Your project sounds most interesting. I do hope you can carry it off with sound research methodology. I suspect that what you intend to do will be far more difficult than what you now think likely.
So many of the effects of component changes are subtle and most difficult to describe in any rational way: hence the strange pseudo poetic language which suffuses most reviews of equipment in the high end press.
I certainly do not believe that most audiophiles can be dismissed as deluded fools, the victims of self-fulfilling prophecies. I do believe that they are hearing genuine, real differences that are consistent and which do affect the pleasure derived from the reproduction of music. However, I'm not sure that these subtleties can easily be correlated with attributes measurable by test equipment. In fact, Im sure that they cannot.
Therefore, it is likely that your survey will have to take for its raw material the sum total of subjective opinions offered by a group of listeners. How you will be able to tabulate such subjective responses according to an objective standard is beyond me. Frankly, I'm not sure it's even possible.
However, in this sense the appreciation of reproduced sound differs little from other types of connoisseurship such as those involved in the evaluation of fine art, wine, automobiles, sail boats, sports equipment, architecture, computer software or virtually any product, device, or system enjoyed by us human beings. How many of these may be adequately described by a small set of objective measurements? Actually, none of them can. The top speed attainable by a car certainly does not fully describe its success as a racing vehicle. Also, its ability to accelerate, its handling capabilities, its braking power, its road holding ability, and many other factors greatly influence how adequate it is to its purpose. Nor can most of those factors be easily quantified.
That is why people who review and write about such things as cars, sailboats, wines, etc. necessarily resort to metaphor, analogy, and other forms of imprecise poetic language. Interestingly reviewers of those things are not reviled for stating opinions which they cannot back up with tests or measurements. It seems that only in the world of high end audio is there the expectation that the complexities of evaluation ought to be reducable to a few measurements.
Also it is clear that the ability to evaluate and discern subtle differences in any human endeavor is learned and that it improves with practice and experience. The choices made by naïve observers about anything are always inferior to those made by knowledgeable consumers. Just think of how a six year old would decorate a house and how a grown up with taste would do the same. Or even in our own lives, we can easily look back at the many things that impressed us as adolescents and which now embarrass us to come to the conclusion that opinions based on experience and knowledge are far superior to naïve impulse.
So I advise you to be careful in your selection of participants and to attempt as best you can, to limit it to those who have revealed an adequate level of discernment.
Im a graduate of Miami myself (class of 69) and wish you well in your project.
Sincerely,
László Bencze
