Lee T
pfm Member
Point being?He makes his living from pfm
The Audio Forum
- Thread starter Shane2468
- Start date
G
Guest432
Guest
Had a look yesterday and it's a cesspit, all the dregs from snakeoil.
Looks like they have now locked it which is not surprising given the membership.
Looks like they have now locked it which is not surprising given the membership.
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Tony gets money from hosting advertising on pfm. I don’t know how it works, exactly, but I assume his fees are related to footfall, eg how many ads are loaded. That correlates directly to the number of page views, which depends on the number of visitors, how long they stay, and how many threads they view.
Ergo, encouraging visitors to spend some of that time elsewhere hits Tony in the pocket.
Tony L
Administrator
I honestly have no issue in this thread highlighting a new forum and I wish them well. pfm has always been friendly to other decent forums (Steve Hoffman, WigWam, AudioAsylum, AudioKarma etc etc) and we have an AUP clause to that effect. I only ever actively block links to vendetta blogs, forums with obviously libellous content, music piracy, racism, homophobia, hate politics etc etc.
Yes, pfm makes its money out of advertising, but the forum world is not an exclusive thing at all. Most people are members of multiple forums, e.g. I’m a member of Steve Hoffman’s forum, AudioKarma, Klipsch, WigWam, DIYAudio etc even if I seldom post much (aside from Steve Hoffman where I’ve got a reasonable post count). pfm is one of the oldest and I guess most successful independent UK audio forums, I've seen a heck of a lot come and go over the years and in this marketplace I suspect it would take something radically different to make any real impact. I’ll be curious to see what ‘Audio Forum’ brings (assuming they open it back up to guests) and I wish it the very best of luck.
PS I still think locking down is a exceptionally bad idea and will kill it before it even has any chance. I’ve learnt a thing or two about forums in the past 17 years pfm has existed and you absolutely need that 1/3rd registered to 2/3rd guests online ratio. Go too far to the former and it is clear the SEO is very broken as people aren’t finding the content, too far to the latter extreme and chances are its a nutter-blog and people are just rubber-necking a train-wreck from afar.
Yes, pfm makes its money out of advertising, but the forum world is not an exclusive thing at all. Most people are members of multiple forums, e.g. I’m a member of Steve Hoffman’s forum, AudioKarma, Klipsch, WigWam, DIYAudio etc even if I seldom post much (aside from Steve Hoffman where I’ve got a reasonable post count). pfm is one of the oldest and I guess most successful independent UK audio forums, I've seen a heck of a lot come and go over the years and in this marketplace I suspect it would take something radically different to make any real impact. I’ll be curious to see what ‘Audio Forum’ brings (assuming they open it back up to guests) and I wish it the very best of luck.
PS I still think locking down is a exceptionally bad idea and will kill it before it even has any chance. I’ve learnt a thing or two about forums in the past 17 years pfm has existed and you absolutely need that 1/3rd registered to 2/3rd guests online ratio. Go too far to the former and it is clear the SEO is very broken as people aren’t finding the content, too far to the latter extreme and chances are its a nutter-blog and people are just rubber-necking a train-wreck from afar.
Marky-Mark
pfm Member
I agree somewhat. On another, I'd think this is site dependent. For instance, a forum serving enthusiasts that involves commerce to play along and has frequent user reviews of those purchases would likely bubble near the top of search queries by other buyers. And so the guest count would balloon to reflect that. I've seen that ratio go as high as 8/10-to-one on such forums. On the other hand, if the running average of registered users online declines as the guest count goes up ... management.
Busy forums, from my experience, tend to inevitably reflect the sensibilities of the moderators. One forum I frequented for some years changed hands three times in ten years, and the current owner is obviously in it strictly for income possibilities and has ignored whatever the implied "brotherhood" spirit of the core members. And this guy is desperately obtuse. The guest/member ratio there now is routinely 10 to 1 and the registered members online runs from 150-200 when it used to be 300 +/- constantly. And as it stands now, the current membership is pretty much desperately obtuse too. I have to think those 150 ex-members are among the guests and rubbernecking the goings on from a safe and untainted distance.
Joe P
Memory Alpha incarnate | mod; Shatner number = 2
Just an aside... Subjectivism isn’t anti-science or pro foo. It simply means that kit is assessed subjectively, and that can be done with scientific rigour.
Weren’t mp3 codecs developed using rigourous subjective listening tests, figuring out how much data can be lost before it’s audible?
Joe
Weren’t mp3 codecs developed using rigourous subjective listening tests, figuring out how much data can be lost before it’s audible?
Joe
droodzilla
pfm Member
In theory yes.
In practice, subjectivism in hi-fi means "If I think I hear it, it must be real, even if nobody else does and the effect can neither be correlated with objectively measurable changes, nor reproduced under strict test conditions".
Regardless, I don't join any forum I can't lurk on for a bit first to see what it's like.
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Indeed.
I'm thinking of buying an Alfa Romeo (used) so I wanted to check out what the Alfa Owners Club forums had to say on various topics. Can't get access to the forums unless you join the club (£50).
Not. Going. To. Happen. Even if I buy an Alfa it won't happen, because that attitude stinks. Found Alfaowner.com instead.
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
An interesting subject for a thread maybe?
My take on it is that of course things need to be assessed subjectively as well as objectively. Amplifiers for example can sound quite different from one another and for reasons that cannot be predicted merely by measurements, and we're all familiar with the huge differences in the sounds of speakers and cartridges. I guess I would call this "good subjectivism" or some such....
Where I have a huge problem is when people with zero electrical knowledge make mental flights of fancy and no doubt start thinking things like "well the amp is powered by electricity so surely the quality of the mains cable, fuses and 13 Amp plug must effect the sound?" and thereby put 2 + 2 together and get total bollox....
Having no electrical knowledge or understanding of the laws of physics does not give one a licence to make it up as you go along, on the whim of your imagination, and then state that the impossible is happening in your hi fi system! This is bad, or foo, subjectivism
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
I agree with this, yet you don't consider this to be even a possibility for something like cables?
A point to ponder:
The audio frequency band (nominally 20Hz to 20kHz) spans around 10 octaves. The band from the top of audio to VHF is much the same, yet nobody argues that cables behave the same at VHF frequencies as they do at audio frequencies. So somewhere between audio and VHF there is a transition where the cables behave differently. It is clearly not a hard transition, but a gradual one.
So can you seriously argue that the transition is not happening within the audio spectrum (noting that the bottom of the audio spectrum is close to DC, which is a very different animal as far as propagation goes - so is there not an argument that the bigger part of the transition happens between DC and, say 1kHz, rather than from 10kHz to 2MHz?). And if it is happening within the audio spectrum, can you argue that it might not, under some circumstances, be audible?
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
Did you read the rest of my post? It's not possible for cables to make a difference*... this is where my exasperation starts... a bit of electrical knowledge soon shows that it's impossible.. in fact ludicrous to even contemplate... in the same way as thinking that a nodding dog in your car will make it faster would be stupid... it is therefore all in the mind of audiophools and due to expectation bias etc...
* Obviously it can under extreme conditions such as using 40 yards of interconnect with a passive pre so the capacitance starts to effect the HF roll off, or using long thin speaker cable that has far too much resistance and wrecks the damping factor of the amp and allowing impedance variations in the speaker to cause actual frequency response errors. Mains cable cannot make any difference even under any circumstances. Nor can fuses or plugs.
Joe P
Memory Alpha incarnate | mod; Shatner number = 2
Drood,
My point is simply that subjective assessments can be done with scientific rigour. Similarly, objective assessments can be done by a person who has no clue what to measure, using equipment that’s Ill suited to the task.
To equate subjectivism with pseudoscience or objectivism with scientific rigour is being lazy.
Joe
My point is simply that subjective assessments can be done with scientific rigour. Similarly, objective assessments can be done by a person who has no clue what to measure, using equipment that’s Ill suited to the task.
To equate subjectivism with pseudoscience or objectivism with scientific rigour is being lazy.
Joe
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Did you read the rest of mine? Can you explain the mechanism whereby signals propagate in a conductor at radio frequencies in one way, and at audio frequencies in another, and at DC the current propagates differently still?
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
It's all in the literature and well researched... At 20KHz for example the wavelength is approx 15KM.... mind you if I was using 15KM speaker cables I would be bothered about more than bad VSWR!
Yes you can. There isn't a point of transition, but a continuum. At one end the difference s will be utterly negligible, at the other end significant. Maths will tell you at what point a change is significant. Resistance in a mains cable is a bad thing, if I had a cable with 100r resistance it would be useless. So how do I know that my actual cable, with 0.01 r resistance, isn't a problem? Because it's in the textbooks why not. Same goes for effects that only matter in the MHz range.