ASR are absolutely not science-driven. See the thread where Amir tested a speaker, trashed it, when others couldn't reproduce the result fought with them, kept trashing it, fought with the designer, and then it turned out that the speaker was broken, quite likely in shipping with incorrect packaging.
Amir refused to retract or correct the review.
Similarstory with his review of a broken Anthem AVR.
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.
ASR aren't science driven because of two cherry picked examples?
You can dislike Amir's methods, but you can't deny that he has transformed the audiophile space by just creating a website for his life passion and sharing his thoughts.
I feel a lot better buying hardware that has been thoroughly tested by ASR. I've even sent Amir some gear to be measured, he's the best of the bunch.
Amir refused to retract or correct the review.
Similarstory with his review of a broken Anthem AVR.