The bottom line to me is this: people come to these forums to share experiences and to perhaps learn a few things about this wonderful hobby. There is plenty of room for discussions about both objective measurements and data and how they effect audio system performance and also subjective listening impressions and how our ears tell us things that audio science can not yet explain. People do not want to be confronted and badgered by fellow members who condescend to them. Life is too short. Participating on forums should be fun. When it no longer is, people will find other things to do with their time.
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I wrote this in another thread. I have highlighted a particular sentence and included its context. Amir commented thus about my phrase "...audio science can not yet explain.": "As to confrontation, unfortunately that is what we have even in your statement when you say "audio science can't yet explain." Audio science very much explains much of what you think it doesn't. You don't like that answer but you have to understand that such comments are inflammatory to the other camp and hugely so. You are telling them that they have to throw out a mountain of research, published and accepted audio science. As I said, on a number of other forums, any of the active threads on our forum would have been considered "anti-science" and riots in streets would follow. confrontational."
Does this highlighted sentence, in my original quote above, seem confrontational, controversial and "(hugely) inflammatory to the other camp"? Are the objectivists, or anyone for that matter, offended by this phrase? I'm curious and want to learn if and why this might be.
Perhaps I should have written, "I do not think measurements can explain everything we hear from an audio system. For instance, I have not seen measurements that will explain how a speaker system will perform in the areas of micro dynamics, resolution, sense of presence, or the listener's level of emotional involvement, in a given system and room." For these areas of performance, I have relied on my ears.
Does audio science really explain everything about how something sounds?
To answer your question, I haven't a clue what you mean by "audio science" as that is such a broad and vague term. I also don't have a clue what you mean by "objective measurements" as to the best of my knowledge there are few if any real measuring standards pertaining to much of anything in high-end audio. It seems anybody with a test bench (or kitchen table), Google, and a measuring instrument (regardless of quality) qualifies as able to produce "scientific" measurements. That’s hardly science or objective.
I think it worth mentioning that there certainly is benefit of designers like John Curl or Nelson Pass measuring various transistors or op-amps for certain tolerances, distortions, etc. After all, they are in the business of designing products and better or worse they are using their own standards to derive at the best overall design to suit their purposes. Near as I can tell most everybody participating in these forums has no such need.
I inquired with John Atkinson some months ago asking him a handful of questions about his measurement standards and his sensitive measuring instruments. Turns out one of his two measuring instruments has been out of production for some time and 1 of his 2 instruments was long overdue to be recalibrated. He chose not to answer some of my other questions but as I recall for years he used to place the products to be tested on his kitchen table unless they were too big, then he'd place them on his kitchen floor.
That's hardly a stable or controlled environment and that hardly qualifies as audio science in my book. Yet how many people cling to Atkinson’s measurements? Is that better than no measurements? Doubtful. Is it beneficial if it helps some sleep at night? In the end I’d say no, because if the benefits of any such measurements are doubtful in the first place, then resting one’s hopes on such potentially compromised measurements can offer little more than a false hope. At the very least such compromised measurements can cause some to focus more on highly questionable measurements and less on training and trusting one's hearing. Which is what this audio hobby is supposed to be all about in the first place.
Moreover, whether some believe it or not, components, speakers, and cables often times need to “warm up” for a time before sounding at their full potential. A normal “warm up” time might be anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours. When I received a pair of loaner speakers for my exhibit at an audio show in January, those already burned-in speakers took nearly 24 hours to warm up from the cold. An extreme example but the speaker journey was only from San Diego to Las Vegas, but until the next day they sounded like crap.
This “warm up” phenomena is rarely taken into consideration for any type of measurements. Moreover, these same objects can take hours, weeks, or even months when it comes to physically moving them around as they must mechanically settle in all over again before sounding at their full potential.
For example. I once owned some very sensitive IC’s that literally took maybe 24 hours to resettle if they were moved at all.
Another example. I had acquired some of the most musical sounding pair of IC’s I’ve encountered that I was beta testing for a mfg’er. A friend came to visit and first I demonstrated with sets of Audio Tekne IC’s we were both familiar with. Then I swapped in the fully burned in beta IC’s I had been ranting about. They sounded so bad my friend with a well-trained ear asked if the mfg’er knew what he was doing. We let the music play while we went out to dinner for 2 hours, came back to listen again and he admitted the IC's were a fabulous performer and upon his return home he purchased several pair.
Rarely, if ever, do I see anybody take these “phenomena” into consideration when performing their measurements. But it is what it is and that seems to be deemed an acceptable standards in high-end audio.
Some call it science but knowing and experiencing the often times HUGE performance differences between an unsettled vs fully settled in product I ask, without a truly controlled and stabilized environment and product and industry standards, where’s the science?
Of course, that’s just scratching the surface with our sensitive playback instruments. With regard to sensitive measuring instruments, well, if so many are still unwilling to properly address noisy AC and mechanical distortions at our sensitive playback instruments, why should we believe the findings of sensitive measuring instrument? Especially when such measuring instruments may be even more sensitive than our components.
So when enthusiasts and professionals alike choose to go down the “audio science” rabbit holes in this and other forums to prove some point, I can’t help but wonder if, well, actually I don’t wonder at all.
Because frankly, in addition to and because of the phenomena above, we have volumes of inaudible music remaining beneath a much raised noise floor resulting from unaddressed distortions induced on our sensitive components and probably also on sensitive measuring instruments. So much so, that any findings from any of these efforts are probably not much different than comparing hockey players skating on one skate. IOW, I see this "audio science" as a whole lot of to do about very little.
But that’s me.
anyway, I know its not an easy thing to do but you should really spend some time around an LP mastering lathe before making that comment about tape. Tape simply cannot do what the LP can in terms of lower distortion, wider bandwidth and wider dynamic range. The LP has the widest bandwidth of any media so far invented. However tape is a lot easier to record on and you can erase and go back if it didn't go right. So tape is more flexible (in more ways than one 
