(un)sound science

Jim Lill is a musician from Nashville who conducts audio equipment A/B benchmarks with unusually high rigour and posts them on YouTube. His most recent of these is on microphone preamps. people are. It's fair to say he's been getting a lot of feedback:🔊 Criticism has converged on a handful of things: He's comparing a modern Focusrite 2i2 to a 1970s Neve 31105 that was specifically designed to be as transparent as possible. It's the other Neve preamps (like the 1073) that have special character. He says that none of the audio engineers he knows set their preamps' input gains to distortingly high values, but apparently that is a common thing that people do. He says "So Jim, are you saying all preamps sound the same? No. Some preamps are broken and some preamps are made so cheaply or poorly that their frequency response doesn't stay flat from 20Hz to 20kHz." which implies that he thinks all preamps that aren't cheap or broken do sound the same. He advertises a course of his in the video…