Thought I would comment on the suggestion of offering Gene to participate in a double-blind listen test. The problem I see is that it would likely be futile and even, in an odd way, harmful to the pursuit of science in sound quality. I can remember the first time I ran into speaker design dogma. It was in the 80s at the NRC. A guy came in with a speaker design that included a little chamber behind the tweeter dome. His line of thought was that this chamber could lower the resonance point of the tweeter and therefore would make his speakers superior in sound quality. I should note that the lowering of the tweeter resonance with the chamber is sound, it works. The problem is simply that it is unnecessary depending on your crossover point. In the double-blind listen tests that ensued his speaker lost against the ones that had the superior family of curves. To me I thought this would be an awesome revelation for him; it demonstrated the importance of the family of curves and that his invention would not matter unless it had a positive affect on the family of curves. But that is not what happened. He just got angry with Floyd and was going on about how the testing at the NRC must be flawed. Afterall, everyone he had told about his invention before demoing it for them thought it sounded amazing. We did not have audio forums back then but if we did, no doubt he would have been out there bashing the work being done at the NRC, perhaps for decades on end. This presents an interesting question; are we better off ignoring these dogmatic fanatics and just getting on with making better sounding audio products utilizing science? They will never change their mind, instead they will just get angry and blame the testing in some way, and this anger will result in public bashing of the science.
