It's the only way to justify an expenditure.
I can't believe this is even debated. What else are you going to go by, some review whose magazine has paid advertisers or is friends with the designer or manufacturer or is incentivized by them?
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? - QuoraPaul at PS Aduio's video posted above is right on the money. Keep everything the same, blind folded A vs. B for a minute or as long as you need to get a feel for it and then play the same thing on the B option. If you can't hear a difference, then who cares? Just make sure someone else sets it up for you so you are not biased in any way. It's the only way to justify an expenditure. I can't believe this is even debated. What else are you going to go by, some review whose magazine has paid advertisers or is friends with the designer or manufacturer or is incentivized by them? |
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@ dletch2 Because people like to hear themselves talk, they do it about things they don't have any real knowledge of,93 posts in this thread and you, have 18 of them or nearly 20%. That's about the most accurate thing I've heard you say. Psychological projection - Wikipedia Projection tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of personal or political crisis but is more commonly found in narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder. |