Audio Equipment Testing - Objectivists

Objectivists

Objectivists believe that audio components and systems must pass rigorously-conducted double-blind tests and meet specified performance requirements in order to validate the claims made by their proponents.

• Objectivists point out that properly conducted and interpreted double-blind tests fail to support subjectivists' claims of significant or even subtle sonic differences between devices in cases where measurements predict that there should be no sonic differences in normal music listening.
• Objectivists feel that subjectivists often lack engineering training, technical knowledge, and objective credentials, but nevertheless make authoritative claims about product performance.
• Objectivists are likely to stress the importance of accounting for the influence of placebo and confirmation bias in subjective listening tests .
• Objectivists reject arguments that are based on accepted physical principles, but apply them to circumstances where they are irrelevant. For instance, the skin effect, which relates the efficiency of cables to the frequency transmitted, is often applied to audio frequencies where it is insignificant .
• Objectivists believe that subjectivists' preferences are often driven by gullibility and fashion—e.g., the late eighties' vogue for marking the edges of CDs with a green felt marker or suspending cables above the floor on small racks—and bear no relation to well-known laws of physics.
• Objectivists claim that subjectivists often reject attempts to notate differences in sound using objective measurements, despite the evidence of their effectiveness.
• Because measured audio distortion is higher in electromechanical components such as microphones, turntables, tonearms, phono cartridges, and loudspeakers than in purely electronic components such as preamplifiers and power amplifiers, objectivists generally do not accept that very subtle differences in the latter can have an appreciable effect on the perceived quality of reproduced sound.

British audio equipment designer Peter Baxandall, who is often considered an objectivist, has written, "I ... confidently maintain that all first-class, competently designed amplifiers, tested under completely fair and carefully controlled conditions, including the avoidance of overloading, sound absolutely indistinguishable on normal programme material no matter how refined the listening tests, or the listeners, may be; and that when an inferior amplifier is compared with a very good one and a subjective quality difference is genuinely and reliably established, it is always possible, by straightforward scientific investigation, to find a rational explanation for this difference." Baxandall also proposed a "cancellation test", which he claimed would prove his point.