Sometimes listening is not feasible, or at least blind testing in one's own environment is not feasible, so we depend on recommendations of trusted influencers or other members who are known to have good listening skills and are not corrupted or paid by manufacturers. Once we use the product, we form our own opinions. If we don't like it, we sell it. That why Audiogon is in business - Audiophiles (and stores) selling their equipment. Other sites too that don't charge for their service - they exist on advertising on their sites.
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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Over the course of the last 30 years my thinking on this has changed and evolved considerably. From the beginning in the 70's my view was you absolutely must go and listen. Then in the 90's this evolved to you must audition in your home. Because the results I got back then seemed entirely based on being able to do home audition. When it came time for a phono stage I took this to the max, doing home auditions on at least a dozen different phono stages. Whew! But it was all worth it in the end when I wound up with a ARC PH3SE that made me happy for a good 16 years. All during those 16 years however my system continued to evolve. Everything got better. Including my review reading skills. When you get up into a very select range of components it simply is no longer practical to home audition. Also at this point I came to realize it makes little sense to go and listen. Why? Because components at a certain level, the very best ones aren't really doing anything. The perfect component does absolutely zero to make the sound good. Instead what happens is you realize a crap component can make everything crap, but a good component can do nothing to make it good again. All it can do is add zero additional crap. Therefore, if you find something really good and you go to listen it is only going to reveal all the other crap in the system. This is why I never bothered to go listen to Moabs even though I could have. If they are as good as I expect then I will only hear whatever they are connected to. Now if you follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion you realize that going to hear something somewhere else is at best a two-edged sword. You may have a favorable impression, or not, but either way it can be just as easily based on everything else in the system and have little or nothing to do with what you think. That is why for going on 15 years now I have not listened to or auditioned one single thing I have added to my system. Yet every single one of these additions has performed beyond expectations: Melody I880, Koetsu Black Goldline, Origin Live Conqueror, Teres Verus motor and controller, Herron VTPH2A phono stage, Townshend F1 cables, Pods, and Podiums, Tekton Moab, and a slew of others. Currently working on Raven Reflection MkIII. So today my view has evolved to this: When you are new and starting out you absolutely must go and listen to as many different things as you can. Make the stores change components. Any component. They can switch power cords, interconnects, amps, speakers- does not matter. Just make them do it. Pay attention to how the sound changes when each component is changed. Compare this to as many reviews and user comments as possible. When you gain experience try and do the same as much as you can in your own system. Bring a demo home, have friends bring stuff over, bring your stuff over to try in theirs. Try as many different things as you can. Always with the goal of becoming so advanced and skilled you no longer have hardly any need for such things. Along the way you get good enough reading reviews, sifting through comments, and understanding what all the various components do and how they contribute to the overall sound, that you don't really even need to do this stuff any more. |
Mahgister, thanks for the clarification. My bad. I’m just fed up with audiophiles who use our hobby to ... if I may be blunt ... bludgeon people into submission with their positions because their - - - - is too small. Over 53 years, I have learned how to find components and parts that work for me and to improve upon them, that bring a smile to my face, and shock the crap out of people who hear it for the first time. What else is there in this short life, other than to try to make oneself happy despite neuroticisms, and to paste smiles on other people’s faces? I really don’t care about the rest. enuf already. Jesus Mary and Joseph (Moses Abraham and David, Marx Lenin and Mao for our Jewish and communist friends ...) i don’t wish to get involved in a discussion about wire directivity unless there is a pragmatic application that is outside of our cult of audiophilism. |
The world's first double-blind test was performed live on television before a national audience. https://youtu.be/gbNCBVzPYak?t=56 |
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