Myth Statement
Measurements do not reveal fidelity

Many audiophiles like to embrace the myth that measurements cannot tell you what something will sound like. They like to reflect on the Total Harmonic Distortion competition that amplifiers follied with in the 1970's. True, in the early 70's THD was the only "quality" specification used, but it soon proved to be insufficient. If you look at the complete history, you would find that in the mid 70's a new quality measurement was introduced. This was Intermodulation Distortion. Striding for low THD's engineers chained together many gain stages in series and closed a global feedback loop around them. Intermodulation occurs when the distortion cancelling feedback signal arrives too late to make a complete cancellation. With the introduction of IM testing, the THD wars ended abruptly. And those horrible sounding amplifiers, started to sound nice again. We can all thank Crown corporation for that. You can google it: Crown IMA Intermodulation distortion meter.

History teaches us a couple of things. First it shows that no 2 people hear the same thing the same way. There were many who thought those 0.00001% THD amps sounded fine. But there were others that were certain something was wrong with them. For those that had doubts, some stayed with older designs while others pushed on and found a technical reason and a solution to their dissatisfaction. That is how progress works.

The moral of the story is, when you make the right measurements, you get the right answer. And when your ears tell you that something is wrong, hard work will generally find a measurement to match it. There is never any justification to not measure. None. If Crown never did the hard work, we would still believe that the only way to get good sound was with zero global feedback. And while there are those that still believe that, Crown proved that there was another way.