Reference

Sidebar 3: Hard-Line Objectivists

"Hard-Line Objectivists" is my name for certain self-appointed Czars of audio equipment design. They think that the senses of humans, even skilled audio professionals, should never be relied on in matters of audio equipment assessment using music; that only test gear should decide; that audio equipment is perfect and sounds "blameless," provided it meets highly limited tests; that only a steady sinewave is required to discover all that is knowable about audio equipment; that capacitor, resistor, thermal, and dynamic distortions do not exist because they cannot be detected using limited test gear; that listeners who use anything other than Wal-Mart bell wire for connecting their loudspeakers are fools; etc.

This is also the class of person who, having bullied, ridiculed, and scared off those who seek to point out possibly better interpretations of the facts, reinvents and renames the very things he has aggressively denied, all under some new, pseudoscientific guise.

Novice readers should be warned that HLOs regularly try to insert their views into audio publications—see Robert Orban's letter in the October 1999 Stereophile—and that they pretend to represent all scientific orthodoxy while standing yards to the right of it.—Ben Duncan