I think Jostler has made the most sense here so far. How can so many refuse to acknowledge the mountains of evidence in the annals of psychology? One note to "Joe-coherent"--before we have another Carl-Joe fight on our hands--when you made a distinction between "blind" and "double-blind" did you mean the distinction between blind and blind A-B testing? When you mentioned the example of the perfume shop wherein one could be confused by the propinquity of the stimuli I thought you might be referring to blind A-B testing rather than double-blind testing per se, which I believe means that the person administering the blind test to another is also unaware of the nature of the sample contents being tested. As versus the single-blind test where the person administering the test would know the nature of the contents. I would agree with you that listeners can be "dazzled" by types of A-B tests, especially when the differences are subtle. However I don't see why all audiophiles don't regularly test blind, like beer and wine testers do. If people knew ahead of time that it was Chateau d'Yqem they were tasting instead of a Mongolianian Sauterne...(not that I have anything against wines from Tuva). Professional beer tastings even insist on using the same glassware for all the beer to be tested as people's decisions are known to be affected by their aesthetic response to different glassware. Often beer is tested in opaque containers because the dark coloured beers "taste" more bitter when they can be seen to be dark by the taster than when they can't be seen. Surely audiophiles are not immune to analogous effects. Why not do everything we can to reduce these effects? I am disappointed that professional reviewers aren't naturally inclined to do this. I am not denying the validity of the claims of Dekay, Bob_bundus, Gthirteen, Carl_eber and Sugarbrie etc. They could be hearing things I'm not able to perceive. Carl especially, seems to have extensive experience in the pursuit of this hobby. I'm curious--what are the reasons for not doing blind testing?
"The Audio Critic" B.S. or what?
Has anyone ever heard of this magazine? In a nutshell, their premise is that audiophiles are ridiculous. They claim that all high-end equipment is marketed to audio magazines and their foolish readers. One particular area they sounded off about was cable and interconnect theory. They claim that spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars for cables is a joke and is a total waste of money. They claim that companies like Kimber are selling us a bunch of "snake oil." I just breezed through a copy and now it's got me wondering if we audiophiles are just masturbating each other with our concepts and discussion of "high-end" equipment and cables. Please tell me this is a bunch of sh*t. I'd like to think that we're getting at least a bit of "high-end" for our hard-earned $$$$