It’s been my experience most engineers are terrible at the empathetic skills needed for good public relations. The public can seldom absorb the fact an engineer is trained to question beliefs and opinions. Beliefs and opinions are inherently very valuable to the general public as that makes up the world they live in. The act of questioning their beliefs alone will trigger irrational emotions and engineers simply can’t handle such subjectivity…
Perception problems are better handled by professionals…
I keep reading stuff like this and it bugs me.
Good engineers are good engineers precisely because they are
empathetic, if by that one adopts the definition of feeling what others feel. Being able to crawl inside the user's perspective in understanding use cases and user needs has been a specifically identified mandatory skill going back at least to Bill Hewlett and the HP Way.
What they may or may not be is
sympathetic, or able to express the emotions of pity or sorrow at the plight of the suffering. Engineers aren't trained to the notion of questioning beliefs, etc.,--I never heard anything like that in pursuing my two engineering degrees. We were trained to correctly identify the problem and find a design solution that would be safe, efficient, and cost-effective. Most of the questions on tests in engineering school start with the word "given...," followed by the problem definition, and not with specific training in communicating with users to understand the nature of problem in the first place. And most engineers are trained in methodologies to a much greater extent than in the principles of physics and theory on which those methodologies supposedly draw. Good engineers usually must transcend typical engineering training to have a real grasp of underlying theory and to be able to explain themselves to non-engineers.
Engineers who cannot adopt the user's perspective may attract the stereotype precisely because they are held in low esteem by users (and, for that matter, by good engineers). If they are brilliant designers, they may be quite useful, but probably not in the user/customer-facing role, at least early in the process.
Back to this issue. As I have said before, there's nothing really wrong with a person with good ears designing speakers simply to sound good to them, and then marketing them to anyone who will buy them. The problem is in making false claims about them. If they use words that imply measurement, people will (eventually) demand to see those measurements, or they will take it upon themselves to provide their own. If the claim is "we tune these speakers to provide the spectral response that sounds good to us, and we think they will sound good to you also," then there is no claim of measurement begging for refutation.
But also as I have said, even low-cost speakers of good reputation going back half a century (and more) were designed using definable tools and measured in laboratory conditions of one sort or another. They may not perform today in the way Dr. Toole came to recommend, but they made a lot of music that brought a lot of people into the fold of those who enjoy good-sounding playback equipment in their homes.
Of course, the response by the designers of such speakers should be to change the conditions of the test rather than to challenge the tools of measurement within the conditions.
(Also of course, public relations isn't about empathy or challenging dominant paradigms or TRVTH or anything like that. It's about taking what you do and presenting it as the best way to do it in such a way as to expand the market pool rather than contract it.)
For example, a one-off maker who tunes by ear might write the following ad copy: "Our speakers may not be for everyone. And that's fine, because we lovingly handcraft them one pair at a time with our devoted but small staff of eight. But those who have been impressed count themselves among the leading experts in the audio community. Please don't be swayed by measurements from reviewers who are trying to force our special speakers into some generic mold. Listen for yourselves. We think you'll be impressed, too."
That really doesn't take much creativity and there's nothing about that statement that is untruthful, no matter how much folks here (including me, up to a point) might disagree with it.
I don't think what we are seeing is specifically any sort of engineer disease.
Rick "has enjoyed speakers who measured worse than these" Denney