It isn’t so much the mediocre measurements but the sheer hideousness.
Keith
Keith
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Dan D’Agostino on measurements
- Thread starter reg19
- Start date
No. It seems to be a result of low FB factor and higher Class AB bias.
Tom C
Major Contributor
Back in 2018 and 2019, when audio shows were legal, I had a chance to hear some of his stuff. Gorgeous to behold, tempting to the eye, it didn’t sound better...or even different than 90% of the rest. As far as his comments go, he’s got something to sell, but I’m not buying into what he’s saying. And if you’re paying that much money for something, you want it to be better, no matter who you are or how much you have to spend. The whole point of an extravagant piece of gear like that is for it to be better than anything else. But aside from appearance, it isn’t.
- Thread Starter
- #24
As a logical argument, I see fallacy in your statement.
I am not in the audio business but did major in Electronics Engineering in a past life. The past 3 decades, I’ve been using sophisticated math (multi variable stochastic calculus) & advanced statistics for trading. In short, I’ve relied very heavily on numbers only all my life and owe my life savings to them.
My noobie opinion: perhaps, better measurements => better sound always; but we haven’t completed the necessary set of measurements yet.
Re: Benchmark, I auditioned one of their amps once (AHB2?). Never checked their measurements but felt that it lacking in instantaneous power.
Were I to try to summarize or put into correct perspective what Mr. D'Agostino actually said, it would be something like, "Measurements do not tell the whole story. You have to listen, to know whether the measurements correlate with the sound quality."
I think there is a fundamental problem with this perspective, as I will explain momentarily, right after I make a comment about many of the comments on the YouTube page. Many of those comments indicate a different interpretation of what Mr. D'Agostino said, something more like, "Measurements are useless. All that matters is how an amplifier sounds." I don't think this would be an accurate interpretation, yet it is how many of the comments spun it. This suggests to me a sort of confirmation bias, not the type that we routinely discuss here, but a different type, where, when listening to something that someone else is saying, we don't always hear what they are actually saying, but hear what we want for them to be saying. Based on Guttenberg's comment in text at the top of the comments section, I think that Gutterberg is guilty of this. And it was obvious in the video that Guttenberg was leading D'Agostino on, trying to coax him to say something strong, that other people would take to mean that he's saying that measurements are useless. Guttenberg simply wants to get as much traffic to his YouTube channel as he can, for the obvious reason, and he now owes reg19 a thank you for helping him out.
The problem with the perspective that Mr. D'Agostino expressed is the presumption that amplifiers ought to have any sound signature at all. In my opinion they should not. Amplifiers are not musical instruments, and should be talked about in a manner that suggests commonality with musical instruments. The output of an amplifier should be a perfectly linear replication of the input. This perspective ought not need any justification, because it is manifest that otherwise there would be no assurance that what is heard through the speakers or headphones is faithful to what was recorded at the microphone. There are no two ways about it. The only question is what is the best way to insure that an amplifier faithfully replicates the signal sent to it. Is this better accomplished using laboratory instrumentation, or by listening? There was a point in time when instrumentation was poor and no one would have questioned the need to listen to the amplifier, in order to have a sense of how well the amplifier faithfully renders the signal presented to it. Some people might argue that this is still true today, and that you still have to listen in order to know whether the distortion level is audible, or how objectionable the distortion is. I don't have any big problem with that, however I will point out that there is a fundamental distinction between listening to make an assessment of how much distortion you can hear, vs. listening to find out whether the amplifier sounds the way that you like for amplifiers to sound.
Technically-minded people, who would advocate listening to an amplifier in order to assess how much distortion you can hear, do understand that an amplifier's job is to faithfully replicate the input signal. People who are not technically minded and who listen to amplifiers and talk about whether they like the sound of this amplifier better than the sound of this other amplifier, etc., generally do not quite understand that the job of an amplifier is to faithfully reproduce the input signal. They make it all too apparent that they just don't understand this essential, fundamental truth about amplifiers. Moreover, there is a curious steadfastness in their inability to understand this, by which many people imagine that they hear differences in amplifiers that they did not actually hear. This has been demonstrated numerous times. People will routinely describe in considerable detail, while using arcane language, the difference in the sound of two different amplifiers, and then when they are asked to tell which is which when all they have to go by is the sound, they cannot tell them apart. What is it that makes people behave this way? Why are so many people unwilling to simply say, "I can't hear any difference." In audiophile circles, your status and reputation within the peer group is determined by your ability to hear things that lesser audiophiles with ears with inferior gilding do not hear. If you are willing to say, "I can't tell them apart," you will be fortunate if you are not told that you are expected to stay around after the others have left, to help clean up all the mess. You may even be asked to clean the toilets, or clean the leaves from the pool using that big long-handled thing with the net on the end. I'm being silly, but what is actually true is that if most other people in the gathering say that they hear a difference in the two amplifiers and you do not agree with them and add a little bit of your own elaboration to what they have said, they're simply gonna stop talking to you. They will in fact treat you as though you don't belong in the group. You're not going to be invited back to the next meeting of the society. And you can't stand the thought of that, and wouldn't be able to stand that thought even without the rumor that you overheard that both Steve Guttenberg and Michael Fremer are planning to drop in unannounced at next month's meeting. You certainly don't want to miss that one. You'd best start talking about the difference in the sound of those two amplifiers, using the most arcane and elitist language that you've thus far been able to muster.
I think there is a fundamental problem with this perspective, as I will explain momentarily, right after I make a comment about many of the comments on the YouTube page. Many of those comments indicate a different interpretation of what Mr. D'Agostino said, something more like, "Measurements are useless. All that matters is how an amplifier sounds." I don't think this would be an accurate interpretation, yet it is how many of the comments spun it. This suggests to me a sort of confirmation bias, not the type that we routinely discuss here, but a different type, where, when listening to something that someone else is saying, we don't always hear what they are actually saying, but hear what we want for them to be saying. Based on Guttenberg's comment in text at the top of the comments section, I think that Gutterberg is guilty of this. And it was obvious in the video that Guttenberg was leading D'Agostino on, trying to coax him to say something strong, that other people would take to mean that he's saying that measurements are useless. Guttenberg simply wants to get as much traffic to his YouTube channel as he can, for the obvious reason, and he now owes reg19 a thank you for helping him out.
The problem with the perspective that Mr. D'Agostino expressed is the presumption that amplifiers ought to have any sound signature at all. In my opinion they should not. Amplifiers are not musical instruments, and should be talked about in a manner that suggests commonality with musical instruments. The output of an amplifier should be a perfectly linear replication of the input. This perspective ought not need any justification, because it is manifest that otherwise there would be no assurance that what is heard through the speakers or headphones is faithful to what was recorded at the microphone. There are no two ways about it. The only question is what is the best way to insure that an amplifier faithfully replicates the signal sent to it. Is this better accomplished using laboratory instrumentation, or by listening? There was a point in time when instrumentation was poor and no one would have questioned the need to listen to the amplifier, in order to have a sense of how well the amplifier faithfully renders the signal presented to it. Some people might argue that this is still true today, and that you still have to listen in order to know whether the distortion level is audible, or how objectionable the distortion is. I don't have any big problem with that, however I will point out that there is a fundamental distinction between listening to make an assessment of how much distortion you can hear, vs. listening to find out whether the amplifier sounds the way that you like for amplifiers to sound.
Technically-minded people, who would advocate listening to an amplifier in order to assess how much distortion you can hear, do understand that an amplifier's job is to faithfully replicate the input signal. People who are not technically minded and who listen to amplifiers and talk about whether they like the sound of this amplifier better than the sound of this other amplifier, etc., generally do not quite understand that the job of an amplifier is to faithfully reproduce the input signal. They make it all too apparent that they just don't understand this essential, fundamental truth about amplifiers. Moreover, there is a curious steadfastness in their inability to understand this, by which many people imagine that they hear differences in amplifiers that they did not actually hear. This has been demonstrated numerous times. People will routinely describe in considerable detail, while using arcane language, the difference in the sound of two different amplifiers, and then when they are asked to tell which is which when all they have to go by is the sound, they cannot tell them apart. What is it that makes people behave this way? Why are so many people unwilling to simply say, "I can't hear any difference." In audiophile circles, your status and reputation within the peer group is determined by your ability to hear things that lesser audiophiles with ears with inferior gilding do not hear. If you are willing to say, "I can't tell them apart," you will be fortunate if you are not told that you are expected to stay around after the others have left, to help clean up all the mess. You may even be asked to clean the toilets, or clean the leaves from the pool using that big long-handled thing with the net on the end. I'm being silly, but what is actually true is that if most other people in the gathering say that they hear a difference in the two amplifiers and you do not agree with them and add a little bit of your own elaboration to what they have said, they're simply gonna stop talking to you. They will in fact treat you as though you don't belong in the group. You're not going to be invited back to the next meeting of the society. And you can't stand the thought of that, and wouldn't be able to stand that thought even without the rumor that you overheard that both Steve Guttenberg and Michael Fremer are planning to drop in unannounced at next month's meeting. You certainly don't want to miss that one. You'd best start talking about the difference in the sound of those two amplifiers, using the most arcane and elitist language that you've thus far been able to muster.
I think you may be misinterpreting the general perspective of most ASR members. A device that measures well here demonstrates:
- A high degree of audio engineering acumen.
- For things like DACs or amps, once a device measures beyond a certain threshold (related to what humans can actually hear) then that device is audibly transparent in regards to noise and distortion.
You'll also see many members talk about devices that don't measure well that they know don't measure well, but they like the sound anyway. Personal preference is perfectly OK.
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That's interesting. Which speakers were they driving, how large and reverberant was the room, and what kind of level were you listening at?
tuga
Major Contributor
No, the output is measured at the output. PSU noise may or may not contribute to that.
DSJR
Major Contributor
I bet your feelings against the Benchmark would have cleared had you heard two in bridged form? I think 'we' know what to measure, but some of the most successful designs jiggle the distortion, drive and clipping parameters to give the best possible results into real loudspeaker loads using a musical signal as well as conventional test tones at various levels and frequencies. Can't back it up with evidence, but the few decent audio designers (out of many) I had the pleasure of talking to over the decades all seemed to have a handle on what to do to make a design behave in a particular way and it's one reason why some of them endorsed active speaker operation, as the demands on each amp in the system were so much reduced if the quality of the speaker drivers allowed it.. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my general vibe about it right now
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I think Dan's current gear is ugly in the way a gold plated Bentley is ugly. And for the size and material involved the Bentley is much lower priced.
Was about to ask th same question until I read your post .
+1
Fair enough - I guess if I was to try this I'd need to be able to trim input levels accurately - many preamps these days don't go better than 0.5dB/step so that adds complication. Beyond that we need two independent level adjusted outputs from the preamp or to be able to direct the signal to one amp or the other (changeover relays). It's bit trickier than it seems unless building our own buffer stages perhaps? And to be able to switch amplifier output on the fly - a high current change-over relay. Then some way to blindly select one or the other. As you say - not too hard. Is that what you'd suggest? I wonder how many do this vs making their own comparisons as they best see fit - no one I know of - but I guess that is what we are here to change ;o)
Kiwi actually - fellow Austalasian
Better measurements are meaningful up to the limits of hearing. Beyond that it is more about design performance limits. This is more the ASR view. So I surmise that you don't 'know'/'always'. Avoid unfounded generalisations.
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Here's one who went through the effort.
It's much harder with amplifiers... DAC's aren't nearly as difficult.
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...f-tube-sound-is-a-myth-why-tubes.8656/page-22
It's almost embarrassing to comment - we are both super lucky at least. Last I looked Taiwan had stunning management as well.NZ, probably the only place better than Oz at the moment
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