Article: "Do Blind Listening Tests Work? My Sessions with the Colorado Audio Society"

@sns 

Responding to your comment up a few posts on why so many different sounding systems... Well, I think most folks don't start off with the big picture. I certainly did not. I had a system... I loved the sound of a kick drum, and loved to crank it up to "concert levels" (young and stupid era). So, I went out listening to equipment and bought stuff that sounded good. I continued this for a couple decades as I learned the lingo and became enamored with soundstaging, micro details, air, etc. I had no reference... I was not wealthy, I didn't hear acoustic music and only occasional rock concerts... a source of some of the worst (but loud) sound quality... drugs help. The best system I had heard was a Rowland / Wilson ($500+K) perfectly set up. Holographic... but sounding nothing like real music. I loved listening to it... but I did not want to own it. Many people love this sound and want it in their home. I get it. Sonic spectacular. 

I slowly realized that there were dead ends and that my system could loose the music. That is when I stepped back and realized I needed an empirical ruler. I started listening to real music. I realized what my system was missing and I headed down the path to construct a musical system. 

So, there are many other paths to take. Nothing wrong with them... they just are not attempts to recreate the real thing. 

@newton_john 

Good to hear about your Linn experience. I have noticed a trend (I think) in more equipment getting better rhythm and pace. I noticed it in the most recent generations of Pass x and integrated amps. I am happy to hear Linn amps are getting better. Maybe this is the new thing that designers are figuring out how to get better rhythm and pace in solid state amps... more tube like. 

Nothing wrong with them... they just are not attempts to recreate the real thing. 

This is a common standard. It assumes that what is "real" is:

• live music
• un-amplified (I assume)
• in some kind of venue (hall, church, club)
• from a certain distance
• in the center
• using certain microphones
• using certain mixing and mastering techniques

Many of the above factors involve interpretative choices. Are there "more and less real" microphones or placements of microphones? Are there more and less real mixing techniques? 

You see the point. Even in cases of live music reproduction, there are so many choices that the idea of a convergence on "real" begins to look like a hopeless quest.

What’s being sought is something interesting or stimulating or pleasing -- with perhaps the illusion that one is "there, at the concert." But even that goal can be accomplished in so many ways, that one cannot converge on a single (objective) solution.(After all, the person at the concert in the distant balcony, with lots of reverberation and an unbalanced frequency mixture is having a "real" experience at the concert. But is it less "real" than 7th row center?) As you said, there are many paths, even to the standard which you take as "real."

And if that’s true, then there’s nothing more real about live music than about electronic, mixed, multi-track, or live-with-reinforced sound (PA’s) music. The goal is always some kind of experience in the listener, whether it’s about the experience of "being there" or some other experience. 

Get rid of the word "real" and a lot of these issues just melt away.

There exist a "real" sum  of acoustics objective information any stereo playback system loose by definition of being a stereo system...(information about timbre and spatial localizations and attribute of sounds as holography,volume,listener envelopment versus sound source width etc)

When people speaks about recreating the real objective collective event of a concert, which is impossible for many reasons , what in fact is possible and what they refer to is the retrieval of the original acoustics information coming from the recordings  many trade-off "designed" and picked choices kept by the recording engineer but lost in the regular stereo "translation" process of these  acoustics parameters values in our own stereo playback system/room because of the cross-talk between two sources of sound (the speakers)  instead of one localized  source of sound as in real life  if i hear a bird for example or in the concert case.

The only one explaining this very clearly is the acoustician Edgar Choueiri in his many articles...

Then we must not get rid of the real but understood what real means from the  acoustics concepts and parameters at play in  the recording process to the playback process in our room.

Get rid of the word "real" and a lot of these issues just melt away.

Unless double blind testing includes long-term listening, my take is that while it can be useful to determine IF there is a difference, it is not useful in determining which is "better" to us.

Analogy: many times I have eaten at a restaurant and the first few bites of something taste very good. Then I realize it's actually very salty or has some other overly emphasized characteristic that doesn't withstand repetition in taste. It doesn't taste as good on the 5th or whatever bite.

I have found audio to be similar. What sounds detailed or something else at first can be fatiguing. 

So it's a useful tool, but far from the last word.