I agree true double blind testing isn't practical for the average consumer. I quit bothering with testing blind a few years ago.
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- ...
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Uh, folks breaking news: double blind IS a form of listening and learning. So it sounds like everyone agrees that is a good thing, but of course there is a place and time for everything.Maybe for some, who are filled with self doubt. For me, it's just one of many disciplines that I choose not to partake as I find it unnecessary and a bit of a fool's errand. By the time I got a piece of equipment, it's already been analyzed to death. Anything I do to it afterwards, is just tuning it to my satisfaction. All the best, Nonoise |
millercarbon ... if you utter the words "double blind" in anything other than mockery and derision then YOU are the ape trying to fix the helicopter with a hammer. YOU need to drop the BS step away from the keyboard go out and DO and HEAR and LEARN- on your own.Let's please not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Scientific listening tests have value - though that value is limited - and they have their place. But they are not infallible nor are they reason to dismiss empirical results with a wave of the hand, which is what has begun to happen here. It's even worse when the demand for some sort of blind testing is accompanied with the accusation that a listener is insane, deluded, retarded, etc. - all of which has happened here. |
@mapman so what? true experiences are not in had the laboratory nor in school, but in the real world, where stuff comes at you from every direction. if you havent learned how valuable true experience is in life and business, then nothing I say will change you mind. youve got to experience it first (see what I did there?) |
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