Guermantes
Senior Member
This is a reasonable engineering goal but not a satisfying definition/goal in the real world. Eventually what matters is how a piece of equipment sounds to somebody, not how it is measured. And just because something is easily measured does not mean it is the right measure. If something is measured beyond human capabilities ti hear then that should not be part of the ranking in some composite number.
I'm afraid that I simply don't agree with you. It is perfectly valid to evaluate how a piece of equipment measures since this indicates how it statisfies real world engineering goals (to borrow your terminology). How is the psychological aspect of how it sounds to any individual -- an aspect that will probably vary greatly depending on mood, physiology, environment, what sort of day they are having -- supposed to be anymore "real world" than what measurements show? If anything, the measurements allow us to rule out bias and listening idiosyncracies. Our ears are not the great arbiters of audio truth you seem to imply, unless it's a phenomenological truth you are searching for.
The bridge analogy is off the mark. Noise and distortion can be audible artefacts, so SINAD ranking seems perfectly reasonable even when it drops below apparently audible levels. In my work I constantly battle digging intelligible speech out of the noise floors of recordings systems -- what I would give for a SNR of 120 dB!!
The whole history of sound recording technology has been a battle to reduce noise and distortion, and the standard measurements in devices such as the AP analyser reflect this. If these are not the right measurements, then you should probably take that up with the AES, et.al.