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Singular Objectivity

Best in what way ?
This forum is focused on technical reviews of audio (and related) equipment with its goal being impartial objectivity. To my way of thinking, objectivity and reality are synonyms. We can distort reality through subjectivity, but objective reality persists. Period. And this forum is where the veils of subjectivity get peeled away to expose the accuracy of objective reality, as evidenced by measurable outcomes. This is far and away the primary reason I'm attracted to audiosciencereview, and individually benefits me so that I may focus on purchasing the BEST audio equipment in any given audio category. I suspect that attraction is likewise shared by many other participants here.

But it occurs to me that objectivity should result in a singular answer to a question, not multiple variants. For example, 2+2=4 achieves objectivity. There is only one answer to 2+2, not multiple variants. When a question elicits multiple variants, then that seems to imply elements of subjectivity. Variant answers indicate feelings, biases, or beliefs are distorting objectivity. Isn't that what we are trying to get away from? An objective answer to a question should be singular, not plural.

If the above perspectives about objectivity are true (and they are only perspectives being shared; I am not presuming "ultimate" truth), then the logical consequence of that line of reasoning leads to an interesting outcome. If the question is which item of equipment in each audio category is objectively the BEST for us to invest in, then that question should be answerable objectively with only one result. So there should be a BEST turntable, a BEST amplifier, a BEST speaker, a BEST streamer, a BEST dac, etc. For you long-standing participants in this forum, can you objectively answer those questions?

I suspect not.

I suspect answers to BEST in each category would diverge wildly. Despite everyone's professed adherence to objectivity in this forum, I highly doubt even ten audiosciencereview members could agree on BEST in any one category, much less 20,000+ members. Perhaps the only way to achieve singular objectivity in the audio world is to reduce down to tiny little questions, such as distortion, or SINAD, or similar, but that scarcely serves to answer which is the BEST piece of equipment in a given category that deserves our money. Which seems to imply that, for that ultimate decision about where to invest our money, objectivity in the world of audio science has either not been achieved, or is unobtainable, and what unfortunately remains is the dominance of subjectivity.
We have plenty here who ascribe a lot of value to asesthetics or things like vu meters....which don't even come into the equation for me generally....
 
Not quite true.
Not quite is an interesting choice of words in the context of quantum mechanics. ;)
And, just to be clear, I wasn't trying to imply that Einstein was right in his assessment of quantum mechanics! I saw @Skeptical_Aus 's post and I think he misinterpreted my too-terse comment posted earlier. I was at a holiday dinner! (we need a blush emoji).
As best I can tell, Einstein missed the boat by being sure he was right about his conviction that God wouldn't play dice.
Failure to keep an open mind is the kiss of death for a scientist. Unfortunately, it's tough for most of 'em (ahem, us), as they we grow older, not to get set in their our ways. :(
 
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A technician's opinion on listening to music or watching videos (there is a home cinema part here) is that these are questions that have been resolved since the last century.
They are not vital occupations but amusement with a fraction of reality. The idea of "the best" to do this is therefore laughable because we are swimming here in the deep waters of lies, therefore of the most total subjectivism.
 
After all my time here in ASR, best measuring does not necessarily equate to good sounding but it does point me in the "right" direction to demo audio gears.
 
This forum is focused on technical reviews of audio (and related) equipment with its goal being impartial objectivity. To my way of thinking, objectivity and reality are synonyms. We can distort reality through subjectivity, but objective reality persists. Period. And this forum is where the veils of subjectivity get peeled away to expose the accuracy of objective reality, as evidenced by measurable outcomes. This is far and away the primary reason I'm attracted to audiosciencereview, and individually benefits me so that I may focus on purchasing the BEST audio equipment in any given audio category. I suspect that attraction is likewise shared by many other participants here.

But it occurs to me that objectivity should result in a singular answer to a question, not multiple variants. For example, 2+2=4 achieves objectivity. There is only one answer to 2+2, not multiple variants. When a question elicits multiple variants, then that seems to imply elements of subjectivity. Variant answers indicate feelings, biases, or beliefs are distorting objectivity. Isn't that what we are trying to get away from? An objective answer to a question should be singular, not plural.

If the above perspectives about objectivity are true (and they are only perspectives being shared; I am not presuming "ultimate" truth), then the logical consequence of that line of reasoning leads to an interesting outcome. If the question is which item of equipment in each audio category is objectively the BEST for us to invest in, then that question should be answerable objectively with only one result. So there should be a BEST turntable, a BEST amplifier, a BEST speaker, a BEST streamer, a BEST dac, etc. For you long-standing participants in this forum, can you objectively answer those questions?

I suspect not.

I suspect answers to BEST in each category would diverge wildly. Despite everyone's professed adherence to objectivity in this forum, I highly doubt even ten audiosciencereview members could agree on BEST in any one category, much less 20,000+ members. Perhaps the only way to achieve singular objectivity in the audio world is to reduce down to tiny little questions, such as distortion, or SINAD, or similar, but that scarcely serves to answer which is the BEST piece of equipment in a given category that deserves our money. Which seems to imply that, for that ultimate decision about where to invest our money, objectivity in the world of audio science has either not been achieved, or is unobtainable, and what unfortunately remains is the dominance of subjectivity.
Your starting premise of 2+2=4 is OK, but it's really solving one thing at a time. An audio device has to do several things well at the same time. If you only consider noise, frequency-amplitude and distortion, you have 9 options ranging from the noisiest, most distortion, wobbly-FR to the quietest, least distorting and flattest FR. Objectively, the latter is better than the former, but if they are all better than we can hear, picking the best is irrelevant. Under those circumstances, we pick the one with features we like and price that suits us (2 more aspects, so now we're up to five dimensions of interest). We also consider interfacing with what we already have. For a power amplifier we may consider gain, power, load sensitivity, input sensitivity etc. based on our speakers. And so on.
 
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