I don't see him as an ass. It's a different approach, one I grok from having grown up with both parents being engineers. Impressions and passionate discourse are one thing, but when you start speaking business (science) then it's a matter of stepping up to the burden of proof.

I doubt there are many engineers out there even in the stratosphere of gold plated half-ton amps who are arrogant enough to design solely by ear. Most have probably measured damn near every component, even if the final result is many orders of magnitude below causing an audible defect.

When speaking of the final product, the output, measurements are simple because there are really only a handful of identifiable things to measure. If an amp does make an audible difference while measuring flat, then either you haven't measured the right thing or it's in your head. And that's the part that gets me annoyed at discussing audio in general on online forums, folks tend to get insulted at the mere suggestion of the psychological basis of perception.

So, um, yes, I'd have to align closer to the philosophy of the minions. Though my background of study tends towards neuroscience and from that I see every review as the description of nerve impulses as codified by a vast network of cognitive processes rather than any sort of elemental truth

I appreciate nwavguy has done with his measurements and discoveries - not too different from what I (or we - if you haven't figured this out yet) are trying to do. I think the ass part comes from his unnecessarily picking fights with people, e.g such as AMB, the admins at HF, the folks at HC, etc. Nwavguy could have been really somebody special and very respected by most if he had known how to handle himself better. I figure it's a matter of youthful arrogance and a lack of wisdom because of inexperience.

As with his minions, some of them have quoted him without understanding the meaning of what he (nwavguy) was trying to say. For example, one guy in a HF thread sort of barged into a thread were there was discussion (subjective impressions) about op-amp rolling - and basically said "there is no difference" it's all in your head. This was a total misunderstanding of from where nwavguy was coming from. I basically told that poster to fuck off in nicer words and referred him to a document containing a zillion opamp measurements that Nwavguy had referred to.

If Nwavguy is going to have minions who claim to speak on his behalf, he should make sure they know what they are talking about and they are not assholes too. I've actually seen discourses between one of his minions and him on his blog - and then that minion parroting back on HF what his "master" said. If someone did that with me, I would, as I like to say, rip his nuts off.

Here's a good example of the personality issue when it down to a "end-user" experience:

• I want to get schematics for the AMB portable amp. I go to the AMB labs website. Click on mini3. Click on schematics.
• I want to get schematics for Nwavguy's portable amp. I go to his Nwavguy's website. I manage to find O2 on the right column. I scroll up and down looking for a link to schematics, but instead I see a long manifesto of his views, why he's right and everyone else is wrong or deluded, bad analogies to cars, shopping malls, wine (with pictures too), measurements comparing his amp to mini3 (even though they are not comparable given the difference in battery size and form factor), etc. I just say fuck it - because it's so hard to find schematics without reading his crap. Sorry, that's not engineer mind (my dad is an engineer, I myself am a computer engineer by study), that's just "I'm a self-righteous prick" mind. Those are the kind of people at work that I fire, however brilliant they can be.

Yeah, Marv nails it on the head.

I was thrilled when I stumbled upon his blog. For someone who has ZERO background in engineering, I found it a great resource for a noob like me to start scratching the surface on some of these concepts. But over time, his arrogance started becoming off-putting -- as he paints himself as some sort of lone crusader in this land of evil audiophiles that are out to get your money through brainwashing.

And I do agree that folks should be more open to, as you said, "the psychological basis for perception." On the other hand, Nwavguy's minions are so quick to snobbishly dismiss ANY subjective experience as mere bias. I've witnessed so many occasions where someone was nice enough to share listening impressions, only to get berated by the objectivist peanut gallery with dime-store engineering knowledge.

That's another questionable property common to engineer-folk: the tendency to treat unqualified views with contempt and respond with arrogance to any imprecision, as if upholding a scientific point-of-view ever mattered at all in human relations. Nwavguy is arrogant and I understand why he got kicked after just viciously going after the Schiit engineers about the bug in their amp. With AMB, it's a different matter. I appreciate that there are hobbyists like AMB who volunteer their time and expertise in creating new designs and generally propping up the community. However if you look over at his forum, you'll see the same minions of the cult of personality, when Nwavguy began discussing the mini over there I would say that he was mainly on the receiving end of an overly aggressive defense by AMB & the gang which quickly deteriorated.

Anyway, I would be very interested in seeing some more involved testing for amps which would allow for both physical performance characteristics and listener predisposition to be tracked. Present amps as a black box to a control group, or that type of thing.

Maybe there is something to be found in the spectrum of the distortion, like higher orders harmonics vs lower orders, but I'm not sure that still matters after a certain point.

What is certain though is that any objective change is measurable, it's a matter of measuring the right thing, or creating the appropriate metric to measure it.

Measurements of impulse response (hence CSDs, FR, etc. derived from them) - is still very a static measurement. They don't show a significant difference (beyond measurement error) between amps or tubes. I don't think we are imagining things when we do hear such differences - heck as I mentioned earlier, I think certain op-amps sound very different. But then again - we could be imagining things... Or maybe certain kinds amount distortion just sounds better on certain headphones.

Did you measure with a real load? Say your HD 800 for example why seems to be pretty amplification sensitive, maybe differences will show up.