This is getting silly. Engineered products required measurements to confirm they meet the design goals. It is not up to some of us users who think they know enough to decide what is useful or not.
But it's up to us to decide that x product is flawed because it measures poorly in y measurement? How do we know that y measurement was
ever part of the original design goal?
So yes I have to rely heavily on specs and lab measurements, as many as possible.
As do I. But if we buy solely based on the measurements specifically that the magazines give us, you have to accept the great possibility that they're measuring the wrong thing altogether and you could still end up with a mediocre or underperforming product. Hopefully you won't though. At the end of the day you have to realize that it's silly to compare magazine numbers like this because these are NOT the things that the designers were probably measuring during product design.
Again, just because someone here say something is not useful it doesn't mean it isn't.
...regardless of what different individuals
think - just because the magazine measures it, doesn't mean it
is useful.
It only means people form their own opinions, and are entitled to them as I am to mine.
Of course you're entitled to your own opinion. But unless it's factually backed up by bias-controlled/blind listening tests it remains your own opinion and nothing more and nothing less and the same applies to myself and everyone else.
It's easy to get caught up in "measurements we get" but that doesn't mean "measurements we get" equates to "measurements that correlate to what they want us to hear (or NOT hear)"
How do you know for sure they excel in the measurements that matter if those measurements don't exist?
I don't and I never said they do. But I don't pay much mind to the measurements that most of the magazines do measure. I do like Gene's FFT distortion spectra @ 1w VS @ full power
All I know is, there's specs for the sake of specsmanship and specs for the sake of high quality. They're not necessarily related.
It may also be that those measurements that matter are also easily and affordably achievable today but those you consider useless are also easy but costly to achieved.
It may be. And it may very well NOT be. All I can say is simply there's more to the picture than what the magazine shows and to that end I wouldn't discount any product based on a poor measurement that shows zero correlation to audibility, just like I wouldn't parade a product that measures great in almost all the important measurements but falls short in even one.
For example the KEF Q900. You know i'm always on about on and off axis frequency response of speakers and how they're the first important thing I look at. But when I see the metal cone breakup in another measurement, it tells me that there's some serious cost cutting involved and they're not really a speaker i want because of it.
Just because a few measurements are good doesn't indicate a good product, an just because a few measurements are poor doesn't indicate a poor product. We have to correlate things with their audibility else we're just playing the aformentioned mental masturbation game.
