Agree with the first two paragraphs, not that it matters.
So maybe Dr. Toole didn't lie, he was just incompetent, 50-50 chance in your view... AFAIK his studies were about preference, and what most people in the studies preferred was by (his) definition "best". As I said, I am not in complete agreement with him, and in fact my main listening room is pretty much the antithesis of his philosophy (but I like it). I respect his work and do not have any desire nor need to question his character and methodology as you are.
Harman, not Harmon (typo, I've done the same).
Everyone has their own view of "reality" these days. I do think you are throwing stones, not tossing feathers, but that simply reflects my bias.
For the record, I have only rarely listened to JansZen ESLs, but very much liked their approach and what I heard back in the 80's. I have never listened to the headphones.
I shall try to shut up since this is straying way off-topic. - Don
Last bit of straying -- I need to acknowledge what you say here -- sorry -- didn't realize Toole has said all along that he simply investigates what's preferred by a majority of his subjects. I have seen his work cited and employed as though this were not the case.
We all know sound preferences are personal, and have a large component of taste and history. I meant to demonstrate this point with the example of
you-are-there vs.
they-are-here listening experiences that stem from small vs. large amounts of local ambiance. I happen to like experiencing the ambiance of the original venue when a recording includes it. Since this reproduces a recording more faithfully than when the recorded ambiance is convolved with large amounts of local ambiance, I even think minimizing local ambiance has some degree of objective merit. It's not entirely a coincidence that I design speakers with relatively narrow but controlled dispersion.
I thus perceive declarations of the objective superiority of wide dispersion differently than the apparent majority. I've seen such declarations made by people who refer to Toole's work for support. I'd assumed these people were correctly interpreting Toole's results, which apparently they were not.
Anyway, to be clear, I have no problem with anyone's sonic preferences. The point is to enjoy music, after all, and give our minds a little massage and rest.
Even in these times of blurred reality, though, there are things that are incontrovertibly real; the audibility of high Q peaks is one of them, so a study that concludes that high Q peaks are inaudible must be flawed. I don't think my criticisms of Toole's published work impugn his integrity, which is anyway not my intent. My intent is to refute false information, and Toole's invalid peak audibility study was offered up as support for a false belief based on false information.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned how it could have gone wrong, because it's sent us off on a tangent, but I do think people should be generally skeptical of research, and whenever possible, rely on their own senses and intellect.
Lastly, I think disagreements about audio are relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of things, so yes, I feel like this is just tossing feathers, despite how interesting it is, or how weary I might be of the prevalence of dubious truth in audio these days.