Crutchfield's Speaker Compare

@ thecarpathian. Can you elaborate on expectation bias? 

Hi, luciano33.

When one has a preconceived notion in one's mind about the outcome of something before doing it, they have already made up their mind as to the outcome, and that is what is most likely to occur. As Tom had suspected in advance what he was going to hear, that is what he heard.
That is a decent description of expectation bias, even though I was half kidding and really have no idea why as to he not hearing a difference...

I was half kidding as well. That's sort of how the mind works. I am a scientist and we actually have to train our minds into not being bias and let the results speak for themselves. Why are we by default biased? I am not sure...it's not my field. I have to confess that before actually listening to different speakers through this tool I thought their sound was going to be way off...and what I experienced was completely different. It actually surprised me. I guess I had a null hypothesis in my mind and tested it without being fully conscious about it? :D
I am with you, I can't understand those saying they can't hear sound differences among speakers because they were very obvious to me. Cheers!

I like Crutchfield. I bought a Yamaha CD player from them. I had a lot of questions and their staff is extremely accessible and helpful. They don't carry everything under the sun but they have a pretty well rounded selection of hifi gear and yes the speaker compare is a cool tool.

I really like this Crutchfield speaker compare option. It is especially useful since they give you the option of normalizing the playback by either input power or output volume level. This is great! With this set to equal output level all speakers in the compare group play at the same volume. This allows you to compare high and low efficiency speakers at the same time as if the volume were adjusted between each. That’s difficult to do Seamlessly in a real setup. I also noticed that they have a large dropdown list of headphones to choose from. I assume they have a model for each that they to adjust the equalization so that each sounds neutral. It’s not going to tell you exactly how the speakers sound of course, but it at least gives you a rough idea of at least how they sound relative to one another. Very innovative Crutchfield!