On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 16:58:23 -0500, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:

"Scott Gardner" wrote in message

On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 07:49:29 -0500, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:
snip
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.


Along these lines, who was it back in the sixties that first said "All
sonically-accurate equipment must, by definition, sound alike"? (I'm
paraphrasing, but that's the gist of the statement.

Sounds like the sort of thing that the late Julian Hirsch would say. I
don't know if he said this in the 60s or 70s but it was about then that at
least a modest amount of sonically-accurate or nearly-sonically-accurate
started showing up on the market.

I came across the quote when I was reading about Richard
Clark's "Amplifier Challenge". The statement seems pretty obvous to
me, but the author of the article I was reading implied that it was a
pretty ground-breaking assertion at the time it was originally made.
The idea that audible differences between two high-end pieces
of equipment is proof that one (or both) of them is noticeably
inaccurate is a powerful statement, and one that doesn't seem to get
much mention in the literature these days.

Scott Gardner