Darko Podcast: The REAL value of measurements

[Chris]

A pretty balanced discussion.

Listen here.

[sailor]

Thanks, Chris for this link.
For me, the most important thing is that there is no actual answer here. It still comes down to the perception of what a piece of kit sounds like and if one likes that sound or not. Why would someone be satisfied with a bad-sounding piece of kit just because it measured well? As I have mentioned many times one has to trust their ears and not care what others think about your purchase. I suppose one could convince themselves that the widget does sound good because the reviewers said so or it has glowing specs but I do not think I could. In this blog, it was said over and over that measurements do not correlate with how a product sounds.
I will not purchase anything that I cannot hear on my system unless there is a return policy. We are lucky we have some good dealers in the club that will go along with this policy. Both Russ and Jose will lend equipment for an audition. They want their customers to be happy with their purchases.

[gandhisfist]

I can't tell you all how often I see it parroted that all well-measuring gear sounds the same, that the set of measurements we have today encompass all there is to know about sound, and that especially with headphones, the area I'm most familiar with, that Frequency Response alone is the definition of how something sounds. I like measurements, they tell me when there is something broken or outright wrong, they tell me when something meets the basic criteria of functioning as expected, but they can and have never told me if something sounds good.

I understand the obsession with measurements, it makes audio less of a journey and more of a one-stop shop, it is a whole lot easier if you can just trust the numbers to tell you what to buy, get the cheapest things with numbers that are good enough and never have to shop for anything again. Personally though, I can't think of anything that's further from the truth in audio.