Hello Micro
How do you think we got here?? How do you think the systems we all take for granted everyday were designed and tested??
I guess I will have to be happy with entry level and mid-fi. They seem to know what they are doing and actually seem to get measurements. You guys in the High-end can continue to stumble blind wondering how it all happened and how we got here.
Magic beans?
Rob
Micro's position is a fairly nuanced, First-World-Problem one that doesn't quite hold water under close scrutiny.
Although there are some high-end products that seem to have been thrown together with no regard for the objective performance, they are - relatively speaking - rare (interestingly, there's some fairly strong correlation between ears and meters on these products, in that they are usually the ones the 'ears-first' people tend to reject as sounding 'no good', and the 'needles-first' people can point out why. There are also products that are routinely liked by some, despite not performing well on the bench, and these are usually for reasonably predictable reasons). This gives rise to what I think of as the 'audiophile white smoke' effect; because the objective boxes are already ticked in advance, the audiophile can sit around and muse on the nature of sound like some Romantic era poet, wafting around in a haze of opium smoke.
However, the alternate and just as polarised viewpoint is the objective ivory tower of thinking measurement alone fully defines the nature of a product is as flawed in thinking. While it is possible to cite well-engineered products that were designed with minimal listener involvement, a more reliable method of product design involves a great deal of measurement and a great deal of listening along the way. In fairness, thanks in part to extremely sophisticated EE design and modelling programs making electronic circuit design extremely predictable before it even gets to physical prototype form, the closer you get to the transducers, the thermionics and the mechanical engineering aspects of a system, the more important those listening tests become.
An analogy I've seen several times recently is that of the SONAR operator. SONAR calls upon some very well tried and tested technology, with detection algorithms that are capable of seemingly impossible levels of discrimination. And yet, above all that sits an operator, listening for things that should be demonstrably and scientifically impossible to detect according to any current psychoacoustic model. It's not a perfect mechanism, as it ultimately calls upon an inherently fallible mechanism (man); but that fallible human hearing mechanism still proves to be more discriminating than the current limits of technology.
So ultimately, it's not that high-end audio - or audio in general - rejects the objective systems in place in audio. In most cases, far from it. However, there's a realisation that - as Floyd-Toole put it - it's 'science in the service of art' and that even after you have measured absolutely everything, listening (to a thing that is designed to be listened to) can provide its own data points.
