Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

The short answer is that our reviews aren’t based on reasoning at all.

The full story follows. The comments you see below were left on our listing for the Rhino pressing of The Cars’ first album.

The grievances the writer lists are long and mostly unserious, but I think they have some value, just not the value the writer intended, so of course I am happy to reproduce them here and take a crack at explaining the mistaken audiophile thinking they represent.

If you’ve ever stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies, you will have no trouble recognizing all the shortcomings this writer has called us out for in our review of The Cars on Rhino, as well as, we assume, the hundreds of other Heavy Vinyl disasters we take to task on this blog.

Rather that attempt to rebut the individual charges, which seem to be grounded in issues of logic, semantic hair-splitting, a deep misunderstanding of the unwritten rules of criticism, what does and does not constitute an ad hominem attack, my use of injudicious language, and who knows what else, I have an answer that I believe gets to the heart of why none of this matters, which you will find below in my reply to his comments. [Bolding added by me,]

Ad Hominem Attack: The author attacks Kevin Gray personally, suggesting that his work is consistently poor without addressing the specific issues with the remastering process.

Appeal to Authority: The author mentions Steve Hoffman and his successful remastering of The Cars’ first album on Gold CD, implying that because Hoffman did it well, Kevin Gray should have done the same. This disregards the possibility of differences in approach and technique between the two engineers.

Appeal to Popularity: Popularity does not equate to quality.

False Dichotomy: The author presents a binary choice between their preferred pressing and the Rhino pressing, suggesting that the Rhino pressing is objectively bad without considering the possibility of subjective preferences or different listening experiences.

Appeal to Emotion: The author uses emotive language (“just awful,” “godawful”) to elicit a strong negative reaction from the reader, rather than providing objective evidence to support their claims. This would be very difficult considering that taste and preference is subjective.

Hasty Generalization: The author assumes that anyone who disagrees with their assessment of the Rhino pressing must have inferior audio equipment or lack understanding of audio quality. This overlooks the possibility of legitimate differences in opinion or subjective preferences.

Appeal to Ignorance: The author suggests that because they personally find the Rhino pressing to be of poor quality, it must be objectively bad. However, personal experience or opinion does not necessarily reflect objective truth.

I would hope that no one reading this blog could possibly find these sophistic arguments persuasive, for the simple reason that none of them have very much to do with the sound of the records, by The Cars or anybody else, that we discuss in our 5000+ listings and commentaries.

Everything we say about records is backed up by the evidence we have discovered by actually playing them.

Failures of logic and generally fallacious thinking have nothing to do with whatever “truths” we believe we have discovered about records, because we didn’t use either one — logic nor reasoning — to learn what we know about them.

I also don’t think we would be comfortable characterizing our claims about the sound of records to be objectively true. Our claims may be objectively true for us; the same stampers of scores of records win our shootouts over and over again, even though no one playing or reviewing the pressings in question knows which stampers are which until the grades are in.

But that objectivity extends only to the records we play on our stereo, and the kind of sound we like our records to have. (May I point out here that the other two guys who took over the job of doing our shootouts more than five years ago heard things the same way I did, and we never quarreled even once about which pressings were the best. They didn’t need teaching, they just needed good records to play on a good system. If your stereo is good enough, the right answers come naturally and effortlessly.)

Fortunately for us, thousands of customers have found that their stereos play our records just fine, and these same customers seem to like the kind of sound we like. That didn’t have to be the case, but we’re glad it is. Otherwise I would have had to find some other way to make a living. I sure wasn’t going to keep selling Heavy Vinyl once it was clear to me how consistently inferior the sound was more than likely going to continue to be.

Logic and Evidence

To understand the records we offer, and the reviews we write, logic is of no use whatsoever.

The only thing that has any real value is experimental evidence.

Without experimental evidence, you simply have no evidence, because logic is not evidence.

(more…)