It sounds like you're describing some bad judgement calls.
And I agree with you. I remember the ELAC speaker review you're referring to. In fact, a friend of mine had a friendly business relationship with the speaker designer. He spent (wasted) a lot of time doing damage control thanks to that review. And while the speaker designer remained professional and polite in public, I am told that he had some much spicier remarks in private as one would suspect. So I think Amir was quite wrong there.
But I don't think some isolated bad calls mean that ASR is not science-driven. By and large, he gets it right and his contributions have been tremendous. We're talking about a handful of controversial moments... versus literally thousands of quality objective reviews and a real wealth of data.
And I agree with you. I remember the ELAC speaker review you're referring to. In fact, a friend of mine had a friendly business relationship with the speaker designer. He spent (wasted) a lot of time doing damage control thanks to that review. And while the speaker designer remained professional and polite in public, I am told that he had some much spicier remarks in private as one would suspect. So I think Amir was quite wrong there.
But I don't think some isolated bad calls mean that ASR is not science-driven. By and large, he gets it right and his contributions have been tremendous. We're talking about a handful of controversial moments... versus literally thousands of quality objective reviews and a real wealth of data.