The question isn't whether you agree with Stereophile's approach. Obviously you don't. The issue is denigrating someone's honesty.
And "he should know better" simply is NOT conclusive in that account. That's just not the way humans often work. There really is a range of human belief
which will include those who have a lot of technical experience, but who may have come to different conclusions than you or others at ASR.
It doesn't mean they are being dishonest.
First, and we've been down this road before but I'll let J. Gordon Holt speak for me, he's much better at it.
"Do you still feel the high-end audio industry has lost its way in the manner you described 15 years ago?
John Atkinson"
"Not in the same manner; there's no hope now. Audio actually used to have a goal: perfect reproduction of the sound of real music performed in a real space. That was found difficult to achieve, and it was abandoned when most music lovers, who almost never heard anything except amplified music anyway, forgot what "the real thing" had sounded like. Today, "good" sound is whatever one likes. As Art Dudley so succinctly said [in his January 2004 "Listening," see "Letters," p.9],
fidelity is irrelevant to music."
Since the only measure of sound quality is that the listener likes it, that has pretty well put an end to audio advancement, because different people rarely agree about sound quality. Abandoning the acoustical-instrument standard, and the mindless acceptance of voodoo science, were not parts of my original vision.
JGH"
"Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?
John Atkinson"
"Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with
the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.
JGH"
Now if the editorial policy of Stereophile is to take that (dark side) path, fine and good.
A damn shame, but it's their magazine.
BUT then we come back around to Mr. Atkinson himself, he is the one that's supposed to represent the light side of the force there, the guy that does the measurements and understands their implications. Unfortunately when we get to something like that Spec amp he ducks any discussion on how that amps technical failings are probably audibly effecting the sound of what the listener hears. Often we get to more radical cases where things like SET amps and their transformers interface with many of the recommended speakers to provide a freq response that's insanely wild, not to mention the distortion specs, the exact opposite of a straight wire with gain. He's the guy there that is supposed to "know his schitt (and he does)" but does he ever use that knowledge in an attempt to educate the less tech minded readers? Does the "measurement guy" ever attempt to influence the readership in a more positive direction? Nope, he can't say anything that might upset an advertiser or even a reader that may be in love with their distorted sound.
Where do you see the integrity of how he handles the position he holds there.
