My lips are sealed, my fingers are tied.Ahh, you work in the industry, then! Please be discreet! Don't tell us any proprietary information which we shouldn't know! It could become awkward for us all.
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Snake Oil Department, Top This
- Thread starter Ron Texas
- Start date
And all these impressions from just a cable, Amazing!
the guy missed his call, should have been a Poet, a Bard, perhaps he is professionally, and audio is just a hobby.
"...and to get a paycheck for being a dishonest shill."
I intellectually understand the notion of giving up scientific integrity for pay, I just can't imagine being that amoral.
Never. Because the statement “opened his mind... to a greater acceptance of uncertainty, a willingness to give up the certainty of scientific proof and accept things with less evidence than, say, a rigorous double-blind test.” leaves lots of room for wiggle because he changed his “rationale and beliefs”, so the sentence written by @SIY in post #2,743 would never be written, said or even hinted by a legal savvy operation like the one that Jim Austin leads as Stereophile editor. Long gone are the days when The Stereophile told it like it is.
"Opened his mind" and the brain fell out.
But that is only one instance of what has been an ongoing situation since they started to accept advertising and J Gordon Holt departed Stereophile.
You can budget your entire life for 5 years.
Understood. This has been an ongoing situation since Holt left Stereophile. However, I had never seen in black on white that they decided to “open their minds” and become subjectivists of the kind I don’t have any proof but I guess ==> know ==> must be ==> declare that it is this way ’cuz I like it.
I did not see the original review of the audiophile switch box when originally published in May’24; I only saw it with the just published Recommended Components.
Once more a quote from Gordon,
"To celebrate Stereophile's 30th anniversary, Gordon gave a speech at a dinner the magazine hosted at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. The text of that speech was reprinted in our September 1992 issue, and it makes for disturbing reading:
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.
Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio."
J. Gordon Holt"
Bolt type highlighting was mine. Sal
45 Years of Stereophile
It was 45 years ago this month that the first issue of Stereophile, just 20 pages in length, went in the mail. It had been founded by one J. Gordon Holt. Gordon had been technical editor of High Fidelity magazine in the 1950s, and was tired of being asked to pander to the demands of advertisers.
www.stereophile.com
The pressing question is why did he not raise his voice ten years earlier when he saw what was happening in through the 80’s. Why did they not enforce DBT at Stereophile?Once more a quote from Gordon,
"To celebrate Stereophile's 30th anniversary, Gordon gave a speech at a dinner the magazine hosted at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. The text of that speech was reprinted in our September 1992 issue, and it makes for disturbing reading:
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.
Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio."
J. Gordon Holt"
Bolt type highlighting was mine. Sal
45 Years of Stereophile
It was 45 years ago this month that the first issue of Stereophile, just 20 pages in length, went in the mail. It had been founded by one J. Gordon Holt. Gordon had been technical editor of High Fidelity magazine in the 1950s, and was tired of being asked to pander to the demands of advertisers.
If memory serves, he had already lost control of the magazine by then.
For a accurate answer to that you'd have to ask Gordon and he passed July 20 2009.
I would only venture he ran into walls after he sold the magazine and within a few years left.
He was also passionate about multich sound and ran into walls there.
IIRC he did plan on starting a new "something" that focused on multich but I believe he just ran out of time and energy.
Don't we all.
He lost full control by 1982, not totally as he did by 1992. JGH could have raised his voice publicly at the overall equipment review “industry” not just Stereophile. Oh well, it is past history anyway and “here we are”: looking at hobbists deriding measurements, the scientific method, etc. and everything controlled by audio theocracies. Not unlike the general lack of rational discourse in many areas including politics — and I will stop at this. People do not want to think through, they just want to “feel good”.
Galliardist
Major Contributor
I don't think the model for magazines of the 1980s would ever have allowed for it.
The thing is that the truth is, largely, boring.
Take Amir's reviews: and a lot of magazine reviews in the early years were similar, largely measurement based reviews. Imagine reading 100 pages of ASR style reviews in magazine format every month. Sure, it would have been informative. (And I certainly used the old What HiFi back pages in the 1980s, where they gave very basic info (compatibility details, really) about most of the items on sale on the UK market). But i doubt that hundreds of thousands of readers would pick up copies every month and be enthralled. Today, we have the online format where we are presented with Amir's one at a time to follow here, or go to them only when we need to - it's a much better way to do this. And we can respond instantly, which also adds interest and sometimes value through seeing those reactions.
Some DBTs would have been more interesting back then, as there was more chance for difference than there is now. Cartridges would have been interesting, I'm sure. Even so, the majority of electronic component reviews could have just said "no difference". Not only boring, but it requires multiple people to perform the tests. The model in the UK was largely "ship it to a freelance reviewer to listen to". One person, no prospect of DBT. If you look at some of the reviews from the early subjective period back then, you can see that some reviewers did try ways to try to make subjective reviewing more useful - underlying it with a philosophy, or trying to score their results in informal ways, or trying to write something that conveyed the usefulness or different features of products. They understood, and I suspect some still do, that this model is weak.
Is there an answer? Well, for the future, they could make changes. For example:
- I'd propose putting some more emphasis on the measurements.
- Reviewers should be trained in listening and proper setup, and if they are going to compare items, they should at least have "known good" models to compare to.
- Standard test tracks should be used for some of the listening tests (it may get boring to read about the same music again and again, and those tracks may not be mentioned in the reviews even - but we should still be confident the reviewer did at least some consistent work across devices.
- Everything should be measured: cables should not be in an "accessories" bracket that doesn't get measured, for one.
- Detailed testing of associated apps would be useful. Things like ergonomics and long term use are where magazine reviews - where the reviewer may have the item for a few weeks or months - could really shine as well as drive improvements. If necessary, have someone specific with knowledge do some of the app testing, just like someone specific measures devices.
At the point that you cross the line of FTC rules regarding advertising, otherwise you're free to lie your ass off.
gfinlays
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US line voltage is normally supplied as 110 V phase to neutral, but it's fed from a supply transformer with twin secondary windings with the centre tap providing the neutral. If you connect a load between one output (phase) of the transformer and the neutral, you get 110 V. The other output (phase) of the transformer is 180° out of phase with the first. If you connect your load between the two outputs (phases), you get 220 V. In effect, 2 phases, 180° out of rotation with each other, each at 110 V wrt to neutral. 3 phase has 3 outputs, 120° relative to each other.
Here in the UK, single-phase is 240 V (230 V harmonised) measured wrt neutral. The other two are also 240 V wrt neutral. Phase to phase voltage is 415 V (400 V harmonised).
Many people mistakenly believe the UK mains voltage changed when we harmonised with Europe in 2003. It didn't - it has always been 240 V nominal. It was just redefined as 230 V -6% +10%. European 220 V nominal was redefined as 230 V +10% -6°. So all "230 V" appliances should be able to operate over the range of 230 +/- 10%, or 207 to 253 V.
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Speedskater
Major Contributor
About 75 years ago, nominal US residential line voltage was 110 Volts (110/110) then it drifted to 115 Volts, later 117or 118 Volts.
For a long time it was 120 Volts. But now it is drifting towards 125 Volts.
NEC (National Electrical Code) lists it at 125 Volts.
At my home, in a very old neighborhood, I often see 123 Volts.
123 Volts can be a problem for old components with transformers rated for 110 Volts.
For a long time it was 120 Volts. But now it is drifting towards 125 Volts.
NEC (National Electrical Code) lists it at 125 Volts.
At my home, in a very old neighborhood, I often see 123 Volts.
123 Volts can be a problem for old components with transformers rated for 110 Volts.