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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? - Quora
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Showing 1 response by jaymark

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jaymark
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How about because it is hard to do.

I am a clinical research scientist as well and have a deep appreciation of biased ascertainment of endpoints. Nevertheless, it is fairly easy for me to hear differences in amps, preamps, dacs and CD transports that blinding won’t help cause I am impressed with how my brain tells me that my pre-listening biases are in the wrong direction. Great example, I put in an ASI Teknology modded Black Ice hybrid preamp in my reference system and was blown away by the spacious, clear, crystalline sound that had spot on tonality and tone colors. It replaced an Audiogon cult preamp and despite my clear expectation that the cult preamp would be better, it wasn’t.

If you are trying to discern very modest differences then blind testing is best. However, I can make a cogent case that if I am struggling to hear modest differences then it is probably not worth my time to try and figure out that puzzle - and certainly not worth much incremental money.

I doubt seriously if my preamp is the best around even to my ears and brain. However, I can guarantee u that I won’t be spending 20k to test the waters and find out. I have though been convinced that the modest bucks for Grover Huffmans Pharoah speaker cable and the nearly 2k per pair cost of the Zavfino Silver Dart interconnects is audible and worth opening up the purse strings - at least a bit.

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