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Audio Science spends all of its time...

Posted by EdAInWestOC (A) on August 21, 2019 at 06:09:37

In Reply to: Possibly my next upgrade will be an amp, however ... posted by Feanor on August 8, 2019 at 12:25:31:

With quantitative evaluation of gear. Long ago I learned the bitter lesson that in spite of our advances in technology, we still don't know as much as we give ourselves credit for.

I have no idea how old you are but years ago there was a magazine called Stereo Review and they stuck to the opinion that if there were not significant differences in how an amp measures it sounds the same.

I learned that this is far from the truth. It is not the truth because we still do not fully understand what makes our hearing pick up differences in the sound of different things. In short, we just don't know how to measure things that translate to how an amp sounds.

Of course there are those manufacturers who abuse this little factoid and insist crazy things make a difference. Maybe they are right but I tend to be a skeptic and lean on the side of dismissing crazy sounding claims.

There are things that do matter and whenever I see people who backup their opinions by showing a lot of graphs, I tend to walk away. I trust them as much as I trust the snake oil salesmen.

The sales people who I do trust are those who offer you a chance to sit down and listen. Or give you a warranty where you can return the product for any reason, as long as you are not satisfied.

I personally know people who use the Valhalla and that amp performs very well for them. I also know people who use the Bottlehead Crack and that little amp also performs very well.

If you hook up both to test gear they may not measure as well as a cheap sold state amp but how do the amps sound when compared to each other? We do not listen to graphs or tables of numbers, we listen to the amps themselves.

It is a throwback to quantitative vs qualitative measuring and we cannot get away from the fact that measuring things don't tell us everything. I suggest you sit down and listen to these amps before you accept any graph or table of numbers as some sort of absolute proof that the product is superior.

After all, like I said before, you don't listen to the graphs.

Ed

PS. BTW the original Valhalla was replaced by the Valhalla 2 quiet a while ago. The people who I know are using the Valhalla 2. The fact that the reviewer draws conclusions from a defunct product shows you how seriously you can take this person's point of view. He did mention it was an old product but then concludes by bad mouthing the product and calling it names. If the results were honestly represented he should have mentioned that the results were on a product that has been replaced and will not be the results you can expect. In short it is a misrepresentation.
Life is analog...digital is just samples thereof

Edits: 08/21/19 08/21/19

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