and employ Detrministic Chaos as their tool to bring Order from Chaos. Although, they may be the only ones who are fully awaree of what has transpired.
Though I have never made a dime on the products I pushed, like NoScript, and I'm in the red for having promoted FreeBSD.And if anybody should have been paid it was me.
High Ranking Agents of Chaos are wandering independent entites who can identify a situation where they see their services needed and employ Detrministic Chaos as their tool to bring Order from Chaos. Although, they may be the only ones who are fully awaree of what has transpired.
Though I have never made a dime on the products I pushed, like NoScript, and I'm in the red for having promoted FreeBSD.And if anybody should have been paid it was me.
We have reached a point (at least with electronics) where it's easy and cheap enough to develop a product that sounds indistinguishable from any other product. In other words, if an amplifier or a DAC is engineered correctly, it has essentially no sound of its own. It just produces music and ideally, you shouldn't be able to distinguish one from another regardless of costs. Given that we have reached the point of what amounts to perfection on the cheap, the fashion now is to maintain some sort of a "house sound", which is essentially euphonic distortion. So, in effect, we've gone a full circle: People used to strive for electronics that reproduced the recording faithfully in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Now, people pay top dollar for electronics that do exactly the opposite. How bizarre.
We have reached a point (at least with electronics) where it's easy and cheap enough to develop a product that sounds indistinguishable from any other product. In other words, if an amplifier or a DAC is engineered correctly, it has essentially no sound of its own. It just produces music and ideally, you shouldn't be able to distinguish one from another regardless of costs. Given that we have reached the point of what amounts to perfection on the cheap, the fashion now is to maintain some sort of a "house sound", which is essentially euphonic distortion. So, in effect, we've gone a full circle: People used to strive for electronics that reproduced the recording faithfully in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Now, people pay top dollar for electronics that do exactly the opposite. How bizarre.
I fully agree, especially with the first part which I highlighted in bold & italics. I’ve owned very expensive headphone amps and DACs in the past and my present set up which is old and humble price wise, is as good as anything I’ve owned before. I did my own research during the past few years and eventually had an epiphany pertaining to the hype and publicity attributed to audio equipment. I’m satisfied with what I now own.
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