Articles You Feel Should be Shared

I wouldn’t use the word bogus. I would use the word inconclusive or perhaps meaningless. Performing many tests on the same system by different testers and performing many tests on different systems by different testers would be a much more scientific approach. What are you afraid of?

In that last article from Audio Science Review djones51 just posted I don’t think I’ve seen so much misinformation and disinformation since Gandhi was a Boy Scout. ✌️Good name though, Audio Science Review. As if it was scientific. 🤗

Why don't you go educate them. 

djones51,

Good link. So the conclusion was that even if a fuse was placed in the signal path of a loudspeaker, it was likely to have negligible effect under normal conditions?

If I ever got tired of this place I might consider jumping ship to Audio Science Review.

Those guys do really seem to know their stuff so I’m not sure what use my experiences could offer them.

Anyway, time for another article on blind listening. This one is from 2012 by engineer/scientist/staff writer Justin Colletti on trustmeimascientist.com.

Great balanced article, here are just a few extracts.


Can You Hear What I Hear?
A Guide to Listening Blind Justin Colletti

"Compared to the much of the animal kingdom, human beings have pretty terrible hearing. We have poor powers of echolocation, especially for sounds that come from behind us, we can only hear a relatively narrow bandwith of 20Hz-20kHz, and we’re easily fooled by illusions.

......

But perhaps the most convincing tricks are the ones we play on ourselves.

Expectation is one of the most powerful forces in shaping our perception, and it’s the reason that the same wine tastes better if we’re told it costs $90 instead of $10. The same goes for our stereo systems.

Because of this, I’m a strong believer in the value of blind listening tests.

Engineers tend to love them, because they help us to test our ears and to identify which of our choices have meaningful effects and which amount to audio placebo.

Marketers of expensive audiophile snake oil, on the other hand, tend to hate blind listening tests.

This is because they tend to show that dubious products like specialty power cords and bags full of magic pebbles have about as much impact on your sound as well, a bag full of rocks.

But to be fair, what’s impressive about these products is that in a sense, they do work — In much the same way that placebo medical treatments work.

They work because we believe the story. Our minds long for convincing narratives, and we find them everywhere we look.

This isn’t a matter of willpower, either. It’s a matter of science. Even the smartest and most objective among us are amazingly susceptible to suggestion.
....

In test after test, even trained listeners have trouble telling codecs apart when they’re created at 160kbps and up, and

I’m not yet aware of a study where blind listeners were able to tell 320kbps files apart from CDs.
......

http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/2012/03/03/can-you-hear-what-i-hear-an-mp3-test-and-a-guide-to-li...