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Old 03-02-2009, 10:05 PM   #422
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BoxOfSnoo View Post
Well I'm not gonna fight you, yep. You clearly have more experience than I do. But I can hear it, so I think most anyone can...
Well, whatever my level of experience (and it's not all that), my first piece of advice would be this: Never trust anyone just because they have more experience than you. Experts are the easiest people to fool. This is not personal opinion, it it proven fact in a whole lot of scientific peer-reviewed studies. My favorite example is the wine experts who failed to detect that they were drinking white wine with red dye, and who also failed to detect when they were drinking the same wine from different bottles:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/...ource=rss_feed

There is also the great monster cable vs wire coat hangers listening test:

http://gizmodo.com/363154/audiophile...-a-coat-hanger

My whole point is not to brow-beat anyone with ad-hominem arguments of "I know vintage gear and you don't," it's the opposite. Look at the emperor and see what his clothes look like to you. "I have more experience" or "I know X and Y better so therefore I must be right about Z" are stupid arguments, and patently false logical tests. And they are exactly the kind of arguments that most gear debates fall back on. Which is exactly wrong, whether they come from me or anyone else.

I really hope I haven't done anything to set myself up as an "authority" here, because I'm not. If my opinions disagree with your own ears, you should say so, and you should let other people know where I'm wrong (because I probably am, in any number of opinions). I am myself disagreeing with a lot of people with much better credentials than myself, in this thread. That's the whole point, and I actually wish more people would disagree, as long as it is meaningful, substantive divergence of opinion.

But as far as I can see in books and on the web and whatever, most of the discussion is frankly a bunch of know-nothings debating what they've read about other people's opinions. (I'm not accusing you or anyone else in particular of this.)

I personally have never done a study of trying to construct the same signal output from silicon-based vs germanium-based transistors. So I have no idea whether it is possible. I know there are a boatload of people online who think that germanium sounds better, but there are far bigger boatloads of people online who are wrong about all kinds of things. And most of the "germanium-is-better" folks seem to ultimately fall back on the "well, everyone knows its better" or "Jimi Hendrix used germanium" arguments, which are worse than useless.

Until Jimi Hendrix came along, everyone knew that Fender amps were the best. Everyone knows what everyone else knows as long as everyone knows the same thing, even if it's not true.

I'm not trying to pick on you. I've been the main person posting in this thread so far, but that doesn't make me or my insights more important or more useful than anyone else's. If I harp on divergent opinions it's not because I'm trying to bully dissenters but because proof of concept is helpful to me, personally, and I hope to others. I so far do not even disagree with you.

Last edited by yep; 03-02-2009 at 10:08 PM.
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