It’s a slow news day, and the Olympic events being broadcast today are not yet interesting enough to keep me glued to the screen. So I read the Roger Skoff piece. I can’t say I felt particularly enlightened. Of course measurements are not the whole story when it comes to evaluating audio gear. Didn’t we learn a long time ago that tube gear generally measures inferior to SS gear (i.e. THD, freq response, etc) but this has little or no relevance for sonic preference? Measurements might in fact be important variables that correlate to sonic preferences, but as many have pointed out over the years, we may not yet know exactly what to measure in that regard, so the entire measurement argument may lack validation until we understand the correlation of yet unknown data measurements to sonic perception.
I also took exception to his point on A/B comparisons. Of course music is a complex signal. But that hardly makes A/B comparisons irrelevant. In fact, the single variable that is being studied in A/B experiments is not the material used or the gear used in playback, but rather a sonic percept. Either you like something more, less or the same. One’s sonic preference is a perfectly valid variable to assess. The problems with A/B comparisons, as legions of thoughtful pundits have pointed out previously, is that audio memory lasts about 7 seconds, which is why many reviewers value long term listening more than short-term A/B comparisons using music as the source material.
Bottom line- IMHO, Roger’s essay was hardly a treatise of great insight as there was little there that hasn’t been said better or more wisely by others over the past several decades.