Yes, the reliance on logic/reason alone, with no recourse to empiricism at all (aside from sighted listening in some cases). The same archaic approach to thought that led Aristotle to claim that, since men are larger than women, we therefore have more teeth than our sisters.
IMO, we have:
- Rationalism
- Empiricism (including its favorite child, science)
- Intuition
- Faith
- Authority
These are the classic "Five Ways of Knowing." "Ways of Apprehending Reality and Unreality" might be a better way to put it. We need numbers 1 and 2 to judge audio accuracy, pleasingness, etc. Every proposition can be seen as Truth + Error, where either Truth or Error can range from 0 to 100%, but, as we know, measuring, rating, or ranking the Truth or Error is full of pitfalls.
How many of you have found that your equipment can sound different at different times, with the same program material, the same listener position, lighting, etc.? Is it temperature, humidity, warm-up time, what was played just before, body weather, mood etc.? Maybe it's the
equipment that has moods.
And, yes, I think empiricism should include Double Blind ABX tests, but some creativity needs to be used to answer objections; yes, if your brain is in a "judging" mode, you may perceive music and its reproduction differently than if you are relaxed, and are just letting the music wash over you. This calls for different and more comparisons. You may need to use some of the strategies in the statistical recommendations of the
American Psychological Association Publication Manual: Effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta‐analysis. I think it is in its 6th edition.
Whatever opinions of experts, designers, dealers, manufacturers, and critics are sailing through the zeitgeist may provide us with the earplugs of
authority. We may read (over and over again, since the AR 3 hit the market) the
fallacy that
flatness of frequency response = "accuracy." We may be able to thank Consumer Reports magazine for that one. Yes, the AR1, 2, 3, 3A all had a lot of bass, and probably reached lower than many
huge speakers. Consumer Reports rated it higher than any other speaker. Most of my friends who went to the Hi Fi Fair thought it lacked openness, detail, was muddy, and did not have much dynamic force, despite all that bass. The rest of us were distributed between the JBL Paragon, the huge EV Patrician, the Klipschorn, the Altec A7, and the like. Naturally, none of us could afford any of them. Some of us went to a friends house to hear his
cheap EV horn set-up in enclosures he built. Just as at the fair, now brass sounded like brass,
With the
authority of Consumer Reports in play, brass wouldn't sound like brass, at least to us. In later years (about 50), we liked horns, ribbons, and some others.
But, while I would like frequency response to be as smooth as possible, everything else being equal or near equal, in a given instance, I might find low distortion, including IM, to be even more important. That 19 dB dip in the Zu is fairly narrow (compared to some) so I don't know.
Solution: listen, for a few hours, on different days.
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