Audio Science Review of Expert 200.

[David A]

A.f.a.i.c. Armir lost all credibility in the EtherREGEN discussion. Measuring, not listening and jumping to negative conclusions is bad form. Not even going to bother reacting to his 'review'. Hope nobody from the Devialet scene does. That is just what he seems to hope to achieve.

Isn't measuring and not listening exactly what the Devialet engineers claimed to do at some point?
Not sure where I read this on this forum, but I was gutted to hear that.

I guess that there's at least 2 types of "measuring and not listening". One type is done by people who believe that a certain type of result gives an improvement in sound quality so, when designing a new device, they measure to see whether they're getting more or less of the thing they're interested in. That, I think, is the way Devialet works but, if I remember correctly, the comment made said that having got the kind of results they were looking for in their measurements, then they did listen to make sure that it sounded right.

The other sort of "measuring and not listening" is done by people who believe that measurements predict how something will sound. They measure what they believe is critical to good sound, which may not be what other people measure or think is critical to good sound, and assume that the measurements they have are sufficient to tell them how the component will sound. Listening is an afterthought for some of these people.

There's a difference between measuring in order to help you reach a certain desired result and then listening to see whether that result gives you what you want, and measuring in order to find out how things are going to sound because you believe that the sound of the component will be revealed by your measurements, and then listening to confirm your belief.

I thought that Devialet comment was interesting when I read it but I definitely wasn't gutted. I thought it was a quite different way of developing a product and quite different from the way I would go about it if I knew enough to be able to design an amplifier but then different people do work in different ways. Given my own personal approach to things, I find it interesting and perhaps even reassuring to find that I can listen to and find a lot to like in an amp designed by people with a very different approach to me. I find it reassuring because it indicates that, despite the differences in approach, we're all still interested in getting a sound we like.

How meaningful are measurements when it comes to predicting how something will sound? Well, you might well be able to predict some characteristics of the sound from a given set of measurements but, when one considers how different the measurements from a Devialet and from a single ended tube amp are, it's actually very apparent that the results will tell you nothing at all about whether an amp will be assessed as good or bad by a particular listener. I'm very happy with my Devialet and I doubt I would ever want to go down the very high sensitivity speaker and low wattage single end tube amp road but over the years I have heard a number of such systems which I really liked. I think measurements are valuable for a lot of reasons but I don't think they're always predictive of the final sound and I've never found them predictive of whether or not I'm going to like a product.