Etymotic has been around far longer than a lot of the IEM guys getting press recently. Their stuff has generally been considered quite good.
I wonder if Amir is piloting that Chinese spy balloon floating around in our air space.
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I’m trained as a behavioral scientist, not as a physicist or EE. The audio equipment designers I admire are people like BHK, Nelson Pass, Ted Smith, and Darren Myers, all of whom have used both measurements and listening when designing high-quality audio gear. The folks over at ASR downplay the importance of listening and focus almost exclusively on measurements while claiming that anything important to audibility can be measured by the tests they employ. This is a simplistic approach that is out of touch with the practices employed by the designers I admire.
Although Amir gives lip service to listening to gear, he usually offers excuses for why he didn’t do any controlled listening. He also routinely measures first and listens later (if he listens at all), so he already knows how a component measures prior to listening to it. He lectures others about avoiding “expectation bias” while failing to control for how his own bias influences his listening impressions. At least Stereophile listens first and measures later so that knowledge of the measurement results doesn’t cloud listening impressions. I wish that the folks at ASR were serious about evaluating the interaction between specific measurements and how equipment actually sounds, but the vibe over there seems to be focused mainly on berating “audiophools” and finding gear with the best SINAD measurements regardless of what it sounds like.
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Everytime I see measurements of a piece of audiophile equipment measured on that site it seems like he is always rushing to get the measurements. Time should be taken even if you own one of the best pieces of test gear.
I used them mostly for listening to podcasts in the car, in particular on the way home that was an 860 mile non-stop drive. They were up to the task, and quite comfortable.
The measurement approach was prevent until the 1970s or early 1980s when solid state amplification and CD basically made audible noise a design fault. So if you can’t measure the audible differences between designs, how to the engineers you mention actually design their products? I can only assume that they have a tool-kit of components, circuits and the like that from experience they know how they nuance the sound and they can hear it, even if they can’t measure it. I have no idea as I know nothing about engineering, but I do wonder about their design/creative processes.
Steven,
As I said above, great designers use a combination of measurement and listening to design gear. If measurements alone could tell the whole story, listening wouldn’t be as important to the design process as it is.
The example @emailists mentioned earlier illustrates this point well. When BHK said that a particular amp with extremely low distortion didn’t sound as good as some amps with more distortion, he was simply stating that low measured distortion didn’t guarantee a great sounding amp. That didn’t mean that Bascom stopped trying to build low-distortion amps, it just meant that he wanted to achieve low distortion using circuits that sounded good to his ears. Maybe he could do this in a way that could be measured (e.g., making sure that higher order distortion levels were lower than 2nd or 3rd harmonic distortion levels) or maybe by using circuit designs that sounded great without necessarily being correlated with electrical changes that could be easily measured.
Another great example of using the measure and listen approach can be found in the forum threads dealing with mods to the Mk1 DS DAC.
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It also makes sense that if he sells cheap per gear, he would be shooting himself in the foot if he preached anything other than “gear that I don’t sell sucks”
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Given the history, especially recently, I certainly understand the animosity.
For me ASR is a useful reference when measurements and technical explanations are what I’m after.
Subjective commentary, especially combative, is unwelcome and certainly some of the threads and posters can border on militant. But I’ve also found reasonable and informative conversations can be had.
Interestingly, and to the point of valuing subjectivity, the Topping LA90 recently displaced the AHB2 atop the ASR SINAD leader board. I was briefly interested in the LA90 but not enough to wade into dozens of pages. So I don’t know how it was viewed overall but the opening commentary wasn’t all that complementary. One suggested Topping coveted that top spot which was my first impression and what really turned me off.
Thomas & Stereo dropped a LA90 review yesterday which validated that concern. At least that’s how I chose to interpret his observations and conclusions, especially given his glancing reference to what I suspect were the ASR measurements.
Thomas concluded the sonic characteristics of the LA90 are very different than his goto AB recommendation, the ASR SINAD mid pack but recommended Schiit Vidar. Whether that difference is good depends on the listener.
Whether to not Topping was chasing numbers isn’t important. Numbers are important but not as an absolute and singular measure of goodness.
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