I hope you uphold your reviewers to the same standard!
While personally I don't draw any income, commission, salary or otherwise, from Madrona, readers should keep in mind that there can be bias in what I say since I am great fan of Harman as a company and the ML is a product of theirs. Should someone buy it, some profit does go to the company to fund its growth. So far, the ML 53 has not been a source of revenue for us. Now, can you walk me through how you think your reviewer is only "informed" and not biased in any way? Can you walk me through how he is not subject to placebo? Can you walk me through why his bias for LP/analog did not predispose him to hear one thing when the equipment performed another? I asked you to answer this in the context of a hypothetical and you refused. So pick your method to convince me how MF is informed and trustworthy.
You are again confused about the people you characterize. I am surprised that in your day job you have not had to dealt with this situation. By your logic, none of your clients should use you. They can just read things on the Internet, and go and create their own legal contracts and fight their own fights in court without you as their lawyer.
So no, there is nothing wrong about trusting an expert. The high net-worth people, through experience or strong recommendations, have picked an expert in the industry to provide them with such answers. Of course at the end they listen and have to be satisfied. But they have better things to do than to sit here and argue with you Greg
. I have a CPA doing my taxes. I did it myself for the first 20 years. But just got tired of it and now pay someone else. In the first year I used him, he looked at my tax return that I did myself and immediately found deductions I had missed which could have paid for his fees! So instead of laboring over tax returns, I spend on my time on my photography, etc. I trust you do your own medical care, fix your own car, build your own furniture, etc.You want to keep going Greg with these put downs? I am ready.
Almost every bit of business we do at Madrona is because our customer trusts us to have done the research for them. They pay us to have sat through blind tests to know how much to trust science vs our subjective, biased views. They pay us to know which company stands behind it's product and will be around a year from now. They pay us to separate companies that have performed ground breaking research into what we hear and what we like. As I said before, this is a business and we run it on merit. We would go out of business if we replaced it with gut feeling. Again, I am not asking you to believe my logic and way of doing business. Just don't ask me to believe yours
.End what? This is a forum. We come here to have discussions. I enjoy it and I assume you do too or you wouldn't keep posting. As soon as you are bored, uninterested, stop posting and I won't respond to posts that are not there
.I am glad you put your lawyer hat on. Let's see how long you keep it on. So you put MF on witness stand as your expert witness prior to jury instructions being read. While there, the opposing counsel ask him to prove why his subjective assessment is true. His answer? I quote from his post on the other forum:
"Why is this such a big deal? I'll tell you why: because some of you give me WAY too much credit and then you get MAD when I don't agree with YOU. I'm just stating an opinion. Stop making such a big deal out of it. And I do agree with one poster: take what i write as ENTERTAINMENT. It's informed entertainment but it's still ENTERTAINMENT. "
Assume he is putting emphasis on the word ENTERTAINMENT as in looking the jury in the eye and emphasizing it. Now counselor, exactly how do you feel about the jury instructions now? You go home confident that your expert witness provided evidence to back his claim which you were defending? Against the other side's expert witness which shows such reviewers cannot consistently vote the same way when blind tested?
I keep repeating: I give it none. I don't even read this part of the reviews. I cherish all the measurements that JA publishes and I think the magazine does a great service to all for publishing it. That is data. That is concrete information. And as I said earlier, I was disappointed in the load-dependent performance of the ML. I expect to sound slightly different with different speakers because of that. That conclusion I can take to the bank. The rest of the review I don't value.
I suggest going back and reading my post. I said nothing about his room, speakers, or specific test he ran. He simply lives in a different universe than I do.
Listen, I would love to keep taking the red pill and live in the Matrix bliss. It is a wonderful place devoid of consequences. You hear two pieces of gear that sound identical yet you can say there is night and day difference between them and no one can prove you are wrong. You can jump between talk buildings and it would still be "real." Or you can take the blue pill and eat oatmeal snot for lunch.
There are times that I also live in the Matrix and do subjective tests. The other life is too hard . So don't get me wrong. I know why you defend the turf. It is a lovable world.I used to live that way for decades Greg. But life and work experiences convinced me otherwise. You have not lived until you tell your chief audio designer that he had screwed up the newest revision of his audio encoder, only to have him show you that the files he gave you to listen to were identical! Have you lived through that Greg? You know, have evidence presented to you that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that you are wrong? I have had too many of those. And again, these were important things to get right. I was vetoing the release of that new encoder. It took blind tests and verification against a "control" that brought out the audio truth.
All of this said, I can't explain all of this with pure logic and strict objectivist views. I am not at that hard corner. There are subjectivist experiences and conclusions that could be true against at least simplistic views of audio engineering. I am here as a co-founder of this forum because I believe in some level of open-mindedness. This is why I went and bought this issue of the magazine (my subscription had just ran out) to read what this was all about. I listen to your stories and do think about them. I hope you listen to my stories and do the same
.No different. I would have no credibility trusting him and not in so many instances elsewhere.
He can. Question is, would you buy and not buy a $50,000 amp based on a hack that could be right based on luck alone? I would not. I like to have high odds.
I am going to assume that you are not defending this review because you care one way or the other about this amplifier. So I suspect all of this fighting, and I mean that in a fond way
, is about the old argument of subjectivity being valid. In that context, I don't believe for a moment this will be your last word .
