Sprezzatura2010
Senior Member
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2008
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I recently found this gem of a quote from Stereophile's founding editor, thanks to a friend who alerted me to Harman engineer/designer Sean Olive's blog. "Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me..” Of course, people who "hear" differences in identical-sounding commodity audio boxes (DACs, switchers, amps, and certainly digital media readers and wires; basically everything but turntables, room-correction processors, and speakers) based on brand names and price tags won't understand JGH's lament. But that's their problem.