Someone else's subjective impressions are vastly more likely to be different from my own than they are to somehow align and thus are vastly more likely to obfuscate than to inform.
I think that’s likely quite exaggerated.
But in any case, noting when somebody else is accurately describing the sound of speakers you’re familiar with could give one more confidence when they describe a speaker you haven’t heard yet.
I have a long running thread on Audiogon in which I describe many different loudspeakers that I’ve auditioned (or owned).
The thread has plenty of comments along the lines “I’m familiar with those loudspeakers and your descriptions correlate very well with my own impressions.”
This has led to people telling me the thread has been very useful in leading them to check out certain loudspeakers based on my descriptions. And they virtually always report to my descriptions were correct.
As one example, a member who owned Harbeth SuperHL+ speakers was intrigued by the Joseph Audio Perspective speakers, wondering if he should go for a secondhand pair for sale. Since he had found my description of the Harbeth’s very accurate, he asked me how those two loudspeakers would compare. Since I owned both of those loudspeakers I gave a detailed rundown on the sonic characteristics of each, the strengths and weaknesses of each with respect to one another, what he could expect to gain with one and lose with the other, etc.
From my description, he decided to buy the Joseph speakers and he was very happy with the results, saying that I absolutely nailed the way each of those speakers sounded. And his descriptions when he compared the two were just like mine.
That kind of stuff happens quite a bit in the audiophile world. As I keep mentioning a tool is only useful if you decide to use it. If somebody is actually interested in the subjective evaluations from reviewers or other audiophiles it is possible to navigate the field to some degree, finding those whose descriptions you have reasons to build some confidence in, and it does not necessitate having to fall for pseudoscience and woo woo.
Again… if you’re looking for more specific and more reliable information about how gear performs, then obviously this is where measurements and a more scientific approach comes in.
But plenty of us still find that exchanging subjective reports can be fun and also sometimes useful.
Along those lines… I really like seeing measurements for AJ’s speakers because they are informative. But I also personally can find certain subjective reports informative. For instance, I found Erin’s subjective part of his MoFi V10 review informative about “
putting together all the measurements. How does this thing sound?” He mentioned some things that I personally wouldn’t necessarily have pulled strictly from the measurements. (And so many people comment under his videos about how appreciative they are that Erin is able to not only talk about good measurements but put into words “ how those measurements sound when listening to the speaker”)
*imagine if the best endorsement of klippel nfs were "it sometimes works"!
* Imagine if somebody said the informal method of cooking used by most people in the world was useless because it was not being done with scientific rigour.
