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Why Do So Many Audiophiles Reject Blind Testing Of Audio Components?

Because it was scientifically proven to be useless more than 60 years ago.

A speech scientist by the name of Irwin Pollack have conducted an experiment in the early 1950s. In a blind ABX listening test, he asked people to distinguish minimal pairs of consonants (like “r” and “l”, or “t” and “p”).

He found out that listeners had no problem telling these consonants apart when they were played back immediately one after the other. But as he increased the pause between the playbacks, the listener’s ability to distinguish between them diminished. Once the time separating the sounds exceeded 10-15 milliseconds (approximately 1/100th of a second), people had a really hard time telling obviously different sounds apart. Their answers became statistically no better than a random guess.

If you are interested in the science of these things, here’s a nice summary:

Categorical and noncategorical modes of speech perception along the voicing continuum

Since then, the experiment was repeated many times (last major update in 2000, Reliability of a dichotic consonant-vowel pairs task using an ABX procedure.)

So reliably recognizing the difference between similar sounds in an ABX environment is impossible. 15ms playback gap, and the listener’s guess becomes no better than random. This happens because humans don't have any meaningful waveform memory. We cannot exactly recall the sound itself, and rely on various mental models for comparison. It takes time and effort to develop these models, thus making us really bad at playing "spot the sonic difference right now and here" game.

Also, please note that the experimenters were using the sounds of speech. Human ears have significantly better resolution and discrimination in the speech spectrum. If a comparison method is not working well with speech, it would not work at all with music.

So the “double blind testing” crowd is worshiping an ABX protocol that was scientifically proven more than 60 years ago to be completely unsuitable for telling similar sounds apart. And they insist all the other methods are “unscientific.”

The irony seems to be lost on them.

Why do so many audiophiles reject blind testing of audio components? - Quora
128x128artemus_5
realworldaudio
174 posts
 
Every audiophile friend of mine (and myself) are totally OK with blind testing. It is fun, it is a good exercise, and it is also a learning tool to perfect our skills of perception. We do it once in a while, for fun.

Speaking of myself, I welcome blind tests, (being a research scientist that's not at all surprising), but I cannot suffer people who force it to the  nth degree. Blind test fanatics cannot trust their own honesty to not to attach bias to what they see, to be independent of their own previous judgements. 
What's the point of audio then, if one is so utterly insecure of what they hear, and so caught up with ego, pride, that it gets in the way of objectivity?
To me, the sort of attitude that "mine has to be better" or having stakes at proving something with a blind test is utter rubbish. I am an audio pilgrim, welcome and embrace new experiences, even when they strengthen other's positions. Especially then, because that's an opportunity for me to learn. 
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bondmanp
1,821 posts
 
Um, maybe because many audiophiles just want to enjoy listening to well-reproduced music on their rigs, rather than turn their hobby into a quasi-scientific research experiment.  YMMV, of course.
jssmith
324 posts
 
@djones"Why do so many people reject/fear science?"

There's a whole area of study to this called psychological rigidity, but in simplest terms it boils down to some people's problem of equating being wrong with feeling stupid. So they never consider that they are wrong. And they never consider any evidence or procedure that could prove they're wrong. That way they get to stay comfortable. When I was younger I used to suffer from this. Fortunately I worked my way out of it. It's mostly about whether you look at being wrong as feeling stupid or as a learning experience.

speedbump6
760 posts
 
True jss. Beyond that though most of the ones on here that deny blind testing is because it disputes their personal preferences or beliefs. Either towards a product in general such as cables, or a specific model that either wins or loses in such a comparison that goes against their thoughts on it. They will many times try to pick apart the testing procedure and explain why it was done wrong, no matter how it was done. There are fast earthers in our hobby just as there are in general. Most times when someone tells me they hear something as better and I do not, it is not because I do not hear a difference, it’s because of my personal preference in what I hear. When I don’t hear anything ( rarely, but it happens) I assume either it’s hearing degradation due to age, or my personal inability to distinguish what others are hearing. I don’t assume large numbers of people are making it up and fooling themselves about it as some will try to say. I have had a few tell me in private that they didn’t want to admit they hear a difference for exactly the reason you’d stated, or for a few, because they could t afford to play at a high level and didn’t want the embarrassment of saying so. Those ones just need to realize that we all have budgets, and so the best we can at what we can afford. Very few can actually afford the best of the best, and as we all know, the returns  for the dollars get smaller as you climb up the ladder. 
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