As much as I might want to I can't make this stuff up, in other words this month's clown update direct from the pages of the premier magazine for the musings of those fabulous "professional" audio reviewers, otherwise known as clowns, The Absolute Sound. (Issue 232, April 2013)
First off we get a very well reasoned letter questioning the review procedure for AudioQuest DragonFly DAC. To his credit the reviewer, Alan Taffel, does acknowledge his error but then he goes on to write: > Contrary to your assumption, the MM-1 (Note: the MM-1s are B&W powered > desktop speakers with built-in DAC) did not sound better being directly > driven by USB. We can only surmise from this that the PC's USB is laden > with jitter News flash: Jitter can be measured!!! But hey, Mr. Taffel is a professional clown and clowns don't measure, they just "surmise". Next we have the clown in chief, oops I mean editor in chief, Robert Harley waxing on about sins of commission versus sins of omission in his monthly editorial. While most of his points are very well stated and surprisingly coherent, he ruins the whole effort with this last paragraph: > Those who attempt to remove human "subjectivity" from audio engineering > forget that the listener isn't a passive observer, but a fully active, > engaged, and even creative participant. From nothing but patterns of > varying air pressure, we conjure in our minds living and breathing > musicians. The traditional yardsticks of sound quality are meaningless > without recognizing the vital role our imaginations play in music > listening. Now I for one am very confused. Doesn't the process of subjectively reviewing over priced high end audio equipment involve listening to music? And as stated by Mr. Harley the reviewer/listener's imagination comes into play during the listening required during the course of a review. Yet somehow that imagination, or at least the imagination of professional clowns, oops I did it again, I mean reviewers, is able to selectively filter out the real from the imagined. As I said I can't make this stuff up! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ralphpnj's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10827 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98300 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
