Dave,
After reading (most of) both threads on this I wanted to publicly thank you and offer my admiration for how you handled this whole situation stemming from the ASR review(s).
You dug in to see if there was any "there" there, and ultimately made a significant investment in time and money that will hopefully pay dividends for Ascend (and therefore its customers, like me) for years to come.
I work in manufacturing myself, and as the science advances, more and more, as a world, we find ourselves able to measure things in unprecedented detail. In addition to seeing inside the plastic parts we make with a metrology grade CT scanner (accuracy about 4um, NIST traceable), we can measure feature size on parts inches in size with
physical probes down to just over 1um, about the size of a typical bacteria. As the parts get larger, accuracy degrades to over 2um
.
As a more every day example for readers, standard tests can now measure water quality for many contaminates down to parts per trillion levels (1 part per trillion, PPT is 1 drop in 500,000 barrels of water).
This additional detail can start to cause new “problems”, because it exposes things that while they are very real, they may not
matter.
E.g. What is “pure water”? There’s no such thing as 100% pure H2O in any real world setting. Try to explain that to your every-day consumer.
As a practicing mechanical engineer, the hardest part of my job is always making the judgement call of what is “good enough”.
With audio science and the NFS it appears you are having to contend with the same mix of potentially extraneous data/detail and science that may not be settled or very precise (e.g. “95% of trained listeners can not detect distortion X”).
Unfortunately, the hardest part of all of this may be finding good psychoacoustics data and then educating your customers on the same, such as you did at the start of this thread.
Good luck to you sir. I will be placing an order for a Duo V2 as I would benefit from a nice center channel in my living room setup (moving from 2.1 to 3.1, with NrT towers as mains), and there’s no room for the OG Horizon I have (it’s waiting for a finished theater room).
-NE