one fundamental flaw in just about everything NWAVGuy did was that he treated all distortion the same, high order, low order, even order, odd order, all the same in his analysis. This has been known to be a flawed approach by speaker engineers for literally decades. We've long known that how the harmonic distortion profiles is as important, if not more so, than than total distortion. High order and odd order harmonics sound much harsher to the human ear than lower and even order harmonics. In fact, this actually provides a fundamental basis for how chords and harmony work in music composition itself. Yet in his "objective" measurements, he repeatedly just lumped it all together as a raw THD number and kept saying "see, no difference.". His designs reflect this flawed philosophy. They, while having good THD measurements, have a lot of harmonic distortion in higher odd order harmonics, and thus sound much harsher than amps with higher "objective" THD measurements.
It's hard to say if he designed his amps this way because of this flawed philosophy, or if he used this flawed philosophy to justify his claims about his amps. The first view would put him as having a fundamental misunderstanding about something he claimed to be an expert about, the second makes him a snake oil salesman.
Now, I do enjoy a lot of his other writing. His treatise on power and gain, how much is needed, and how they work are fantastic and required reading for the "you need a 4 watt amp for your HD650 to get proper bass control" crowd.
And yes, trying to properly evaluate headphones or amps at a meet is silly. You can get the basic signature of the headphone, but they're simply too loud to hear differences in dynamics, micro detail, etc.
![DT1990-ChSd-1024x555[1].png](https://cdn.head-fi.org/a/12230656.png)
