That is me, and I do so in response to people like yourself who claim to hear the sonic superiority of e.g. expensive underpowered amplifiers. My argument is nothing other than what is also put forward here, and documented with measurements. After all, is anything wrong with budget Yamaha amps, the RME DAC or Hypex/Purifi modules? Yes I agree I repeat this quite often, for no other reason than that new people keep coming forward with the same old nonsense.e.g. there is a guy on HUG who repeatedly comments (promotes) Hypex based amps, Yamaha amps and RME DAC. Every time the same without ever making (and share) any different experiences, progress.
I also share experiences with subwoofers and dsp room eq, however. And, as you saw and seemed to lament, I recently opened a thread on policies to speed up the transition to sustainble energy. HUG also has some threads on modern culture and society, and climate and high energy prices are on many people's minds. So I posted some information on what the Dutch government is doing, and what we have done personally in terms of home insulation (with measurements) and heat pumps, and the financial benefits (with numbers). I did so in part because I wanted hear about other countries.
As for Alan Shaw and HUG, it is true that he does not really divulge his trade secrets, and I think that is fair enough, although I am obviously curious. From time to time he also has historic bits from his company archive and elsewhere on BBC speaker research. As a historian I find that very interesting, even though it is also clear from what he shows that Harbeth has moved a long way since those early days. In particular, independent tests have shown that over the years Harbeth speakers have acquired a far flatter frequency response. And that, he repeatedly insists, is one of the most important characteristics of a good speaker. He is not alone in that. In the end no speaker is perfect, so inevitably each and every speaker is a compromise. Which compromise you prefer is a personal matter, I am afraid.
Most of HUG, however, is about getting the best out of your speakers, so there are threads on why vinyl is technically inferior to digital, on amplifiers explaining why valve amplifiers have problems that solid state ones don't, that a lot of power is good for a clean reproduction of dynamic peaks, that good amplifiers do not need to cost an arm and a leg (at times with measurements), or on the importance of the room and what to do about that. An interesting current one is on the quality of streamed sources versus CD. His original assumption had been that there was a problem with streaming, but he has now posted a series of measurements from real streamed content to show that this assumption was wrong, provided of course that the same master is used, and that we are dealing with the same 16/44 quality. To me this was not at all surprising, but for some people who claimed to hear differences it was an unsettling result. In any case, to all the posters who claim to hear all sorts of things, his reply is always that their listening methodology may be wrong. He explains time and gain that blind and accurately level matched testing is the only proper way, and in the past has shown how he does that himself. And he insists on the importance of measurements. In short, the ethos is not that different from ASR.
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