"...the odds of running into someone like me who really does understand and can actually explain it are slim to none."
So, there is hope on this gloomy day?
Why Do So Many Audiophiles Reject Blind Testing Of Audio Components?
Because it was scientifically proven to be useless more than 60 years ago.
A speech scientist by the name of Irwin Pollack have conducted an experiment in the early 1950s. In a blind ABX listening test, he asked people to distinguish minimal pairs of consonants (like “r” and “l”, or “t” and “p”).
He found out that listeners had no problem telling these consonants apart when they were played back immediately one after the other. But as he increased the pause between the playbacks, the listener’s ability to distinguish between them diminished. Once the time separating the sounds exceeded 10-15 milliseconds (approximately 1/100th of a second), people had a really hard time telling obviously different sounds apart. Their answers became statistically no better than a random guess.
If you are interested in the science of these things, here’s a nice summary:
Categorical and noncategorical modes of speech perception along the voicing continuum
Since then, the experiment was repeated many times (last major update in 2000, Reliability of a dichotic consonant-vowel pairs task using an ABX procedure.)
So reliably recognizing the difference between similar sounds in an ABX environment is impossible. 15ms playback gap, and the listener’s guess becomes no better than random. This happens because humans don't have any meaningful waveform memory. We cannot exactly recall the sound itself, and rely on various mental models for comparison. It takes time and effort to develop these models, thus making us really bad at playing "spot the sonic difference right now and here" game.
Also, please note that the experimenters were using the sounds of speech. Human ears have significantly better resolution and discrimination in the speech spectrum. If a comparison method is not working well with speech, it would not work at all with music.
So the “double blind testing” crowd is worshiping an ABX protocol that was scientifically proven more than 60 years ago to be completely unsuitable for telling similar sounds apart. And they insist all the other methods are “unscientific.”
The irony seems to be lost on them.
Why do so many audiophiles reject blind testing of audio components? - QuoraShowing 7 responses by glupson
"A-B testing, blinded or no, performed by an experienced reviewer with discerning ears provides a possibly useful data point guiding the consumer on their quest, nothing more." I would add "...performed by an honest and experienced reviewer...", meaning "with no conflict of interest of any sort". "...as only 1 person is making a claim." Not around here. You may need to hire a scheduler. The line is longer than in front of the Nike store on the day of a sneaker release. |
artemus_5, "A speech scientist by the name of Irwin Pollack have conducted an experiment in the early 1950s." Which one of Dr. Pollack’s studies are you referring to? Those two from the 1950’s do not seem to support the assertion that "blind testing" is useless. The one from 1971 (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03329012.pdf), even less so. Are you sure it was Dr. Pollack’s work you were referring to? I did not go through all the references in that article you provided link to, just through those by Dr. Pollack. |
"Because it was scientifically proven to be useless more than 60 years ago." Interestingly enough, abstract of that article (I could not find the whole article) starts with emphasis on "the extremely acute sensitivity of a human listener to discriminate small differences". The rest of that abstract leaves a lot to be desired. "In contrast to the extremely acute sensitivity of a human listener to discriminate small differences in the frequency or intensity between two sounds is his relative inability to identify (and name) sounds presented individually." The Information of Elementary Auditory Displays: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: Vol 24, No 6 (scitation.org) |
artemus_5, The study you linked to, and seem to have based some of your assertions on, might be flawed by design. At least to half of the Audiogon crowd... "All of the stimuli were digitized and their waveforms were stored on the Pulse Code Modulation System..." Are we going to accept digital as a reliable method? Here? Additionally, subjects in the testing... "All were right-handed native speakers of English..." How would the results be for some other native speakers? It would have been more interesting had they included multiple groups of subjects. Maybe, they would have found that native Korean speakers are much better at figuring differences than English ones. Even then, digital? As a proof on Audiogon? Categorical and noncategorical modes of speech perception along the voicing continuum (nih.gov) |