fdeck said:
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The manufacturers don't want to publish specs, because they can sell more expensive gear by forcing us to compare models under duress -- the showroom environment, sales pressure, widespread superstitions, and so forth. An informed consumer is an empowered consumer. There is a perpetual atmosphere of uncertainty about whether a piece of gear will meet your needs, so you are tempted to buy the more expensive piece. They happily allow us to perpetuate the belief that there is nothing to be learned from objective data. I call it the "use your ears, not your brain" mentality.
Then, there is also a competitive issue. Published data would encourage comparison shopping, but it would also encourage a competitor to offer a model with the same specs for a lower price.
Okay, my friend, you and I have agreed in these threads on just about everything. I believe you have missed a couple of important points here. First, let me say that having been an audiophile since the age of about 12 and having "grown up" to be an auditory scientist, I firmly believe that objective measures should be provided and that they are important. Anyone who followed the hi-fi world closely through the '60s and '70s (as I did) knows well the various pitfalls and problems.
One very important aspect of the measures is that they be the relevant ones. In addition, there must be education regarding what they mean and how to use them properly. The manufacturers are typically of little help here. Many companies focus upon the importance of differences in specs when those differences are meaningless. This results in a "spec war" in which the uneducated consumer becomes the victim. A case in point is the total harmonic distortion (THD) spec for amplifiers. Hi-fi manufacturers used to love to paste that one up there and try to convince you that their amp was better because it had a THD of 0.0001% rather than 0.001%. It wouldn't matter-- no human could tell the difference. What was worse was what they may have done to the circuit to achieve that figure! Often, they caused other problems.
The uneducated consumer can also be a source of the problem. I think some manufacturers fear this (and rightly so). Two honest manufacturers might publish specs for their amps showing that one develops 110 watts (continuous, into X ohms, at X% distortion, over a bandwidth of.....) while another developes 100 watts. Joe consumer wants the first one because it has more power. Great, he just bought himself 0.4 dB more. Now we have a spec war...
Worse still are the cable-company engineers who will thrill you with science. Their cables alleviate the dreaded Miller-effects, skin-effects, etc. You know what? They're probably correct. This would be important if your passband stretched to 1-MHz and beyond! We are, however, concerned with audio frequencies where those effects are IRRELEVANT!
Now, as far as amplifiers go, specs will take you a long way in a
practical sense. Speakers are another matter entirely. Here, specs can be very helpful as well BUT things are far more complicated. The almost infinite number of possible types and degrees of interactions between speakers and rooms added to the variations in listening positions make such specs a rough guide at best. YES, they are important but here education is needed as well.
Finally, having specs for amps and speakers is all well and good but they interact as well. To this day, we can take two very high quality power amps that, according to their bench specs, are, for all intents and purposes identical and almost ideal. When we attach a set of speakers that present a particularly complex and varying load (in the impedance sense) they can behave somewhat differently, leading to real audible differences.
The bottom line is that specs, in and of themselves, are not a panacea.
I agree that they ARE both necessary and desirable. In the end, however, you must use your ears AND your brain.
