There's another important point which hasn't yet been made here. Let's suppose one of these tweaks - like vibration isolation for the SB - really does make a difference (as verified by blind tests and/or measurements). Great - where do we go from there? That's not very useful knowledge unless we know *why* it made a difference, because otherwise we're just fumbling around in the dark - we have no idea how to further improve things, or even whether the tweak actually improved things or made them worse!
The only way to proceed is to carefully investigate, in other words, do science, or something close to it. And that requires reliable and reproducible testing, it requires avoiding the confounding factors which arise in sighted listening tests, it requires lots of care and attention to statistics - in other words it's a pain, but unforunately it's the only way to go. And the very first step is to separate the tweaks which work from those which don't - surely no one thinks *all* of them make a difference? So if tweaker audiophiles (I don't mean that as a derogatory term, I'm just not sure what else to call it) really care about audio, they should be eager to investigate their tweaks and try to uncover which are real, and from there why they work, right? And if they think their tweaks are real, they have nothing to lose from that, and more importantly if some turn out not to matter they can focus on those that do. Then engineers and designers might take those tweaks seriously and improve on them. But that just can't happen, or it's much harder, when there's all this sillyness around. I just don't understand how you can care about audio and not want to know what really makes a difference. Or if you do want to know, why it's so hard to accept that sighted tests are deeply flawed and often very very misleading. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32301 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
