You seem to have edited your post while I was typing ... darrenyeats wrote: > What about loudspeakers, venue acoustics. In terms of recording > technology, analogue tape? People's opinions about what sounds better or > worse are very important, but this doesn't diminish the science and > engineering aspect at all. Yes; I think I appreciated this context in my orginal post by saying that superbonham wrote: > It does make sense to argue that an audio component is better suited to > reproduce sound more faithfully than another one if it measures better > or if this improvement can be backed up by double blind testing, though. > Whether this component 'sounds better' to someone or not again is a > different story [...] It's just a matter superbonham wrote: > [...](of personal preference, opinion and taste). darrenyeats wrote: > > Why should proper engineering and human opinion automatically exclude > one another? They don't. They do exclude one another in the sense that they address different questions. There is no scientific way to address 'human opinion' [preference, taste, mood], because it's just not a scientific category. There is simply no scientific way to tell whether some audio equipment or tweak sounds better [right, more intensive, ...] to someone - it's just not he right question asked.*
At the same time it's inadequate and useless to tackle the 'ability to reproduce audio faithfully' by opinion or (sighted) personal listening tests. Of course one can express his personal preference and suggest an (unproven) tweak to others, but what exactly is the point? On what basis should I trust him (especially if he sells this tweak for hundreds or thousands of dollars)? * Of course there are various methods (e.g. statistics or analysis of historic evidences) to address scientific aspects of personal opinion (e.g. distribution of a certain opinion in a group of people, development of opinions throughout human history) - but that's not meant above. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ superbonham's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=22540 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=102330 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
