Audio Science Review Review

Discussion in 'Audio Science' started by purr1n, Aug 30, 2020.

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  1. Vtory

    Vtory Audiophile™

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    "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

    - Ludwig Wittgenstein (1989-1951)

    PS. I sometimes think Amir's career as claimed is all fake and he's just a sophomore or so as his behavioral/psychological pattern reminds me of the typical Dunning-Kruger curve.

    [​IMG]
     
  2. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    The difference is that you are not masquerading as doing this for science to find the one truth (religion and dogma). Amir likes to heap credentials upon himself. If you are going to do that, then at least act competent and think! We all make mistakes, I've made plenty myself where I've have to eat my words or graphs, and go back and correct them. However, in this case, it's two fricking stators that don't touch anything, except the air between them and a charged diaphragm. This is essentially a weak capacitor in the megaohms impedance range as a load at audio frequencies. For someone who brags about how he oversaw the invention of the VC-1 codec, I can't see how he missed the basic theory of operation for 'stat headphones.
     
  3. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

    Pyrate Slaytanic Cliff Clavin
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    Amir knows less about audio electronics than any guitarist who has had to trouble shoot their rig or repair anything.

    Amir is like the tech bros and white collar criminals with 200k in recording gear who make worse recordings than mailmen and drug runners did with Tascam Portastudios.

    Harman curve is boom tizz consumer bullshit. 8db low shelf and super broad 1-2 dB high shelf starting from lower down than a 1073 will just wreck any sense of balance in hyper compressed popular music.
     
  4. Yethal

    Yethal Facebook Friend

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    The real question is, did he drive stats to 120db and complain about distortion?
     
  5. atomicbob

    atomicbob dScope Yoda

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    Any visitors to that site should keep in mind a certain quote:
    "My son, we are pilgrims in an unholy land."
     
  6. Hrodulf

    Hrodulf Prohibited from acting as an MOT until year 2050

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    Using a 110pF cap and some HV probes would've been sufficient.
     
  7. Bobcat

    Bobcat Friend

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    Just because you can manage thousands of people, it doesn't mean that you know what they know or can do what they do. Usually it's just the opposite.

    Rob
     
  8. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

    Pyrate Slaytanic Cliff Clavin
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    Often it means you have been promoted to where you are bumbling and incompetent so your underlings won’t kill you. When the barbarians are at the gates and mean business, then they’ll toss you into the dirt or bury you in a ditch. If a company has at will employment, there are no cushy severance packages. They will choke you out over the phone like Darth Vader.
     
  9. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Well, if one invokes the name of science, one must verify. It's not a matter of lack of trust, but rather scientific method. We want to make assure assumptions are good to being with. I don't think I've ever seen a impedance plot before of a 'stat, with the diaphragm charged.

    My science brain would respond to your "that's enough" as "show me why".
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2020
  10. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    VP of the consumer division at M$ is a tough job. You better get the XBOX One to top PS4, turn HDCD into the next MQA, or make HDDVD the standard. If you can't get a least one of the three, you are out. You can only bullshit and Force wave your hand at Steve Ballmer (CEO back then) so much.
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2020
  11. Hrodulf

    Hrodulf Prohibited from acting as an MOT until year 2050

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    110pF is the nominal load Stax specifies their earspeakers ar. If you think about it, the electrostatic driver is nothing but a capacitor with two conductive surfaces suspended close to each other.

    I agree that my "enough" is prone to critique, but getting a 110pF non-polar cap would've been worlds better than just using a 100k resistor.
     
  12. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    My read on it is more a critique on Amir. He is the one selling a rigorous scientific approach to audio characterization, along with an expert image.

    We understand that under such pretenses, even modeling different electrostatic offerings would require a close look at the actual impedance characteristics between different headphones and a proper justification. And yet, the demanding expert feels 100K impedance is good enough, when even going by *intuition, it is not.

    *intuition given manufacturer specification and theory of operation, but no rigorous independent verification. Obviously 110pF model is likely a better model. But a careful characterization would not even take that for granted, much less a who-knows-from-where 100 Kohm assumption. It's sort of the equivalent to Amir-bits in the analog world.
     
    Last edited: Nov 2, 2020
  13. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Intuition is fine after said intuition is proven.

    A 110pF cap means megaohms impedance in the audio range (20Hz to 20kHz). It's entirely possible that 100k-ohms, which is already pretty high, could end up as a realistic proxy for the load. If Amir's intuition was correct, he can simply claim that he knew it all along.

    I do have a cheap MicSig HV diff probe with 10M-ohm input impedance. No STAX amps, but I do have an iESL energizer / transformer. Can order an assortment of HV caps. Just saying. :p
     
  14. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    Dunning-Krugerites I have known, and usually not loved.

    There was no curve. They were stuck at the start point, permanently. Experience, if that was what the years actually gave them, made no difference: they still had the same high opinion of themselves, and the same low actual ability.

    By the way. Yes, there are articles beyond count. If not done already, I recommend people to read their original paper. It is fairly short and very readable.

    The Dunning-Kruger effect is something that should make us all question... ourselves! Regularly!
     
  15. Cspirou

    Cspirou They call me Sparky

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    I read somewhere that the reason why there's so many terrible CEOs is because people really don't want a boss smarter than themselves.
     
  16. penguins

    penguins Friend, formerly known as fp627

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    Heh I'm the opposite. One trait for an ideal boss and especially the top boss to me would that they be noticeably smarter than me (at least at what we do for work in general). Wouldn't care if they weren't better / smarter at my specific tasks / job and don't care if they're dumb at things that have nothing to do with our work. The boats rise with the tide so to say, and if the captain can navigate us through this all on top of it, then that's the best of both worlds.
     
  17. Degru

    Degru Facebook Friend

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    [​IMG]
    "Please... reviews are not science."

    -Amir, founder of AudioScienceReview, 2020
     
  18. Elysian

    Elysian Friend

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    Not to get too off-topic from ASR but I wanted to note that this is a somewhat unfair oversimplification of how the corporate world works.

    When you're working at middle enterprise and larger companies (say, 1,000 employees or greater), the role of a manager, director, VP, and C-suite are all very different. Being a VP of Engineering is difficult enough when you're trying to steer hundreds or even thousands of developers and product managers, manage roadmaps, product strategy, product operations and insights, etc., and the CEO's role is a standard deviation or two more difficult by being responsible for engineering, sales, marketing, operations, manufacturing, IT, admin, and all the other functions required to drive success and 20-30%+ YoY growth, while still reporting to the board. The things a CEO is saddled thinking about everyday is very different from even directors and VPs and it's such a divergent role that the CEO might as well be speaking a different language.

    I don't mean this post to come off as condescending but I don't think many people have an understanding of how difficult the CEO job is, and I don't think most CEOs come to work thinking that they're smarter than everyone else. At least in tech, things progress so quickly that it's impossible to become a subject-matter expert in more than a couple of areas, and once you start becoming a higher-level people manager, you're so busy managing that it's really hard to stay on top of your technical skills. Successful execs will surround themselves with people more technically and operationally able than themselves as it's impossible to effectively micromanage past a certain point.
     
  19. Elnrik

    Elnrik Super Friendly

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    True. However, some people are managers, VPs, and CEOs simply because of who they know, like the guy I used to work for. He had 15 years management experience in the broadcast industry and used to be a radio DJ long ago. He didn't know Doritos from Pentiums and yet he still was in charge of 300 people in the Information Technology department.

    It was pure hell.

    The guy got the job because of the good ol boy system. He was friends with the Sr. VP. Got promoted to VP too, mostly through stealing credit and backstabbing. He fired anyone who stood up for themselves too. Lost a lot of very talented people from that.

    While I'm sure what you said has some truth to it, my experience isn't so peachy and the term "promoted to ineptitude" rings true.
     
  20. Elysian

    Elysian Friend

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    I've lived through the same experience where senior leadership is largely based off of nepotism. It's incredibly fatiguing to go to work everyday in an environment like that. Most companies are probably somewhere in between the two examples we gave. In my personal experience, things tend to be a bit better at publicly listed companies and worse at privately owned companies as there are fewer checks and balances at the latter.

    To bring this back to ASR, I wouldn't be surprised if Amir's cult of personality at ASR mirrors the culture he's led at past organizations. The groupthink there is among the most extreme I've seen among audio communities. Some communities will delete your posts if you post anything negative about paid sponsors but ASR reads like a cult. I don't know why they are so defensive about their equipment and obsessively need to rank everything. Even when they acknowledge that people can listen to whatever they like, they need to caveat that they're spending money on poorly measuring gear. But then again, at SBAF, people drew the line at spending money on the HD700 :)
     
    Last edited: Nov 3, 2020
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