[Audio_Empire[_2_]]

On Monday, December 10, 2012 7:35:04 PM UTC-8, wrote:
On Monday, December 10, 2012 6:17:06 PM UTC-5, Audio_Empire wrote:



The SR reviews are suspect due to SR's editorial policy which was

that everything printed in SR must serve the advertisers/potential

advertisers.



Science doesn't rely on editorial policies.

No, but publications do.

Science relies on proper test methodology. Anyone interested can seek out the articles (try either major urban public libraries or technical academic libraries) and see for themselves how well these tests were carried out.

The idea that a suite of tests which only seeks to confirm a set of
published specs for a unit under test is not, in my estimation, good
science. The further fact that The editorial policy at both SR and
High-Fidelity was that if a component didn't meet specs, the review
was not published, is also not doing good service to one's readership.




That meant no critical evaluations of anything. Ever

wonder why SR never published a negative review from Julian

Hirsch? Because it was SR policy to not publish negative reviews.

That didn't mean that Julian never came across a piece of equipment

that didn't meet its public specs. It simply meant that SR didn't run

the review, that's all. You see, it was their editorial policy to cater

to the industry, not the consumer. It is because of this policy that

the late J. Gordon Holt founded Stereophile. His stint at High-Fidelity

Magazine (and I believe that he also worked at SR for a time too)

convinced him that these magazines weren't serving the interest

of the consumer. That's also why that no one should be surprised

that SR's tests on the audibility of components, including CD players,

show no differences in audible performance. It's also where the joke

"quote" from Julian Hirsch goes like this: "of all the amplifiers that I

have ever tested, this was one of them" That "quote" applies to

tuners, CD decks, preamps, receivers, you name it. And no, Julian

never really said that, but if you read the sum-total of his work,

including going back to "Hirsch-Houck" labs before Julian went off

on his own, you will see that he never had an opinion. He just

measured the equipment against its published specs, and if it met

them, it was good for go. If not, that fact was never mentioned (as

far as I know and I subscribed to SR for decades!) and the reviews

were not published. The fact that to SR, everything sounded the same

was sacrosanct. I don't wonder that all of those "DBTs" showed no

difference in CD players.



Subsequent research has pretty much vindicated Hirsch, but that's the subject for another thread.

Really? Science has vindicated a non-critical approach to evaluation? Since when?



BTW, the idea that a guy who thought all properly functioning amps sounded alike was serving his advertisers is ridiculous. For service to advertisers, Stereophile (along with TAS) takes the cake


Well there you are wrong. I have written for both TAS and Stereophile
over the years, and no one ever told me how to slant a review. If I
found something negative, I said so in no uncertain terms and they
both published those reviews with all my comments intact. Both
Stereophile and TAS started out accepting NO ads, then they
"graduated" to taking ads only from dealers, and finally from
manufacturers. Both magazines' policy toward advertisers is pretty
much the same: We'll take your ads with the understanding that the
fact that you are an advertiser will have no bearing on the outcome
of reviews of your products. Both magazines have a list of not a few
manufacturers who refuse to advertise with them and won't send
them equipment to review any more because they previously
received a bad review at the hands of one or the other.

..



snip



As for the early Philips (Magnavox) players sounding "different" in

one of those tests, I agree. It did sound different from the early

Japanese players. It was listenable, the early Sonys, Kyoceras,

and Technics players were not and that's MY opinion.



The biggest trouble with high-end audio ever since the term was coined is the mistaken confusion of opinion with fact.


I would say that's more than somewhat true. But often,
opinions merely mirror facts. Cable elevators, green
marking pens, blocks of myrtle wood placed on the tops
of components, "cryogenically treated" clocks
and cable sound are all unsupported mythology, but early CD
players that sounded nasty to a rather large group
of people definitely mirror facts. Let's face it, not everyone is
a critical listener. That's a facility that one has to nurture, its
not God-given. And as was discussed ad-nauseum in another
thread, there are people who are so biased toward certain
precepts that they wouldn't hear things that challenged their
biases even if that characteristic stuck-out like a sore thumb!