"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[David A]

Be honest, David, if you criticised ASR's measurement for being non-scientific, how can you happily accept uncontrolled, anecdotal, sighted listening reports from a group of people who have been "in on" the development of the ER and by all accounts were so eager to buy one that the first batch of production sold out in minutes?  Would you not agree that they had a very high susceptibility to expectation and confirmation bias?

I doubt we're ever going to see a listening test that he would be completely happy with, simply because that sort of test is extremely expensive to set up and conduct and it's hard to get access to the budget and facilities required for such a test unless there is a compelling reason to conduct the test.

Agreed.  Probably more to the point, who would fund such a test?  The only people who would benefit would be UpTone and then only if the test gave a positive result.  It is a very high risk for them to take in case the test produced a negative result.


Self selection certainly does mean these reports are unreliable if you want to distinguish the behaviour of the ER from placebo.  On the other hand, if you're interested in hearing stories about what people hear, of course the self-selection is irrelevant.

Deleted the quotes from my posts where they weren't necessary for understanding my comments here.

Did I say that I happily accepted ununcontrolled etc etc tests? I said that at the moment that's what we've got which is a very different thing. On anecdotal evidence generally, show me a well designed and conducted listening test, one we're both happy to accept, and I'll show you a pile of anecdotal reports that someone has turned into quantifiable data for statistical analysis. Science depends on observation and in a hell of a lot of cases the observations on which the science was based started off as uncontrolled anecdotal reports. I happily accept that one needs to use caution when assessing such reports but those reports are often extremely valuable and what some people seem to be all to willing to forget is that scientific knowledge, what some people like to call the "laws of physics" don't really prescribe what will happen. What they do is to state the principles we use to predict what will happen and when we find that what is predicted does not occur, that something else is observed to happen and those observations can be verified, then the so called "laws" change as scientific theory is updated. In reality it's observations which determine what gets counted as scientific knowledge and it's not scientific knowledge that determines what we're going to observe. Science starts with observations that raise questions and ends with observations that confirm that the answers we came up with allow us to make reliable predictions.

Self selection doesn't make observations unreliable. Mistakes make observations unreliable and beliefs can lead to mistakes. Self selected subjects are no more prone to making mistakes than any subject selected by whoever is conducting the test when they hold equally strong beliefs and you're just as prone to not hear a difference if you believe there isn't one as you are to hear one if you believe there is one' Having a belief is a potential problem regardless of which belief you have. Both sides are equally at risk from self selection and also as a result of their beliefs.

Now if everyone on both sides of the fence was inclined to think that the people on the other side of the fence to them were just as honest, intelligent, and reliable as a witness as the people on their own side, and as equally prone to making mistakes as the people on their own side rather than more prone to making mistakes, it would be a lot easier to have a reasonable and useful conversation about a lot of these questions. Unfortunately there's a tendency for people to only see one side of the argument as reasonable, the side they believe in, and they're not interested in listening to things that support the other side because when you're convinced you're right then you "know" the other side is wrong and there's no need to waste time listening to what they other side says.

I don't know which side is right on this question and I've said that. What I do know is that there's rubbish that doesn't hold up being said on both sides of the fence and there's also observations being reported on both sides of the fence which deserve to be acknowledged by the other side as data to be seriously considered. Anecdotal reports deserve just as much serious consideration as do specific tests which don't show a difference on a particular parameter. Yes, the anecdotal reports may be mistaken but it's equally possible that the tests were inaccurate or that, while accurate, they simply didn't measure the things which needed to be measured to show a difference.

It would be great if both sides could show a lot more respect for the views and experience of those on the other side.