Any and all of the examples I’ve outlined above CAN work – in the right situation. If they make a point rather than acting as window-dressing, then fair enough. The problem comes when they cross the line into cliché, habit forming written tics that fill the space that might otherwise actually communicate something useful…
“There is more to sex appeal than just measurements.” Audrey Hepburn
However, flip the coin and you’ll quickly discover that the measurement-based media are just as flawed and compromised, both by the tools at their disposal and the way in which they use them. There is no single measurement that tells us how good a product or even a system sounds. What we can do is measure individual aspects of performance – in some cases with considerable accuracy. The problem comes when we try to assemble a complete picture from those individual parts. As Einstein is so often quoted as saying (incorrectly, but let’s be honest, crediting sociologist William Bruce Cameron doesn’t have quite the same ring) “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Measure as much as you like and there will still be vital parts of the picture missing. And that’s before you get to the methodological issues around not just what you measure but how. For years, magazines and manufacturers relied on Frequency Domain measurement: not because it was right, but because it was what was possible. It is only relatively recently that meaningful Time Domain measurements have become possible and their critical importance has been recognised. For all those who constantly demand the ‘scientific evidence’ to support equipment performance descriptions or claims – remember that science is only the sum total of what we can actually explain (and doesn’t really touch all the stuff we can’t) but is also constantly reinventing itself, filling in the gaps and correcting its assumptions.
Where measurement does come into its own is in product development and quality control. Designers often need to drill down to specific aspects of performance and appropriate measurements are a crucial part of that process. Likewise, measurement can assess product consistency with considerable accuracy. After all, consistency and quality are far from being the same thing. But for really advanced measurement and product development, manufacturers are often left to develop their own approaches and techniques, skills and abilities that they are understandably reluctant to share.
The problem facing the audio industry is that it’s no longer big enough or important enough to justify massive research budgets of the sort it once enjoyed. Genuine advances in audio performance come from individuals working in isolation or piecing together bits of work from other fields. As such, their interest is essentially commercial and given the cost (and frankly, the irrelevance) of patenting their work, you can forget any notion of peer reviews. Likewise, most of these people, whether they’re working in the analogue or digital domain, have developed measurement techniques or understanding that is way beyond the level applied by magazines. So constantly demanding that products be sent to Stereophile for a ‘proper’ review is as meaningless and unrealistic from an empirical perspective as it is unlikely from an editorial one.
