[This is a hard concept to get across. Suffice it to say that humans know very, very, very little of the science behind what makes a good sound system – and hold on to your wallet around people who imply otherwise]
Now here I go defending Reviewers, after blasting them last post. Just goes to show that things can always get worse.
Most reviewers (there are exceptions) seem to be able to avoid the ‘self-appointed technological expert’ syndrome which is for all intents and purposes almost indisinguishable from the ‘sales techno-babble daze and confuse them in buying what you are selling’ approach.
To put it simply – Whenever someone says that a product is better than another because of some technological detail – they are lying.
This is true in any technological arena – and any real expert will tell you that we as a species don’t know diddly and what we do know has so many qualifications and constraints thatr we might as well not know anything – and in the end it is all just theories and models. That is just the way science works, sorry.
So then we have the Audio Perfectionist, whose role apparently is to, well in the automobile universe it would be to berate auto reviewers for not spending their time informing their readers that the Porsche is a very badly engineered product (in comparison with the Honda and Toyota, for example) and is therefore not worth 1/10 of the asking price (i.e. the car or product should sell for little more than the cost of its constituent parts).
For example, to state that time-aligned speakers are better than non time-aligned speakers is B.S. Even saying that they are more accurate is B.S.
What is not B.S., but verging on meaninglessness, is to say “From what we know about human hearing, a time-aligned speaker will seem to image better and seem more realistically dynamic than a non-time-aligned speaker, all else being equal”.
“All else being equal” requires us to imagine two speakers that are absolutelyidentical except one is time-aligned and one is not. Of course, making the one speaker time-aligned will in actual reality cause side-effects that might render the speaker less ‘real’ and distort imaging – just those areas that time-alignment is trying to improve, so this statement means very little in the real world where you and I listen to and buy speakers.
And we can go on. Suffice it to say that ‘statements’ like the B.S. above, are only true, if they are true anywhere, in an extremely simplified imaginary view of the world. I am not sure that people really want to spend their hard earned dollars on something whose value is based on somebody else’s fantasy life,
whose only goal seems to be the evangelistic promotion of our era’s archaic definition of what accurate sound reproduction is, from spinning aluminum and vinyl disks no less.
Archaic because scientists know almost nothing compared to what they will know in decades and centuries hence – so evaluating equipment based on what is essentually voodoo may not be very smart if you are technologically minded. And things like…uh…. musicality and enjoyment do not appear anywhere in these kind of voodoo doctor proclamations of what has ‘quality’.
It just seems like a bad buying decision to me to buy something you do not like. Hey! It took me a lot of years, and a lot of cars and speakers and cables… to figure this out. Everyday we talk to people who are seriously considering products based on specifications, build quality, measured performance, reviews….people who are just like me.
That is why it is important to actually go for a test-drive and listen to something to see if you like it and not just read the specs or a reviewer’s description of the component’s construction and measured performance.
[Then we have Romy’s critique of the same Wilson MAXX II speakers, coming from a more experiential perspective, much more in the line of how we think speakers and systems need to be evaluated. Why he liked the referenced Audio Perfectionist article, I couldn’t tell ya]
*There are so many examples of this. Another is: “This amps sounds more organic BECAUSE it is using 1% Vishay resistors” B.S. Does it sound more organic? Listen to it! More organic than what? Than no-name cheap-as-dirt resistors from the Far East? Well, I guess it is nice of them to spend the extra buck. But what else is in the system that we are supposed to be listening for the sound of a few resistors in? The electrical music signal is going though a LOT of things, even inside all but the most simple of components. And the system! It is one gigantic, very, very complex technological-ecosystem; it all must work together in harmony. Each component is affected by every other component. Still trying to pin-point the sound of those resistors the saleperson is touting?
The best scientists using the biggest super-computers in the world can only partially simulate a tiny fraction of this system. And gurus, and salespeople, and manufacturers can’t tell you why it sounds exactly the way it does, either.
All you can do is listen. For yourself. It’s OK, take your time. Enjoy the music while you’re at it.
