Reading the Baseline

What is the first thing you look for in a review? How do you know a comment is not biased? Here is what you need to learn to extract from everything you read: the baseline. A baseline is the minimum standard in every articles, reviews and comments. It is often not in plain sight and hard to find. However, it can also be in plain sight and still difficult to notice.

The truth is, everyone is biased and only way to be unbiased is not having a mind of your own. The real difference lies in how biased a person is and the degree its affects the person's opinion. Thus finding and reading into a person's baseline is often a shortcut for better understanding. If this isn't hard enough, sometime finding your own baseline can be even more difficult. Prejudice being a natural part of our thinking process is often what we don't realize the most. We don't like to believe it exists but often it plays a big role on how we read into our own world.

Here are two graphs consist of test results from amp A and B. Consider that the black line representing the original frequency response curve and the colored line representing the amplified signal's frequency response curve, which graph do you think is better? A or B?
If your answer is either one of them, you'll be wrong. Taking the black line as baseline, both amplified signal are able to match the original signal in very linear fashion across the whole spectrum, thus both are equally good. What you want to pay attention to the graph is whether the signal is colored (bumped up or down) or not, not how flat or curve the line is.

Are you reading the right baseline?