To me, you are pinning an industry wide problem to a single individual. It is both claimed specs and a well uninformed public and industry that misuses that uninformedness.
No, absolutely not. The situation with fantasy power numbers has been a lot worse 30 or 40 years ago than it is now. There
is no (new) industry wide problem. The uninformed public doesn't know about input sensitivity, gain and speaker sensitivity. In an ideal world they wouldn't have to. Unfortunately, the variety of sources and their typical levels is ever increasing and the number of older devices still in use is probably higher than it's ever been. The degree of standardization has not gone up.
NAD was one of the few companies that the wattage was more or less a real world use value. The real problem lies in all the specs do not translate to real world usage and he addresses that problem. Should we not be cheerful for that?
He claims this to be the problem, but he's wrong. Simple as that. Could you give me a hint what your point regarding NAD is? The only two aspects of their strategy I am aware of is a) "more power doesn't equal better sound" and b) "provide the same power into all loads" (which is mainly a matter of efficiency, also from the economic point of view.
Should you need an electrical engineer degree just in order to understand specifications?
For some specs that's unavoidable. But I get your point. The end user should be able to tell which devices will work well together from what's in the specs. But SA is of no help here.
Yes, you should know about clipping when measuring amplifiers but as we both do not have the real tests He doesn't state the exact measurement procedure but that is true for most of the reviewers that measure. What alternative measurement would be a better indicator of real world performance? M-noise?
I did watch his video from the beginning to the end. As far as I understood he shows all the measuring equipment that's been in use. Based on what I've seen I would conclude that his power measurements are probably invalid. Standard multimeters may provide RMS readings, but only for - Hooray! - pure sine waves, not for different kinds of noise.
From my point of view single tone and multi-tone measurements are pretty much OK for measuring amplifier power output. The problem - if there is a problem - is not about the test signal. The problem is that no single measurement, no single value can ever capture the whole thing. You have to look at many different aspects of performance and telling a good match with speakers or sources based on those specs can be challenging. I believe that M-noise has been introduced for speaker measurements, specifically. As far as I understand it it's not an industry standard (so far) but mostly a single manufacturers attempt. So far I have no personal experience with it.
I truly do not understand the combative attitude at ASR. Instead of helping him, educating him, ASR has a tendency to ridicule those people.
Pardon me, I am here in the hope to be helpful. That does not include trying to educate a guy who's trying to make money from a YouTube channel.
Or do you think the point he is raising is indeed invalid?
That's what I think, indeed (but you probably had guessed so based on the other paragraphs
).
The topic has far too many facets to cover in a single posting (and most probably I'm simply not enough of an expert to cover most of them). However, the whole idea that there is a conspiracy in the industry, optimizing all amplifiers just for 1 kHz power managements, because nobody's listening anyway, is plain silly.
