Amir and Blind Testing

I know. I usually mark my calendar for a month before making any conclusions. But it’s not just blind testing. By Amir’s logic, any back and forth testing would be invalid, except, I would imagine, in the most egregious of cases.  

Amir from Audio Science Review. Quite prolific and a great believer in measurements. 

@spenav- thank you for the compliment, but it was Amir who actually articulated it when he spoke about the analytical brain as opposed to the music-listening brain. Like you, I have felt this for a long time, but couldn’t crystallize the idea as well as Amir did. And while we’re here, I think we should stop using the word “improvement” and substitute “the component that sounds better to me”, which is, I think, what we really mean. 

I have to chime in here just to say that I am gratified to see an actual discussion of a topic as opposed to the “wresting-match” mentality these things often take on. DCS vs MSB. Bruno Sammartino vs Dr. Tanaka, etc.  Too much of a battle scenario for my taste. Obviously, I was a fan in my younger days, but I prefer a more civilized tone for audio. Just my opinion.

@noske - as I recall, the Japanese receivers were boasting incredible distortion specs in the 70s, but the high-end stuff started becoming more well known in the 80s. And by well known, I mean by a very small percentage of the population who were reading the audio critic and absolute sound. Remember, way back then, most everyone had a stereo setup in their living room flanking the TV, but the early high end stuff was relatively rare. 

“Science is a bunch of guys in white coats cutting up frogs”. Woody Allen. But just to drag the thread back on topic, I really wasn’t talking about Amir’s measurements or reviews.  I was talking about his comments on the “analytical brain”  vs the “enjoying music” brain and the difficulty these may cause in evaluating components.  

As a side note to my own thread, many people knee-jerk into thinking that Amir thinks high-priced components are BS and cheap Toppings are the shizzle. Not so. He raved about the $4000+ Dan Clark headphones and he uses a $20k Levinson amp with $20k Revel speakers in his own system. He also raves about the $10k Genelec monitors. 

Actually- this thread was not about electronic measurements.  It was about Amir’s observation about the human brain and its ability to hear non-existent improvements when switching components because we start listening in an “analytical mode” when we are testing hifi equipment. Of course, Amir is not an expert in psycho acoustics, but I thought it was an interesting concept and many members related to it to some degree. The human sensory system is so easily fooled. Ever take one of those flight simulator rides at Disney?  Vibrate the seat, tilt it back and show us a video of flying and we swear we are traveling through space. A little scary how easily our senses can be deceived. What do we do with this knowledge?  Whatever you want, that’s what.

@noske - there were tons of pro amps back then. I mean, Woodstock was in 1969, so they knew how to fill large venues with sound. Crown, QSC, Mac, some others I forgot. Bulletproof gear that could take the punishment of the road. 

We had tons of equipment back in the 70s with the lowest measurable distortion possible. One of the founding principles of high end audio was to prioritize sound over specs.