If thats your take thats on you, Last I checked I'm not selling to anyone on here including the OP so its irrelevant. I'm not allowed to have an opinion all of a sudden? Laughable.
To be fair, I have not seen a single post on this thread where someone implied someone else is not entitled to an opinion. Though I can see that HD might have been a little sarcastic in his "dealer" comment. You, on the other hand said "..Most of the people on the boards haven't heard either and yet have made an opinion and thats even more laughable.. ". To me, I hope after you had your laugh you would also consider their "opinions" in a more objective manner.
Consider that ASR's typical battery of measurements that include not just SINAD (reciprocal of THD+N), but also dynamic range/Signal to noise, 32 tones input, IMD (intermodulation distortions), frequency response including not just the typical 1 kHz but also up to 90 kHz bandwidth, frequency dependency, linearity, THD+N for coaxial input, HDMI input, analog input, and for the power amp side, 5 W output test, maximum output tests into 8 and 4 ohms at the THD knee point, not just clipping point, dynamic output into 8/4 ohms and more..; and also FFTs that display the harmonic profiles, that something the likes of Soundandvison.com would never do, and now they are not doing it at all, don't you think such measurements done on ASR are, to people who lean more on the "audio science" side, are a little more than just "somewhat useful", but actually reasonably useful and reliable in terms of predicting the dut's (devices under tests) sound quality at least in terms of transparency if not audibility?
Dealer or not, you clearly are an open minded audioholics, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered trying several AVRs before settling on one, so I hope you would give the others (the "people on the boards...") point of views more serious considerations instead of just laughing it off..
By the way, talking about FFT, take a look of an Arcam's AVR10 and the AVR-X3700H, the one with the original DAC IC:
AVR10 vs AVR-X3700h:
Let's ignore the noise part in case there is something peculiar about Amir's typical connections layout that the specific Arcam AVR10 may not like, but you can see the harmonic distortions of the AVR10 are quite high, not only in the less offensive low order, but also the higher order harmonics such as the 7th, 9th, 11th and beyond.
That's just the preamp/dac output! If you look at the measurements at the power amp output you will see similar performance. We don't know if Amir had made any "mistakes" or done something that might have skew the results in a negative way, but in the past, other lab's test results including the manufacturers typically confirmed his results in similar tests, with may be one or two exceptions that I can remember (usually on the noise side, and in those cases, the reasons for the differences were discovered and explained).
So I hope you can see why the "people on the boards" reacted the way they did, with those results there isn't much need to listen to the devices to conclude that the AVR10 has much higher distortions and noise than the AVR-X3700H and because it is not about "audibility" but about the measurable performance that most posters reacted to.
In terms of audibility, it is highly possible that the AVR10 can sound more pleasing to many (but not necessarily most) as it has distortions that may be high enough to be audible and it is proven in various studies that harmonic distortions alone, unless really high such as above 1%, is not a good indicator of perceived sound quality anyway. Nelson pass actually designed a DIY harmonic generator for people interested in trying out if they prefer their sound with intentionally added harmonic distortions. He found that "
when given a choice between the sound of an amplifier whose characteristic is dominantly 2nd harmonic versus 3rd harmonic, a good percentage of listeners choose the 3rd. " Now clearly if the total harmonics are low enough, such as below 0.01%, one can say who cares if the harmonics are 2nd, 3rd, or even the highly offensive high order ones? In this case though the example AVR10 used did show THD much higher than 0.01%
This example used the AVR10, the AVR11 might have very different performance, perhaps much lower (or higher) harmonic distortions and noise. Regardless, my point is, assuming when the devices being compared do sound audibly different, the one that measured with better results may be preferred by some but not others in terms of perceived sound quality if the better results are mainly in distortions. Also, as you mentioned there may be other things not measured, in the ASR cases, Amir rarely measured damping factor, he did it for amps sometimes but never on AVRs, and that's just one example there may be other important factors not measured but should have been measured.
