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The central fact remains...

...that it is a mistake for audiophiles, audio designers, or audio magazines to abandon reason in favor of (audiophile) fundamentalist dogma. What we're seeing is the legacy of the justifiable but overzealous reaction against the measurement fundamentalists. Regretably, it has led to a very different kind of fundamentalism, which is well summarized in Hansen's repeated (but now denied) claims that nothing should be dismissed without listening.

This really is very simple: if you encourage people to trust their ears uncritically--which Stereophile has done (inconsistently) for decades and industry figures continue to do--human nature takes over, people imagine things, and Charles Hansen gets richer.

The alternative is not, as CH would have us believe, a return to measurement fundamentalism. The alternative is a more enlightened, more critical (but no less open-minded) listening posture. The suggeestion that if you're skeptical of what you hear and don't completely trust your senses you won't hear anything is unsupportable and--worse--it's the manifestation of an implicit (and inaccurate) belief that this whole audiophile endeavor is amazingly fragile, that if you examine it too hard it will all fall apart. I don't believe that; I think it will stand up to critical scrutiny. I don't think we need to be fallible little sheep led along by our noses (or ears) and industry marketers in order to enjoy good audio.

It is sad that those who are working hardest, and in some ways most successfully, to advance the state of audio arts--Charles Hansen, John Curl, etc.--are simultaneously propagating an attitude that undermines the credibility of the enterprise.

With this, I sign off on this topic.

Jim Austin

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