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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 6 responses by jssmith

jssmith
295 posts
 
@djones"Why do so many people reject/fear science?"

There's a whole area of study to this called psychological rigidity, but in simplest terms it boils down to some people's problem of equating being wrong with feeling stupid. So they never consider that they are wrong. And they never consider any evidence or procedure that could prove they're wrong. That way they get to stay comfortable. When I was younger I used to suffer from this. Fortunately I worked my way out of it. It's mostly about whether you look at being wrong as feeling stupid or as a learning experience.

jssmith
295 posts
 
@ speedbump6 : Part of what you describe is one of humans' most powerful instincts, the pursuit of status. And when your livelihood or acceptance into a desired group is dependent on a belief, it's apt to be even more deeply rooted and challenges to it avoided.  Can you imagine how devastating it would feel to spend $130,000 on a pair of D'Agostino monoblocks and find out you just blew at least $127,000? Why take the risk? And that can be scaled down by income. Imagine the normal Joe spending $5,000 on a DAC then blind testing $140 one and you couldn't tell the difference. That would be like going to the casino, putting down $4,860 on one hand of Blackjack - and losing! Not a good feeling. Well, maybe you could sell the D'Agostinos for $80,000 and the DAC for $3,000 and only lose ~$50,000 and $2,000 respectively on that one hand of Blackjack, but still not a good feeling. One to be avoided at all cost. If you never take the risk, you never have to confront your mistakes.
jssmith
295 posts
 
@perkri : 

These measurements are specifications that tell you how well the components will get along, but very little about how good something will sound. That can not be measured.
Period.
A SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR CHOOSING LOUDSPEAKERS AND HEADPHONES FOR RECORDING AND BROADCAST  - Dr, Sean Olive, Harman

In the 1980’s, Dr. Floyd Toole [2,3,4] at the National Research Council of Canada conducted controlled, double blind listening tests on loudspeakers. Listeners gave the highest fidelity ratings to loudspeakers having the flattest, smoothest frequency response measured over a wide range of angles. This was perhaps the first documented evidence that listeners recognize accurate sound and prefer it.

...

2. Predicting Loudspeaker Sound Quality From Objective Measurements

The accuracy of the predictions range from 86% (based on 70 different loudspeakers) to 99% with bookshelf loudspeakers with restricted low frequency output.
jssmith
295 posts
 
@mahgister:

Room/gear/ears synergy is another factors
...
This is the reason why we choose gear by listening it for practical reason

But you can't listen to everything. Heck, there's very little you can listen to in a comparative environment nowadays. And that environment isn't like your own either. So you need a filter to narrow down the selection. And that's where Harman's research comes in. And if you have a goofy room, you need to understand how acoustics works to consider things like directivity, diffusion and absorption. Otherwise, most speakers will likely not sound very good.

As for room, you could always duplicate Harman's room. I inadvertently designed my new media room to almost the exact same proportions. Here's Harman's.
Length 9.14 m
Width 6.58 m
Height 2.59 m

The AES and IEC also has standards for domestic listening rooms. Also, I found this paper to be informational when designing a listening room.

jssmith
295 posts
 
@perkri: I've read Harman uses both trained employees and trained and untrained civilians. I remember reading that they also did sighted and blind tests with their own engineers and, as expected, the sighted tests had completely different results. 

Here is a short blog post by Sean Olive saying that four speakers were tested by hundreds of untrained listeners.

Most of the information about their procedures and results can be found in his blog posts. And some by reading Toole's book.

I don't own any Harman products except a $180 pair of studio monitors for my computer that I only use to play guitar through, just in case anyone might think I'm a Harman zealot.


jssmith
295 posts
 
@djones51:
I think since the time they were conducted and now there are speaker manufacturers who are influenced by them at least in the pro market.

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."

And this quote from John Dunlavy, "Oh, no. Listening comes later. Because if you stop to think about it, no loudspeaker can sound more accurate than it measures. It may sound worse, or it may sound sweeter, prettier, but if we're talking about absolute accuracy—the ability of the speaker to reproduce as perfectly as possible whatever's fed to it—such a system can never sound more accurate than it first measures. So we try to get the greatest accuracy we can achieve from measurements. Then we begin doing what some people might call "voicing," because the best set of measurements are still open to interpretation." -- Stereophile, John Atkinson 1996

Dunlavy goes on to explain that last sentence as still trying to achieve flatness in small increments as well as large ones. Dunlavy speakers were widely regarded as some of the best of their time.

Many of the top studio monitors, like Genelec and Neumann, are flat as a pancake. It just makes sense to not introduce any artificial coloring when you're recording something.
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