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? - Quorafive pages of meandering posts in my view, the simple and honest answer to the op’s titled question is 1, it takes alot of effort (and involvement of more than one person) to run a proper blind test 2. many don’t want to know the real answers that such a test would likely reveal, or would reject them with some baseless rationale anyway subjective, passion-driven undertakings are usually not prone to intellectual honesty - takes the fun out of the proceedings and the romantic sensibilities that go with it |
PSB speakers are still voiced at NRC. Paradigm used to be based on NRC, then strayed, and now that the founders have bought them again they are returning to that philosophy. Paradigm also has double-blind listening rooms. Ascend is one of the few manufacturers to release a full set of graphs on their speakers, and they strive for "flatness." this is a good post that provides excellent context and background for what this pursuit is about - music reproduction that pleases the listener accuracy in and of itself as an end is besides the point, it is at best a pathway to obtaining beautiful sound reason being that a recorded signal fed through a system is itself usually imperfect, often emasculated, so it typically needs 'help' to get back its glory at time of performance or recording |
while there is wisdom in this approach, i have a bit of a different take as to what i try to do here on the a-gon discussion forum i feel this is a community of hobbyists, and as an experienced member of this community, i am happy to share my experiences if it can help others who need info or are just newer to the hobby and are not on the same point of the learning curve - and of course to continue learning more myself from other well regarded well spoken folks here as well i think the major pitfall for all those who try to contribute here is to take different views personally and take it as offensive regarding one’s own findings and beliefs... this hobby at its best brings a lot of enjoyment to those who make the effort to build nice systems, and there are so many successful approaches to doing so, not to mention so many differing tastes in what is enjoyed... trick is not to put oneself and oneself’s ego into it... |
