The criticisms that people have of this site are ridiculous. People can be a little worrisome.

[THW]

just going to point out that I’m not particularly willing to go as far as doxxing, just cant do it.

 

[Dialectic]

I agree with this, disagreeing over headphones doesn't justify this kind of revenge.

Not a disagreement over headphones. I do not know, do not care, and probably could not figure out what headphones the folks at SBAF believe are the best.

We at ASR don't take it all as seriously as purr1n/Merv/Marv does, and we don't hurl abuse all over the internet. I just find it very odd that purr1n/Merv/Marv feels comfortable posting this stuff under essentially his own name.

No, I would not tell his employer about his posts. But if they have an HR department examining employees' social media activity (as a previous employer of mine did), I'm not sure how he sleeps well. Stuff you post on the internet is real and has real consequences.

 

[Soniclife]

Stuff you post on the internet is real and has real consequences.

And it never goes away.

 

[Dialectic]

And it never goes away.

Past statements can always be disavowed, and I think we should be forgiving if someone decides to stop behaving abusively.

 

[Soniclife]

Past statements can always be disavowed, and I think we should be forgiving if someone decides to stop behaving abusively.

I was referring to the HR dept trawl you were talking about, someones current employer might not care, or check, but if you apply in the future to the sort of large company that does care, and does check things you said years ago might stop you getting a job.

 

[JJB70]

Audio is a tool to facilitate enjoyment of music or spoken word etc. I think it is too easy to take it all way too seriously. If people end up abusive or going off on demented rants I would suggest taking a step back and putting it all into perspective.

 

[Rusty Shackleford]

All issues with personal attacks and just plain meanness aside, this is the kind of thing that bothers me about SBAF.

What Marv states is that beyond a certain point, standard audio measurement metrics are mostly irrelevant. At some level, I agree with this, we've long since figured out and exceeded the minimum test standards by which a bit of audio kit can be heard to be coloring or degrading sound reproduction. What he implies is that only human ears can hear these ineffable (time domain, spatial cues, microdynamics) improvements that anachronistic architectures like R+2R can provide better than D\S. It is with no trace of irony that he claims that there are no extant methodologies for measuring and documenting these qualities, while simultaneously shitting on ABX and anyone who is skeptical of his assertions. He's got good cronies in Stoddard & Moffat who simply smile, nod and wink knowingly when that community is raving about the plankton that the latest Schiit box has resurrected from their FLAC files, but never go so far as to really display any theoretical or empirical proofs of what they do better. Not saying Schiit is shit, they have gear that sounds good, too, but if you wanna say "it's better", some substantial whitherto's and whyfor's are in order.

I guess what I'm saying is that they come off as all science-based and rational at first, but if you scratch their surface, it's the same thing as all the other audiophoolery sites, minus the burden of slobbering on the highest-cost audio jewelry. Still, challenge their claims and they'll get mean.

Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. He explains his views pretty clearly, including in the post you linked to. He’s an engineer and he does his own measurements. He’s also done blind tests showing he can hear a difference. (I have, too, by the way.) But ultimately there’s a fundamental disagreement as to whether the typical suite of measurements we see on ASR or in a Stereophile review capture all that we can hear in a piece of gear. It’s ultimately an epistemological debate. It’s completely fine to disagree, even strongly. But trying to get people fired because you disagree with them about audio measurements is absurd.

Did you ignore that they have history over harassing people who like stuff they hate?. Why are you defending a known creep and telling others to shut up?,.

He was mean to you about audio, so you think it’s okay to run and tattle to his employer? Once again, grow up.

The internet is a sesspool of bigotry and hatred. We can certainly debate whether white supremacists or whatever should be doxxed. But I’m quite sure that disagreeing, even in a jerky way (which tons of ASR folks do!), about audio isn’t in that category by a long shot.

 

[Jorj]

It’s ultimately an epistemological debate. It’s completely fine to disagree, even strongly. .

Technically, you're correct, the issue I mentioned is epistemological in nature, and after hearing Rob Watts give a few lectures, the degreed engineering credential does not impress me as it once did. I try to avoid epistemological debates because they are often unproductive and not well supported by data, in my experience, unless those in the debate are noted experts in a field and packing along a sheaf of research results.

As our dear departed Hitchens was so fond of stating, "that which can be asserted without evidence can be discarded without evidence", especially when the person making the claim is also a jerk. In that scenario, avoidance of the jerk is my preferred response, and I'll even go out of my way to warn others that the jerk is, well, a jerk.

 

[amirm]

A lot of criticism of ASR Forum and me were earlier in our history. Folks assumed I was a random guy, writing on an unknown forum. Kind of makes sense from their point of view as there are a lot of inexperienced bloggers out there assessing everything.

That assumption was false of course. They needed to do more homework before shooting from the hip that way. Atomicbob for example wrote this whole thing about someone not understanding the windows audio stack and hence, testing using it, rather than a bit-exact interface. Little he knew that my team at Microsoft wrote the entire audio stack in Windows.

I think they also assumed that I would come and go. The notion that someone would invest serious dollars in instrumentation and then spend day after day measuring gear was not common sense. Perhaps it isn't now. Those folks are all doing audio part-time, still having to make a living at they day job. I did my nearly 40 years of work and was fortunate enough to have the freedom to not have a daily job and focus a lot of energy in this domain.

So, there is a sequence of events that was "logical" in some sense but led them astray. Now their commentary cemented for all time and for all to read, is out of place.

Then there is the tone and style. We are raised to more or less know how to conduct ourselves in person in public. Such education does not exist for online behavior. Parents did not teach their children what to say and how to say because they did not live online. Nor do they read what their children are posting. When insulted personally, I often as the person to print their post and show it to their spouse or mother. None would remotely do so. I on the other hand, post as if my family and friends and co-workers read my posts. Well, it turns out they do! So best to act professionally at all times.

 

[Dialectic]

just going to point out that I’m not particularly willing to go as far as doxxing, just cant do it.

It is not doxxing if the behavior is public. Purr1n does not seem to care if people know about the ugliness of his online behavior.

I don't advocate pointing purr1n's employer to his many public posts or giving him any more attention here.

His forum is declining in popularity, and the best thing it can do is fade into internet oblivion.

 

[Rusty Shackleford]

Technically, you're correct, the issue I mentioned is epistemological in nature, and after hearing Rob Watts give a few lectures, the degreed engineering credential does not impress me as it once did. I try to avoid epistemological debates because they are often unproductive and not well supported by data, in my experience, unless those in the debate are noted experts in a field and packing along a sheaf of research results.

As our dear departed Hitchens was so fond of stating, "that which can be asserted without evidence can be discarded without evidence", especially when the person making the claim is also a jerk. In that scenario, avoidance of the jerk is my preferred response, and I'll even go out of my way to warn others that the jerk is, well, a jerk.

Hitchens was a jerk, too.

 

[Krunok]

His forum is declining in popularity, and the best thing it can do is fade into internet oblivion.

Yep. Best thing to do is to let Perv, sorry Merv, die in piece..

 

[SIY]

Hitchens was a jerk, too.

Many brilliant writers are/were. I often disagreed with him, but always found what he had to say to be interesting and worthy of consideration, as well as delightfully expressed.

 

[Ron Texas]

Relax and listen to the music.

 

[anmpr1]

Atomicbob for example wrote this whole thing about someone not understanding the windows audio stack and hence, testing using it, rather than a bit-exact interface. Little he knew that my team at Microsoft wrote the entire audio stack in Windows.

I remember two things in early Win (3x through 98x) iterations that frustrated me most: sound, and crashing. Because of the latter, I moved to OS/2 (circa Win 3x), and then Linux (crica 1990). OS/2 was something of a bizarre hybrid, and pretty hardware intensive for the times, but I never encountered sound problems with it. That I can remember. Linux didn't crash often, but sound was still a problem. I mean, just getting sound. Back then I remember how installing Nvidia drivers (dropping to console, unpacking a tar, editing the config file, and all the rest) was less frustrating than sound. Sometimes I think sound and computers are not made for each other.

I hope you were not involved in Win 8x. What the hell was Ballmer and team thinking with that thing? I guess they thought the future was a phone interface to rule them all. LOL

 

[Sal1950]

Face to face communication is very different to that experienced on forums. The latter is somewhat impersonal and interpersonal nuances are lost.

Yep, and keyboard cowboys will say things that would get them knocked on their asses in person.

We at ASR don't take it all as seriously as purr1n/Merv/Marv does, and we don't hurl abuse all over the internet. I just find it very odd that purr1n/Merv/Marv feels comfortable posting this stuff under essentially his own name.

Let's not single out SBAF, the internet is full of audio sites that don't know their butts from a hole in the ground. Head-Fi has a Sound Science header, just don't get too objective on it, along with it's DBT censored Cable header. Things are the same at WBF and it's "Measure Based" header, don't get too objective there and I won't go into it's history or Amir's and mine there. Not much better at CA/AS, put on the gloves if you want to talk science there. LOL
Nice to have a home here that knows the difference between science and voodoo.. Amazing how far it's come here in the last 3 1/2 years, I remember when we were better known as "The Dirty Dozen".

 

[Krunok]

Yep, and keyboard cowboys will say things that would get them knocked on their asses in person.

So true.

 

[Thomas savage]

Fun fact , there was a time at the start of ASR when we were basically 50/50 objective' subjective , if one was to indulge in such simplistic definitions..

There was only two of us here at the time mind ha ha

 

[StevenEleven]

Then there is the tone and style. We are raised to more or less know how to conduct ourselves in person in public. Such education does not exist for online behavior. Parents did not teach their children what to say and how to say because they did not live online. Nor do they read what their children are posting. When insulted personally, I often as the person to print their post and show it to their spouse or mother. None would remotely do so. I on the other hand, post as if my family and friends and co-workers read my posts. Well, it turns out they do! So best to act professionally at all times.

This is what concerns me the most. I literally think about what my kids will think because I have pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they do track my posts on the Internet and I know they look at pictures I post on the Internet. So what I post has to be family friendly or I am setting a bad example. I’ve had times someone insulted me on another forum and I was pretty restrained in my response and my son saw me glancing at me looking at it and said “all of those people are kind of weird anyway.” Which was a reasonable assessment. But it was clear he had seen it. And I was watching the political debates in the U.S last night with another one of my sons and I hopped on here real quick and he said “Audio Science Review huh.” And I said yeah it’s just a forum where everyone talks about audio. So they are looking. The odds are he’ll hop on here out of curiosity. My setting the standard at what I would want my kids to see kind of takes care of everything else, I hope.

I worry for other people who don’t have such a motivation to guide them. I am not perfect but I have that motivation to keep me in check. We live in an age where a bad and uncharacteristic moment can ruin your career and reputation and parts of your life if everything plays out wrong, and where the absolute worst happens where online abuse is taken to its extreme. Things can escalate fast and in unexpected ways. There are just times where things escalate beyond anything you could have imagined within seconds or hours, that’s part of life and the human condition in general, and it can extend to consequences resulting from online behavior.

And I think tonight I will I give my kids that advice about would you want your mother to see what you are posting on the Internet. That should make them think.

 

[Sal1950]

There was only two of us here at the time mind ha ha

You've learned a lot since then.