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

@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.

I agree with the point that all stereo playback systems inherently lose a significant amount of objective acoustic information present in a "real" sound event. (This lost information includes details about timbre, spatial localization, sound holography, volume, and listener envelopment—elements that define the characteristics of a sound source.)

I also agree that it is best to talk about "real" in connection with the retrieval of original acoustic information from recordings. 

What I think is misleading (carefully avoided by mahgister's post) is the constant reference to the original, live musical performance event as the standard of what "real" means. As was pointed out, this is impossible to capture and so is a misleading standard. That’s why I would prefer to get away from the world "real."

FWIW, the term "fidelity" (as in "high fidelity") is a better word, because one can be faithful (have fidelity) without being bound to perfectly reproducing an event which, in its totality, is gone forever.