"goFab.com" wrote in message
news:VaoHc.50782$Oq2.19921@attbi_s52...
On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 16:47:35 GMT, in article
HUeHc.12796$WX.4645@attbi_s51,
S888Wheel stated:

When the substance of a review is so
deeply at odds with the measured results, one must question what useful
purpose
these qualitative reviews are serving (beyond informing us of the mere
existence
of a particular product).

No one is suggesting that you agree with MF. But one has to wonder if you
are
letting your biases get the best of your opinion given you have never
listened
to the amps in question.

And what biases would those be? You think I'm a shill for a competing
$350K
audio amplifier? :-) FYI, I'm not in the business (audio or audio press)
and I
don't have any particular axe to grind. I'm a Stereophile subscriber;
that's
the extent of my stake in the quality of the magazine.

You keep talking about "listening to the amps in question" -- if everyone
could
personally listen to every product, there would be little need for a
magazine
that reviews them. A review, IMHO, is supposed to impart information, and
it
would be good if there was some articulable basis on which to rely on the
information imparted.

Here is a question for you. You listen to a product like the WAVACs. You
know
you don't like the measurements but you really did think what you heard
sounded
more like live music. What do you report in your review?

I would report that I personally liked them but I would also prominently
add,
"Warning Warning Will Robinson: these amps did not test well at all." And
I
would certainly temper the statements made in my review. I'm not saying
the
review had to be negative, but I'd probably hold off on going to the
lengths
that MF did -- apotheosis, eureka, and all that stuff -- for something
that
didn't sport such obvious defects on the bench.

And if I really believed that it "sounded more like live music" despite
the
obvious existence of high levels of distortion and other anomalies in the
measurements, I would start asking myself serious questions about whether
this
repeated mantra of today's audio reviewers really does have any objective
meaning at all. If I were an audio reviewer, I'd think I'd have a strong
interest in firmly establishing the informational value of what I was
writing,
so personally there would be some serious self-examination going on.
Maybe
there is, but if it is, you don't see it discussed in the audio press
(outside
of the letters column occasionally).


John can (and probably should) speak for himself on this. But AFAIK
Stereophile has reviewers testing/listening to the equipment and writing
their review completely separate from (and usually ahead of) John's testing
of the equipment. As RAHE participants, you should appreciate that this is
done in part to *prevent* inadvertent listening bias...so the reviewer knows
nothing about how the piece under review "measures" before giving their
opinion. So, MF's enthusiasm may have been justified by his subjective
listening...or he may have been influenced by the price. It's hard to tell.
But testing first, then reviewing would definitely have damped his
enthusiasm but also corrupted the reviewing process.
If you are going to measure first, you could only justify it by throwing out
without review anything that measured bad. And we don't as yet seem to
have enough correlation to do that.