Ya. Maybe we can have that kind of discussion.
SG already so tiny, everything we always get info from those audiophiles in the USA.
Yet we have all the hidden dragons inside here.
Also SG money not easy earn.
It will be good if combine the knowledge or use it further.
Not speaking on behalf of Amon or Wwenze or Pete. If Amon can get the parts and wwenze can test it,
then we have our own ASR. Probably a better one than the States.(At first i Google ASR means what... arithmetric shift right, automatic speech recognition. Later then realise it’s Audio Science Review).
Spot on. Amon has 1 part of the puzzle; The products that he can freely bring home to test. If we have the other to marry measurements and testing with all kinds of products, we can have our very own Audio Science Review team here where we test the not so well known parts of audio. The interconnects, power plugs and so on. Their income can easily come from Consultation Services to get their products tested and even to an ordinary folk who wants to see they were not duped by some Carouhell seller saying their cable is a 12AWG cable but then turns out to be 18AWG cables. It happens.
Thus why when we have unbiased and honest local talent that do these measurements for us, all of us will not be throwing money into the sea for no reason.
When we start measuring things, we start to root out the thorn in our sides. Those
actual snake oil sellers hiding in our midst pretending their knock off products are as high end as actual high end products. We saw it with speakers in Audio Science Review where a lot of those speakers way up there in terms of price points losing out to cheaper products.
But the answer is simple. Audio technology hasn't changed over the years. Similar to cars. Most cars still use combustion technology. There's only so much improvement that you can do to it. (Thus why the improvements to speakers will start trickling down the price range to mid and budget speakers over time.) Same thing for speakers. You have a powerful magnet moving air back and forth quickly. We use many different types of objects such as woven fabric to metal to even papers for tweeters in order to find the ones that help produce a stable sound that they can be proud of selling to consumers.
Yes, like cars, there are exceptions. Battery powered cars and similar for audio, we have those that create speakers throwing away the entire very old loudhorn technology that most speakers are still using today. I am talking about Planar Magnetic speakers for headphones and Magneplanar Speakers for Home Theatre. These are based on our newer understanding of how we can create air movements with just a thin piece of metal ribbons stuck between 2 magnetic panels.
Magneplanars are actually way cheaper than you think and they produce sound realistically because they are not confined to a wooden box cabinet.
But just because I want to hear realistic sounding audio so much, doesn't mean I will set out to buy one quickly and blindly too. I saw that the frequency readings wasn't as neutral. So to an average consumer like us, we will notice a lot of details may end up being hidden because the volume across the entire frequency range is inconsistent. Thus why I emphasize measurements matter a LOT. You don't have to be the one to do the measurements of course. We can always refer to other people who have done these measurements professionally for us.
But I disgress. A lot of the audio enthusiasts has fallen for the illusion that measurements don't matter from these actual snake oil manufacturers and sellers.
They want you to be ignorant. Because your ignorance leads to the lack of rationality to make informed buying decisions. So you are left with who do you trust. Are these salesman telling you the truth? You don't know. You can't verify anything and you end up making careless and ignorant buying decisions on what you can actually measure other than the most important aspect of a speaker. The actual speakers. You see where these snake oil sellers has managed to trick us average consumers by giving lots of false claims that have never been peer reviewed and verified by anyone? imagine the breakthrough such as solving the skin effect problems in cable. It would have definitely been peer reviewed and published and end up in engineering textbooks by now. So they beautify their speaker cabinets. Put very gorgeous weavings on the woofers and colour them with attractive colours and charge them for a high price and voila; Your perception of audio now becomes it is not the measurements of the actual speaker drivers that matter, but how stunningly gorgeous looking the speakers are along with how high the price is. When in actuality, what we
should have been looking at is whether those speakers are capable of producing audio from the 20Hz - 20kHz range that our human ears can actually hear. That is the entire purpose of the speakers in the first place. That is the biggest deception these snake oil sellers has done to the audio market industry. Because you are right. 20, 40, 60 years ago, there were no flat response microphones that an average consumer can just buy off the shelves. So it was only reserved to those working in the actual professional audio industry that had the money and technical know-how to use these equipments. How do you think THX, Dolby, DTS do their measurements for the past 50+ years? Using lab rats and old uncles to experiment on? Obvious no. They use microphone measurements to achieve this.
So why is it that out of nowhere, consumer market is not allowed to test the audio products that they buy? It is to blind you from the truth. So even crappy bad speakers and other audio components can slip through and pose themselves as a HiFi audio product themselves and price their products at insane prices and use words from actual textbooks that are taken out of context like the Skin Effect stuffs to justify their high prices like they have solved something that NASA themselves with all their engineering expertise couldn't.
If we view Audio as religion, then it is like having some bad apples with bad intentions taking a passage out of the bible out of context to justify that this is why the people must rebel against others. Ala ISIS and KKK and so forth.
I can tell you now. My intentions to coming into some conversations is to remind what really matters in audio. I got a chance to test my new cables from my own Home Theatre Setup (HTS) and therefore, I share with you guys the improvements or lack-thereof that I got out of the upgrade.
Heck, our very own forum moderator, Pete, recommended
REW too.
It takes all the guesswork out of your audio journey and gives you the raw information laid out nicely for you to see what you need improvement on.
But to say microphones and measurements are bad? Be careful. Because you have just ended up unknowingly becoming the loudspeakers for these snake oil sellers.
Last time, we had to prevent our old relatives from falling victim to those fake magic rock sellers that were coming door-to-door. Yet here we are now, in the audio market where the snake oil sellers thrive on the lack of information because there was never any way to measure audio just a few years back for us average folks (not the true professional audio scene). But now that they are, we are experiencing the same push-back with the old timers here who had fallen victim to the real snake oil sellers that have grabbed the Consumer Audio market. Thus why their reluctance to accept change. They have been indoctrinated by these false prophets (snake oil sellers) in the consumer audio world for years and years. It's very hard to change that mindset.
The question now is, will you give power to these snake oil sellers who ask you to be clueless and just accept their words at face value or will you choose to look at actual data where we can easily rate those speakers and if you have any doubt, hey, the information is all there. So you can choose any speakers in those graphs in terms of price to performance and listen to those 3 speakers yourself and see if it matches what the raw stats say about those speakers at those different price points. That is the easiest way for you to debunk or prove the mindset that price determines what makes a great sounding speaker.
Then I recommend you to take a look at the chart, choose a speaker like an Elac Debut Reference (US$600 with 7.76 score) and compare it to the more expensive KEF LS50 Passive (US$1500 with 6.69 score) that objectively, has shown to be worst performing than the Elacs and then you can either prove or disprove that objective tests are a great guiding scale for consumers.
I'm sure at first glance, the beautiful looking LS50 with a very high price and a very well known brand name would definitely sound better. But unfortunately and objectively, it is a No.
So congrats. Because of your subjective "wisdom", you have just screwed many other people into believing the LS50 are the definition of what a HiFi audio is. And now, they too will come into the forums and bash any other speakers and say that the KEF LS50s are the best. This is a result of being subjective and only think that price, looks and the brand is what makes a speaker great and not the actual stats.
That is why I like to come and remind people from time to time of what really matters. Price, looks and brand name is not what defines a speaker. It is the drivers + speakers themselves. And then the looks, the price and brand are secondary. Not the other way round. If you believe in the other way round, you are nothing more than a jewelry salesman coming into another industry to try to poison people's perceptions of what makes audio great and making people as simple minded as possible and only think that the price, brand and looks are what makes up a speaker and how great they sound.
I don't want that to happen to any of us, thus, my reason for intervention. Take it as you will. I have no ill intentions but I definitely can't bring myself to lie to someone in their face and fool people into believing in things that they can barely even hear and especially if a very sensitive microphone can't hear it too.
Here's the updated picture as of July 15 2020 on the graph of all the speakers tested with a comparison of price budget to its performance. If you have the money, by all means you can try to pick any 2 and try them out (after you read the extensive reviews for both of those speakers too) and you can go ahead and debunk it or know that it actually is comparable thus making it easier for you to make your well informed decisions purchases based on your budget. PS, this is the graph with dedicated subwoofers.