This is such a broad brush to paint people with... “ASR guys”. It all at once creates a box and puts everyone that appreciates all of the measurements that ASR does in it. As if someone that is a member there looks at the one of the SINAD charts and goes buys something. IMO it is a pretty ridiculous and disingenuous thing to say. As someone that appreciates and visits both AH and ASR, I don’t find it to be true from my experience. Does it really need to be ”ASR Guys” and ”AH Guys”?
I am a member of that forum and that is exactly what a lot of 'them' do, which of course they are free to do so, remember ASR is primarily focused on measurements and that draws in a lot of like minded people, people that put measurements above all else, many of which I have witnessed choose and write off products based off measurements alone, of course there are always exceptions to the rule, but compare ASR to say Head-Fi for example and they are massively different in terms of how a majority of each forum members choose their products, one is based primarily on measurements, the other from listening, I like to try a fall somewhere in the middle, I mean at the end of the day you can have all the science and measurements in the world but the end result is the 'human factor', us listening to the sound and deciding whether we like it or not.
I think somehow we need to try and bridge the gap between the science the human subjective element, because you have instances with people, for example a chap on ASR yesterday in the RX-A3080 thread that was quite confused as to why he preferred the Yamaha sound over that of the Denon's, when technically the Denon measured a lot better, when an amp measures better does that mean it should sound better?, I personally preferred the Yamaha over Denon based off the soundstage, it had a lot more depth, is soundstage measurable? Imaging?, detail retrieval?
I have an Audeze Deckard headphone amp, got stellar reviews when it was released, I went through a load of different amps and settled on the Deckard as my favourite, years later ASR finally got their hands on it and it measured very poorly!, yet it is still one of my favourite headphone amps, why? what's the missing link?, Personally I believe the extra power the amp had over many other amps at the time negated many of the poor measurements, that was more beneficial for my headphones and yielded better results audibly, but I could be wrong.
I do think measurements are very important, it holds the manufactures to account and lets us the consumer's understand what's really going on inside our boxes and see if manufacturers live up to their advertised claims/specs, but that being said I don't think that should trump, or take take precedent over what we experience when we listen to the end product.
