Alan Shaw at Harbeth has issued a very direct challenge to us audiophiles. Essentially (details on his site) he is saying that he will give away a free pair of Harbeths, up to the Model 40. You have to devise a fair test, and he says he will accept it. You will need to identify two amps 60% of the time, over one hundred exerts. Usual stipulations about the amps not clipping, flat frequency response etc.
How about MC taking-up this challenge?He has the experience, and has identified minor differences in the past. He can specify the conditions, essential to minimise stress and fatique (which may be the main problem).
We cannot keep ducking this issue, a lot of intelligent, interested, people think we are deluded. Success in one substantial test will put that claim to bed for ever.It will take a lot of nerve (more than I possess!) but the challenge needs meeting.

Not very complicated. My house. My system. My music. My time.

We could start with my NAIM82/hi-cap/250 (I would prefer to use a 552/500 if anyone is offering ) and compare to a wheezy valve or a bright class D/Pioneer A400 or a soggy Audiolab. I want to play music I know or at least like if I have a long test ahead of me. I want to take time to get used to the sound of each amp. This sounds fair to me, why would I listen in an unfamiliar acoustic, to unfamiliar music and in conditions I dont usually listen under? Why load it to make me fail or introduce too many variables if we are only testing our ability to differentiate between amplifiers?

Edited by user 06 April 2012 11:24:45(UTC)  | Reason: added laughter

So we have a speaker maker who says all amps sound the same? What would he say to an amp maker who said the same about speakers? Where is the wisdom of any hifi designer getting into " they all sound the same" mode? Isn't his whole business predicated on listeners being able to discriminate between competing products? And select his as the best? If we are all so deluded then why should we trust our ears to discriminate between speakers? Excuse me; I am quite grumpy this morning. I endured a visit from a friend yesterday who has a truly remarkable set of ears; remarkable in the sense that he can't appear to distinguish chalk from cheese to mix a metaphor. He brought up his Korean made dac to compare to my Metrum Octave and Audio Synthesis DAX. Short version, I heard differences, he did not. Well , some, but they were insignificant to him. That was not the fun part; that started when he at once declared that the Spendor 2/2s I had set up were very muffled and unnatural sounding. So we switched to the Duetta Signatures; much more to his taste until he realized that he could see the treble ribbon moving. Then the fun really started; remember that he is a mechanical engineer with several decades experience in audio; not to mention a large following on one of the more prominent audio forums here. We were playing orchestral music and he told me the treble ribbon was oscillating at 10 Hz. I told him that that was impossible as there was no music at that frequency and such a vibration would destroy the ribbon right away. To demonstrate that movement was normal to the ribbon I put on a folk CD of a male singer with guitar; it vibrated in exactly the same manner. Remember the speaker was sounding fine all this time. Aha he said, now it is vibrating at 3 Hz. He knew this as he had seen it move three times in one second; therefore its frequency was 3 cps; QED. " I as an engineer understand these things , you do not". He then proceeded to explain what a crossover was and why the speaker must be defective to allow any movement; his dome tweeters don't move. Perhaps this farrago of nonsense should have given me a feeling of superiority; it did not, it profoundly depressed me. What if the critics are right and were are indeed all crazy; deluding ourselves that we hear differences that don't exist? They probably all view me as I look at my friend, could they be right? After a night's sleep "Away with these vapors, Richard is himself again!". I realized I don't give a tinkers damn ; I hear what I hear! I will leave it to some of you younger and more energetic members to pursue the task of convincing the skeptical that such differences exist; from my knowledge of the History of Science I really don't believe that you can succeed. Scientific proof is an elusive if not unobtainable target as Karl Popper would tell you. Look at how successful climate change deniers have been over here; setting aside Creationists. Sic em boys; I'll sit this one out.

So, if I read 'HIstan' correctly, it is just fine to claim absolutely anything at all, with no requirement to even attempt to verify our beliefs. So why measure stuff at all? After all, we can 'believe' it is correct if we chose to.
I am a bit of a 'subjectivist' but I am appalled by the intellectual laziness of fellow subjectivists who think that you can make claims without any need to verify. I used to argue in philospohy classes (many years ago) that I was previously a fire engine living happily on Mars.....according to the approach 'HIstan' and others take, that is just as valid a claim as any other.Without some theory of verification/falsification, all claims are equal.

Also I believe differences between microphones are readily detected in blind listening sessions

....and cartridges. In fact just about any type of transducer has characteristics that are easily demonstratable and identifiable in blind tests.

But amplifier design has now progressed to the point that it is straightforward to design a product whose output is simply an accurate copy of the input to within miniscule errors, and there are various techniques that can be used to show that these errors are undectable. This is what HiFi is all about - high fidelity to the original.

Design choices are then made as the market needs - power output, load capability, style, ergonomics, controls, types of input etc etc. Sometimes the technical method used to implement these requirements is also driven by purely marketing parameters such as valve/transistor/fet, rather than simply the best way to achieve the desired performance at the best cost.
There are plenty of products out in the market which give excellent results but are despised by audiophiles because they are made by big-name companies and often have such things as tone controls, as well as being reasonably priced, such as Denon, Pioneer etc. Equally there are many products such as SET amplifiers that have deplorable fidelity, with ludicrous levels by today's standards of distortion and frequency response errors into real loudspeakers, but fetch high prices simply because of their quoted design methods, their fans writing off their deficiencies as "musicality", "smoothness", "rhythm" etc.

It's all rather depressing for someone such as myself who doesn't have the time to go out and try out all the competing products when looking for a new purchase, and can't find a single published source of properly carried out comparative tests. So I stick to spending the majority of my money on good speakers and sources. Obviously when I was working in the industry I did listen to a lot of competing products as well as testing them, but even then it was clear that success in the market and in reviews bore very little relationship to quality of design or performance, though on the whole the better speakers did rise to the top, and some ghastly ones ones slowly sank in to deserved oblivion.

Oh well, I suppose that rant will earn me a slap on the writs from Martin. C'est la vie.

Even with speakers there can be surprises.

2 years ago , at the Munich show, I walked into the large IAG room . I could have sworn I was listening to the Quad 2905s , some solo piano was playing..

In fact it was the small Castle Knight 5s . Peter Comeau laughed and said I wasn't the only one deceived !

This would get rid of a lot of modern physics; no one had ever seen or detected a graviton yet no one doubts they exist. SuperSymmetry requires the existence of a whole range of particles yet unseen. Several billion dollars/pounds have been expended on looking for the Higgs Boson. In Paleontology a well known maxim is " absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" ; see "Lazarus Species". Descending to the relative mundane level of Audio the question is this " are there sonic differences which can be regularly perceived by at least some which are not described by current measurements"? Just because you lack a ready explanation for a phenomenon does not mean it is imaginary. My engineer friend assumed that anything not in his current cookbook simply cannot exist. I resist the temptation to tell him " There are more things in Heaven and Earth etc." Science at the cutting edge is a rather murky and ad hoc process quite unlike the rational and measured picture many have of it. I love and respect scientific inquiry as much as the next man [ and far more than most] but to demand a full and detailed explanation at the beginning of an inquiry is not how science operates. Science is not a neat and tightly fitting system but is full of gaps and contradictions and it is just at these locations that progress is made.

What I am trying to say is that there is no agreement yet that some of the effects being discussed are real; therefore the time to look for explanations of them has not yet come. I of course assume any discovered to exist would have a scientific explanation eventually. What I am arguing against is the tendency to use our present state of knowledge to forbid the existence of things outside itself.

Edited by user 10 April 2012 05:43:05(UTC)  | Reason: Clarification of Post

Much as I would like to see this done (and, for "well designed amplifiers" operating within their design envelope one could substitute "well designed DACs" or "well designed cables" or ...), a credible outcome will carry weight and influence primarily if there is a credible subject with a reputation to live up to (or to ruin ...).

In the UK hifi world that would narrow down the subjects to well known amplifier designers still in that employment (and that isn't going to happen) or to just a very few commentators - the obvious ones, head and shoulders above the rest, being Martin Colloms and Paul Miller.

On Mr Shaw's test if I scored 50 out of 100 or 65 out of 100 no one would be interested for too long. Whereas if Martin scored 50 ...

So I'd like to see Martin do it, but if I were Martin I wouldn't.

Many DACS are now even more perfect than amplifiers, laboratory wise

S/N 120 dB , THD -110dB , response 20 to 20k +,-0.01dB

separation 100dB , balance 0.01dB

and how different they actually sound

this week two examples one more like an ipod

one more like the best vinyl replay

one you try to listen for an hour , the other you cannot bear to switch off

Martin C