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I don't recall anyone ever calling a $5,000 audio product 'budget'. A 'bargain' perhaps, but not 'budget'. Criticizing the reviewers for things they have done wrong is entirely fair; calling them out...

Whether something is a bargain or not hangs on a lot of things. Most important, however, is how a product works in context. If a £500 loudspeaker sounds slightly better than £300 loudspeaker, not...

Let's play a little game. Imagine you and I earn the same amount of money and a similar amount of disposable income, and for both of us let's say a $10,000 system (comprising just DAC, amp and...

The market is shrinking in unit terms. Let's look at loudspeakers specifically, in part because it represents £100m of that £200m figure. By sales volume, numbers are down across the board. By sales...

The "you need to spend at least $15k on speakers" mind-set is one of the most vexatious in audio today. It has to stop. I understand the ideas behind this firewall (there's little point in someone...

You are absolutely correct in saying "people lie, market's don't", AudioCynic. So, where is this market of "affluent, music loving consumers"?

I can only speak for the UK market (I get access to -...

Several issue arise from your statements:

1. "I bought the Hippo DAC at 50% off retail"... congratulations, you have just put Hippo (and the company's agents) out of business, because you stating...

The main point of the exercise was to compare movement with movement, not inter-track. So yes, each test does take about half an hour to conduct, and there need to be a lot of gaps between each test,...

2/10 for the answer

1. If the company has a demo system, that set-up is a best-case scenario for the product. It's going to be the most optimized system to highlight the performance of the device...

I can't afford vintage wine. I'm too busy spending money on audio equipment just to try to stay in the game.

You are the editor of a high-end audio magazine. Your publisher has just placed a blanket ban on long-term loans and accommodation purchases. Around the same time, you are offered the 'scoop' on the...

...is used when the reviewer thinks a product at a given sticker price performs like one costing considerably more. The reviewer can do this if they know the product and its peer group. If a reviewer...

@AudioCynic: The point of ABXing whole tracks is in the real world we don't tend to jump from orchestra to orchestra mid-note. This might lead precisely nowhere, but there is nothing in the ABX test...

...is very difficult. You could potentially do it with Replay Gain, but then run the risk of changing then dynamic range of one or both tracks thereby invalidating the test.

My suggestion is to...

The thing about accommodation prices is they are universally available and linked to the trade price. If they went away, what we like or dislike wouldn't change, just what we would potentially use in...

Hi Peter,

The music I used was the 1970s Kleiber/Vienna Philharmonic version of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, Second Movement against the 1960s version of the same by von Karajan/Berlin...

I don't really hold to the 'cloth ears' argument, any more than I subscribe to the 'golden ears' argument. At any given age, and assuming no substantial hearing damage, people's hearing acuity is...

My take on accommodation prices is a simple one. The reviewer gets the same deal someone in a store or who works for the company would get. That usually means trade price, more or less. My reviewers...

Where did that come from?

All I am asking (and asking, and asking) is that we objectively re-assess ABX as a DBT method, in the light of newer DBT methodologies. If, at the end of such assessment,...

As I said, the last ABX test I ran demonstrated that listeners could not tell the difference between two versions of the same classical movement under ABX conditions, when the whole movement is...

Benedetti et al (2003) demonstrated that Valium's performance as an anti-anxiety drug is contingent upon the test subjects being aware they are taking Valium. Once they are aware they are taking an...

Not really relevant, because no-one has yet died of an overdose of preamplification. Moreover, drug testing is not really relevant here because the outcome of such a test is objectively quantifiable....

"Musical instruments, there are people who can reliably identify the makers of different violins by simply listening to them being played."

This statement exposes one of my key problems I have...

The last objective test I ran was last year, when I double-blind ABX'd music and found that untrained subjects cannot tell the difference between two different versions of the same piece of classical...

"And no one has yet addressed the main question: How does the audiophile know what he's buying if cables can only detract from the signal they're passing, they cannot add any "Fi"."

The idea is...