"ScottW" wrote in message
news0pGb.37791$m83.36994@fed1read01

But explain this contradiction in Stereophile.

They provide eloquent subjective appraisals of equipment including
lots of words on the "sound" of the equipment.

They also provide detailed test measurements.

Sometimes the two don't fully concur with one another. Why?

First off, Stereophile doesn't always do appropriate kinds of listening
tests. Their dogmatic adherence to sighted, level-matched, single
presentation method listening techniques, minimizes real listener
sensitivity and maximizes the possibility of imaginary results. The only
thing they do right is the level-matching and I suspect that their reviewers
don't always adhere to that.

Stereophile goes out of its way to avoid time-synchronization and formal
bias controls, despite all the evidence that these are critical if
sensitive, reliable results are desired. I've concluded that Stereophile
does not want to do listening tests that are sensitive and reliable, because
they are afraid of the results. Science can be very unpredictable and the
results could easily go against years of a grotesquely-flawed editorial
policies such as the RCL, and embarrass many advertisers.

So, any Stereophile comparison of ear versus gear can easily be garbage-in,
garbage out; on the ear side of the equation.

Secondly, Stereophile does some really weird measurements, such as their
undithered tests of digital gear. The AES says don't do it, but John
Atkinson appears to be above all authority but the voices that only he
hears. He does other tests, relating to jitter, for which there is no
independent confirmation of reliable relevance to audibility. I hear that
this is not because nobody has tried to find correlation. It's just that the
measurement methodology is flawed, or at best has no practical advantages
over simpler methodologies that correlate better with actual use.

Thirdly, there are whole classes of equipment, mostly relating to snake oil
toys and vinyl, for which Stereophile doesn't perform any relevant technical
tests of at all. No test gear is used, so therefore no possibility of a
valid ear versus gear comparison.

Finally, Stereophile seems to bend over backward to avoid mentioning an
increasingly-common situation where the equipment is so accurate that it has
no sonic character at all, or very little sonic character. In these cases
Stereophile's measurements are effectively meaningless when it comes to
describing sonic character, because there is precious little or no sonic
character to describe.