Quote:
Originally Posted by rodbac
This site has so much potential. The nature of audio, though, needs thorough and rational discussion more than almost any other I can think of if recommendations are to be useful, and nothing I've seen lately promotes that. Quite the opposite, in fact.
|
You're absolutely right that audio discussions need to be as "thorough and rational" as ones on other topics. We do try to promote that as best we can. But how productive can a discussion be when it boils down to arguing whether somebody
actually heard an improvement in his or her system's sound?
You can find countless past discussions on this and other audio sites about whether an interconnect, speaker, headphone, or power cable can influence the sound you hear from your hi-fi system. These discussions change very few people's minds and, more often than not, seem to devolve into the skeptics pointing to graphs or pointing out (often valid) problems with the believers' cable-swapping tests, while the believers point out that what people hear is a personal, subjective experience. And once those points fail to convince the other side, these discussions tend to further devolve into little more than series of personal attacks.
That's exactly the opposite of what we want on Head-Fi. We're here to share, in a lively but civil fashion, our passion for headphones and all the things that make (or at least we think might make) the music we hear through our headphones sound as good as possible. While productive discussions about the science of what we hear are also highly encouraged, past experience has shown us that discussions about whether cables make a difference in an audio system are rarely, if ever, productive. Unfortunately, we've therefore had to leave that particular subject out of our forums in order to maintain a more friendly atmosphere, or at least leave one source of animosity out.
In the end, it comes down to respecting others' opinions for what they are -- opinions. And no matter who writes the opinions you may read -- whether it's a materials scientist, an electrical engineer, or a guy who braids silver wires into cables in his spare time -- he will be expressing his own
interpretation of what he (or she) hears. Not an objective analysis of what left the headphones, but a subjective interpretation of what went into his or her ears.
So yes, I certainly encourage everyone to take everything they read here "with a grain of salt," as Leonid05 suggested. But if you compare how other people evaluate equipment to how you evaluate it, you should be able to get a pretty good sense on whose reviews to trust when making purchasing decisions.
And again, please do send me or another moderator a private message if you would like further clarification of our policies. We don't moderate in order to kill discussion. That is, after all, what this forum is here for. We do, however, need to maintain the level of civility necessary to facilitate the free and open exchange of experiences which can help us learn more about all the various audio products that come out and excite us audiophiles so much.
I do hope that you and everyone else reading this message understand my decisions from my perspective as a moderator a little better now.
I'm closing this thread now because we've
definitely gone off-topic now.
Jay, please start a new thread if you want to go back to your original discussion.
Dan
